📢 How to find content creators to play your game

You've got a game.

You want content creators to play it!

How do you SMASH these two together, to generate happy players & lots of sales?

Lotsa ways, of course, but here's one idea (with 4 steps) –

1. 🎮 Know your game
2. 📋 Compile a list of content creators
3. 🖼️ Prepare a press kit
4. 📢 Execute an outreach campaign

🎮 1) Know your game

First you've gotta be aware of what kind of game you're making so you can send it to the people who actually want to play it.

So come up with an elevator pitch. Try to have 2-3 sentences ready to go. Here's my game Pixel Washer's current Steam store description:

Pixel Washer is a cozy, zen-like game where you play as a cute piggy power washing beautiful pixelated worlds. Wash sprites, upgrade your power washer, and find hidden secrets.

I'll iterate on this over time, but this version does a good enough job. It explains that the game is cozy, pixelated, and then states the verbs players will be using while playing my little game.

An even shorter, snappier elevator pitch could also be handy in certain situations. For my case, how about simply: Pig washes pixels. That might be enough to get someone's attention! You could use that in the subject line of emails or in places where space is tight such as social profile bios.

Also know your game's genre, visual style, tags, and categories it fits into.

Right off the bat, a creator who mostly plays violent first-person shooters probably isn't going to enjoy Pixel Washer. Sure it's possible that they play a wide variety of games, but in many cases you'll find that a creator sticks to a general genre or two.

Knowing your game also entails knowing some of its comps, or comparable games. So make a list of those. My comparable games for Pixel Washer are:

1. PowerWash Simulator (obviously)
2. Unpacking
3. Sticky Business
4. A Little to the Left

So anyone who has enjoyed those games might enjoy Pixel Washer.

📋 2) Compile a list of creators

Now that we know what kind of game we're pitching, let's get a list of people who like that thing. Time to make a spreadsheet!

Collect your data how you prefer; I like Google Spreadsheets for this. In my sheet I created columns for:

• Outlet (the name of the person or company you'll be contacting)
• Contacted (when and how you messaged them, if you have)
• Reason Added (why they're on the list)
• Email (their address if you have it)
• Notes (relevant miscellaneous tidbits like language spoken)
• URL(s) (their contact or landing page)

Include whatever else you think would be useful! I also like to sort them by sections like Contacted, Haven't Contacted Yet, Not Interested, etc.

So we're calling them creators. Anyway how do we find them? There are essentially infinite ways, ranging from searching YouTube manually (slow) to knocking on doors around your neighborhood (ridiculous).

The answer: tools! Glorious tools. Let's talk about a couple.

How to find creators using Playboard

Playboard is a useful way to find YouTubers specifically. You could browse the most viewed gaming videos in your area, although let's be real, we probably can't get in touch with the very biggest channels. So let's focus on small-to-medium sized channels.

We also want to focus on players of our comparable games. To do that:

1. Search for <name of game> (e.g. "PowerWash Simulator")
2. Click the Videos tab
3. Change Relevance to Most viewed (or your preferred metric)
4. Limit Views to your target amount (e.g. 10,000 -> 50,000)

Feel free to poke around the software and use the data that you like best.

Click into the channels where:

1. They'd probably like your game (they play similar games)
2. You think they'll actually receive your message or email (not too popular)
3. You think they can help show your game to more players (big enough audience)

From their channel pages, view the About tab to see if their email is available. If it is, great! Email is our preferred method. If their email isn't available, you can try to direct message them on YouTube, or click their social links to see if you can message them through another platform.

Just track that in your spreadsheet in a way that makes it easy to message them. Then repeat these steps for each of your comparable games.

How to find creators using SullyGnome

SullyGnome covers Twitch stats and analysis. There are of course many ways to use this tool, but let's try to repeat the process of finding popular(ish) creators who like to play our comparable games.

1. In the upper-right search bar, search for <game name> (e.g. "Unpacking")
2. Click the Most watched tab
3. Select a time range e.g. 7 days (use whatever you like)

From here, you can go to any creator's page by clicking the Twitch logo to the right of any row. From their page you can see what contact options they have available (if any). They might have contact details on their Home or About tab, or might have enabled direct messages. Track whatever method(s) you can use.

Honestly many Twitch pages I saw had no contact information. Sometimes there'd be an email address on the Home/About tabs, but sometimes I ended up using their YouTube link instead. Most times I was able to find an email address.

