Get YouTubers to cover your game (for free!) transcript

if you're a broke boy game developer like we kind of are as well you will probably not have access to Giant marketing funds to go to things like Gamescom and other events or to do whole ad campaigns on like Reddit or X or whatever and instead you're going to have to find ways that are like pretty cheap or even free to get eyeballs on your game that is of course assuming you want more than four people to play your game once you launch it one of which will already be your mom probably you want to have a little bit more reach for the game that you just spend like multiple months or even Years War working on the best approach in my opinion if you have absolutely zero marketing budget is just to reach out to influencers and with influencers I'm mainly really I'm talking about people on YouTube but it also works a little bit for things like Tik Tok and reals people who play games not game developers but they just like play games do Showcases of different games do reviews or whatever and reach out to them and be like hey this is my game that I'm working on it would be really nice if you could give it a go and then just play it on your channel and they'll play your game they'll get thousands of views which will convert to hundreds or even thousands of wish lists for your game as well and you're Off to the Races basically and on top of that we're also gamee YouTubers which means that we also make videos about your games where you guys actually submit your games to me for our stream that we did last week where we roasted your games and I felt like that was a good point to look at okay what are these submissions and how does the process work being one of those people who has to decide on what games am I going to cover yes or no because now I've been on both sides I've been the person who sent out the emails of hey please go and play Forge industry and give us free coverage basically and I've also had the wave of you guys the game developers come to me and basically ask the same thing like hey want to play my game and give me some coverage and I think there are a lot of things that you need to keep in mind here and I'm going to start with some uncomfortable truths and that first one is that a marketable game is a pretty game and this is something where I always have to say this but unfortunately a pretty like generic pixel art or like 2D game is going to be infinitely harder to market for example than a 3D game with vibrant colors and like a really unique art style and I was kind of not nearly disappointed maybe by it but we got about 40 submissions for the roasting your game stream and I think about 75% or more of that were like 2D games and I have to be honest they weren't really the best visually now for me it's still like okay I can cover those because it's also about like the entire game development process but there's something you need to remember and that is that you don't just send your game and they do it out of the kindness of your heart you send your game to them and you are going to get some marketing from like Their audience looking at your game and they have that scale that you as a developer don't have and in exchange the YouTuber will get views and that views like converts a little bit to AdSense and they'll get like a free game key but because of that you also need to think about the perspective of the YouTuber if you're submitting really ugly like gener generic looking games there is no reason for that YouTuber to play that game because he will simply not get as many views there's one exception to this we talk about later on but in general going for a prettier game is going to give the YouTuber more views which in return is going to give them more AdSense and more growth and it's going to give you also more wish list and things like that it's kind of like a symbiotic relationship where the more quality of a game you give to that influencer to play the more you're going to get back in return if you have generic 2D platform number 455 well there's no reason for anyone to want to watch that game because it's nothing new which means that there's going to be bad views for the YouTuber which means once again you're not going to get as many wish lists and the view to wish list conversion also isn't going to be as high this is why we really wanted to focus on our visuals for Guild architect because that's what I've learned as well the biggest issue with Forge industry was simply the fact that the game didn't look good and I'm going to be honest it was still 3D I think if we would have tried to make like with our art skills in 2D it would have gone even worse really focusing on the art first if you want to think about marketing with other YouTubers is the most important thing and also keep in mind here that whilst I've been talking so far about just purely the game visuals your steam capsule is also very important actually you need to treat your steam capsule as a YouTube thumbnail basically so ideally get some more vibrant colors puts like some humans on it don't go like all crazy and put like red circles on it but when a YouTuber is going to cover your game 99% of the time they are just going to take your captal image and use it as their thumbnails so if you have a bad capsule you can have still a great game like the game itself looks visually great but the YouTuber's audience is just simply not going to click on that capsule which means you're simply not going to have as many views so those are things you need to keep in mind as well don't just make a capsu to throw it on Steam because steam requires it or it's just some shitty thing you threw together in paint but really think about okay it's not just about steam how is this going to perform on YouTube as well and then there is a second uncomfortable truth that you need to accept and it is that every day more and more games keep getting released we've been talking about this before so far over 4,000 games have released in purely 2024 on its own and this is starting to form a problem because there are more games being released right now than that there are YouTubers to cover those games basically one of the biggest indie game coverage YouTubers wonderbot made a very deep blog post about it that I'll link down below as well talking about this exact issue because it's not just a matter of making more videos because there's more games because first of all making those videos still costs a lot of time there's like a limit to it and splatter cat is not like a giant company and also the YouTube algorithm once you upload more than three videos in a single day will stop notifying viewers that hey there's new videos out and you will get punished algorithmically a lot with all of those other videos so it just doesn't make sense to release more than three videos a day and even then it still doesn't always make sense to upload three videos a day without that algorithmic punishment because you also need to keep in mind that there's something called viewer fatigue where if people see your videos too much they won't really care for them anymore this is something we also experienced ourselves where at a certain point in November last year I was like hey let's increase our views in our ad Revenue by 50% just by uploading one extra video a week so we started uploading on Sundays but the growth we were looking for just wasn't there because people didn't really care as much and we got about like a 5% to like 10% growth in total which was not worth the extra time and the extra pressure so this means that competition is not just harder on Steam itself where you're more games that you need to compete with but also when you reach out to those YouTubers so with those two things that I really wanted to preface out of the way let's talk about how do you actually build up a list of YouTubers to send emails to and what should these emails contain and how do you get that coverage then knowing that hey my game's looks are going to matter and the indie game YouTube environment is also a bit more saturated but I will persevere here's how we're going to do that and the first thing that I want you to understand this is purely a number scheme I'm going to say some that are going to make you probably scared right now but it's called cold Outreach and sales and this is something that I've learned from my previous job as well where I used to work in sales if you haven't sent your game with like a build and a code and whatever to at least a 100 Youtubers in my opinion you haven't really tried influencer marketing so often I talk to people like for example through a coaching on our patreon where they're like hey I've tried marketing my game I sent like a few emails and I'm like how many did you sent and they're like oh my God I sent 10 I sent so many why is no one responding in and I'm like this is normal because generally when we did for industry we had a response rate of about I would say 5 to 7% of just people who answered our email let alone make a video I think that's more like 3 or 4% and looking at that it's simply a matter of the more emails I'm going to send the more chance I'm going to have that people are going to respond and actually play my game and really you need more than a 100 YouTube channels in my opinion to reach out to before you can really say that you've tried marketing your game to influencers and 100 SS like a lot like do you even know 100 channels that would cover your game probably not but remember that this is still free marketing and even if you put in like 5 hours just looking through YouTube finding people who play similar games to yours that is still going to be worth it compared to spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on like a single sponsored video so how do you exactly find these channels to reach out for the first thing you should do is figure out at least five games that are like quite similar to yours in terms of genre and in terms of gameplay and what you're then going to do is just in you YouTube type like the name of your competitor games for example in our case it was factory town and like satisfactory factorio hydr and timberborn and for all of those you're just going to look up for like reviews for example or let's plays and every single Channel basically that you find here you're going to put into a giant Excel list and this is going to give you a whole bunch of results now what I suggest you do here as well is filter out channels that haven't really uploaded something similar to your game in the past like 3 months and also channels that are less less than I would say 5,000 subscribers you can go for less than 5,000 and they will probably respond but at that point it's going to be a less High returnal investment of just the amount of wish list you're going to get when they cover your video we have a few channels as well that have like 1,000 subscribers that covered Forge industry that we sent a key to but the impact of that wasn't really noticeable anymore in terms of a actual wish list Spike and really go wide here don't just stick to purely reviews and let's plays but some other things you can do is like look at like what vtubers are playing for example or try and localize your game if you've got a game that's localized for example German or what we did in Forge Industries case Japanese don't just look up like English videos but look up German videos like translate let's play to German and just put that behind your competitive games names and add all of them to the list we had a lot of success by just reaching out to a few Japanese YouTubers who played our game and because we had a little bit less competition because not as many games were localized to Japanese we managed to stand out much more and we actually got a pretty noticeable impact in terms of wish list even though some of the videos only got like a few thousand views and then for all of these channels you're going to put them in a giant spreadsheet and what you want to do here is just have the channel name have like a link to the channel and then find their contact email YouTube allows to do this very easily you can just go to their Channel and then in like the about page you have to solve a capcha and then you just get their email address if they've configured one that you can reach out to or sometimes they just write a plain text in there about me there are like some Capa limiting but you can work around them pretty easily and otherwise well you just have to spread this out over multiple days but you'll be fine so you've built up a list of more than a 100 Youtubers at this point that you want to reach out to and I mean I'm just saying YouTubers but this also works for Tik Tok or for twitch streamers or whatever but it's not something that I'm familiar with but the same rules generally do apply here of how do you find those games and how do you like reach out to them once you've done that it's time to formulate the exact email now maybe very quickly when should you send out this email because that's very important as well you shouldn't just Spam the creators with an email every two weeks of like hey please go and play my game hey have you had a chance to play my game yet you're only going to have like one or two shots really that I would suggest you sending them an email before you're going to become annoying and they're just going to want to block you and what I would suggest here is to send those emails as late as possible ideally only in like the month leading up to your release where you already have a very fleshed out demo maybe you can link it to something like a steam event if you're doing something like steam nextfest be sure to send them the email and like the demo in advance already that you're going to put on the Steve next fist because they're going to be swamped around those areas because there's going to be a lot more games for them to cover but wait as long as you can I would say now also keep in mind it generally takes 2 weeks from them getting the email and being like okay I'm going to make a video about this to them actually uploading it so don't do it like one week before release because then it's going to be too late really I would say like 6 to 4 weeks before you're looking at your game's release that is the optimal time to really just start me M reaching out and how do you reach out like I said this is purely following the cold Outreach method basically of what like any other industry does you're going to start with a catchy title that is honestly already very important don't just title your game like new survivor like or purely the name of your game because it doesn't give them context something that I think we did pretty well with our Outreach emails is whenever we had a channel that we were reaching out to that had previously covered