💡 Here's a pro tip – if you don't see an About tab on YouTube, add "/about" to the URL to see if that gives you an About popup. This worked for me several times.

Additional creator lists I had bookmarked but are aging rapidly:

• Content Creators (list)
• Indie Game Collective (list)
• Gaming Press Outlets (December 2022, Public)

🖼️ 4) Prepare a press kit

A press kit (or media kit) is a collection of text, images, and other files to help journalists and similar creators make content about your game.

Press kits can be downloadable .zip files, web pages, or something between. There are no hard 'n fast rules for them, except that they should include some key things:

1. A description of your game, when/where it will release, and who made it
2. Logos, banners, and other images for use in thumbnails and promo images
3. Several screenshot images in standard formats
4. Links to your landing pages (e.g. Steam), trailers, and other important URLs

Not sure where to start with your press kit? Try presskit():

presskit() - spend time making games, not press

presskit() (pronounced ‘do presskit’) is the completely free solution to fast, simple & beautiful press kits.

spend time making games, not press

Lastly, to make your press kit more exciting, you need eye-catching key art.

Like this, the Pixel Washer key art:

📢 5) Execute an outreach campaign

"Execute an outreach campaign" is just a fancy way of saying "message people".

Anyway let's message people!

Make sure your email (or message) is quick and to-the-point. These creators get loads of messages like these and are looking to scan many of them rapidly. So focus on the main points:

1. Pixel Washer is a chill, relaxing game about power washing beautiful pixels.
2. It looks up your alley because you played <comparable game>.
3. Here's the Steam trailer, a link or key to play the game, and the press kit.

Write as little as possible, be as entertaining where you can, and get straight into the good parts: what your game is and how to play it. If you have any embargoes, or special rules around when you do/don't want creators to post content, be sure to include that. Otherwise, keep it simple.

I'll be the first to tell you that you should NOT use other games to describe your game. However, there are exceptions to every rule! In this context especially, you've likely found these folks based on what they've played before, so in some cases you know for sure that they are familiar with certain games.

In this case, I think it's fine, even preferred, to mention your comparable games.

🚫 STOP describing your game using other games

Here are 3 reasons to describe your game itself instead of saying, “It’s like X meets Y”

ValadriaMatt Hackett

Once you've got your email(s) prepared, when should you send them?

1. Early in the week (Monday everyone's busy catching up, so shoot for Tuesday or Wednesday)
2. First thing in the morning (e.g. 8am, and be sure to target their timezone)

Send an email (or a message or whatever), don't be shy! If you don't hear back, and haven't seen anything posted, wait an appropriate amount of time and follow-up just once. Email, wait a couple weeks, follow-up, then bow out. Don't become annoying about it, as they might be too busy or just not interested.

How to avoid getting overwhelmed

If you're like me, you like making games. What fun!

If you're even more like me, you find marketing your game draining. Not so fun!

Sometimes I'll get some random energy and bulldoze into various marketing tasks, feeling like I'll "get it all done" in one fell swoop.

However: nope! That's not how this works.

Marketing is like art, or game development, where there's no "end" where you're finished. There's infinite work to do. Every day you could learn something new, improve your craft, or make progress in a new category.

Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

What's worked for me is trying to spend a little bit of time on marketing each day. Check out this GDC talk No-Budget DIY Marketing for Indie Games by Michelle Lega. In it, she offers a process she came up with called the Hour A Day Marketing Plan:

You can use this timestamped link to jump straight into the hour a day process, but the whole video is worth watching. This process covers everything from social media to festivals, which you can tweak it to meet your needs. Just one hour per day feels doable, doesn't it?

There's essentially an infinite number of creators to find, with an accompanying infinite messages to write. It's easy to get overwhelmed, but just an hour a day can really add up over time and make a big difference for your game.

🌎 Summary

That's it! This work isn't nearly as fun as making games, BUT, mastering the art of finding and contacting the creators who will love your game could be what helps you and your game find success.

Here are those steps again:

1. 🎮 Know your game
2. 📋 Compile a list of creators
3. 🖼️ Prepare a press kit
4. 📢 Execute an outreach campaign

🛠️ More Tools & Resources

• Keymailer – a portal to connect with influencers, press and promoters
• TwitchMetrics – Streamers and games metrics
• Lurkit – I'm not sure what this is lol