satisfactory or factorial another game with conveyor belts we would title our email with like conveyor belt suck here's why and that was a title that was very clickable like once again your emails got to clickbait the YouTubers basically to want to open them that's already the biggest struggle getting to actually read the email contents then if they do click it open don't write your entire life story just be like hey we're a game Studio this is our two sentence pitch I generally go for two sentence pitches of what is the game and what makes it special so the first sentence is just we are an automation game and the second sentence is something along the lines of hey what makes it special is that we have no conveyor belts and we purely use po finding instead then after that pitch just include the steam key already you really want to make sure that the person reading your email their life is as easy as possible they don't want to bother with sending you back an email and then maybe you don't respond anymore because you're sleeping and then suddenly two days have passed before you send them a key just send them the key in the email already immediately making it as easy as possible for them to play your game similarly after key have a link to your steam store Page and have a link to your press kit where they can download things like the high quality cover art of your game for the thumbnail or get some short like text blurs about what is the game about so they can really just make a video about it honestly best case is that they don't even have to send you an email back asking for anything and you'll just see the video they make about your game up here because that is going to be the easiest for you and you really want to make it as easy as possible you can also include things like gifs and images in your email we didn't do it because at the end of the day a lot of email clients block these by default anyway due to security settings so just focus on having that two sentence pitch and that's basically everything you need to get started with that influencer Outreach now I have two more subjects that I quickly want to cover over the first one is sponsoring because you see this as well where a lot of channels they will play a game and it will say like hashad or # sponsored at the end of it and sponsoring is a great way to get a 100% success rate basically on sending an email and your game being played but I'm not a big fan of it because you can't afford sponsoring I'm going to be playing here and it isn't really going to be worth it because in my experience a Channel of about 50,000 subscribers will ask about $1,000 to $2,000 for a single video that will get about 15,000 20,000 views if you're lucky for covering your game and that's a lot of money if you ask me there's a lot of stuff you can do with that money instead such as subscribing to our patreon where for just like 12 bucks you get so much extra in-depth content about our game and I think it's a much better returnal investment even if you don't get wish list from it just in terms of the extra in-depth videos we make over there but also remember that hey if your game is ugly or your game isn't clickable or you don't have a good title and thumbnail they will just take your money and they don't care about your video performing horribly when you have that giant list of YouTubers you'll also notice that some of them will like respond or like it won't be the Creator themselves responding but the agency with like a whole rate card honestly just don't bother with that like if they have a PR agency as like their email they will not play your game for free and at that point just drop them from the list they are not going to respond even if you have the coolest game you could try but you need to remember that that PR job is to earn as much money for the Creator as possible so don't go for those as well just skip those and find other creators generally about 100,000 subscribers plus a lot of people will start having PR agencies or extra people on the team where you'll need to go through and you don't have a direct line of contact to the Creator so just skip those and then one final thing that I also sometimes hear about is platforms like lurk it and key mailer where you can set it up so that other YouTubers can go and get keys for your game and you don't have to send them emails back and forth they can just go to lurk it and find your game and claim a key if they like match the requirements that you set up on lurk it this is not sponsored by them I am not sponsored by lurk it or keiller we tried both of them out a little bit but neither of them really wowed me because the main issue with these platforms is they don't give you visibility you still need to bring the people to lurk it to look up your game like the creators whereas something like a lurk it is more interesting if you're like a medium-sized India already where you have a marketing budget and where you've been able able to generate some hype about your game without having to send out direct emails where influencers are actively following along the development of your game so they can go and create a video the moment that you basically Supply keys on lurk it without having to contact like the pr agency of the game Studio themselves it's more of like a midsize Indie and like triple Indie thing already honestly it's not going to be worth it for you really if you don't believe me you can of course give it a go but I'm not a big fan of those platforms we've had a bunch of calls with them but it just doesn't fit our studio at least and I feel like if it's it's not going to fit us 99% of the time it's not going to fit you either this has become a bit of a longer video already but this is honestly everything you need to know in my opinion about reaching out to influencers it is a really good way to get marketing for your game still so really the earlier you can start building that list the easier your marketing for your game will be once you're getting close to release once again of course remember visuals they are still also important if you are making a game that is a 2d platformer with a pretty basic color palette using only like assets store Sprites there's not going to be much that will convince a YouTuber to play your game because that is something that you need to think about already from the beginning of your development cycle how Market flow is my game but even then you can still reach out to as many people as possible it's really a numbers game go for over 100 go for over 200 if you really want to try and this way I can guarantee you some people will play your game and you will get some wish list from it already and it is going to be better than just posting your game on Reddit or on like X or something with screenshot setting Saturday I will guarantee you that so I hope this video taught you some more stuff as usual if you have any questions you can head down below in the comments and leave them there or join our Discord where you can just interact with me and other game devs more directly if you're new here as well we make two videos every week about game development the things that we learn along the way and just sharing the ups and downs of game development with you so if you aren't subscribed yet I would really suggest you do so because there's a lot of value on this channel thanks for watching and I'll see you guys the next one bye