moarserin

Okay… a LOT of people asked me to do this post (admittedly more than I was expecting haha), so as a fellow creator turned PR person, I want to share some insights to help set your expectations accordingly if/when you’re applying for game keys and campaigns with developers and PR teams. This post will be long, so feel free to bookmark it and come back to it if you need 😂 I ask that you remember that this is a GUIDELINE, much like the pirate code. Don’t take it as “hard fact” as every team does things differently, and every campaign gets adjusted to what we feel like it needs specifically. There is no “one shoe fits all” to this game. Anways… let’s dive into it! You’re Not Entitled to Keys, Buy the Games You Love! I’m starting with this section because we as creators often get into this mindset of, “Well, I work so hard, I deserve a key! I know I’ll generate wishlists/sales for this game!”, and that’s entirely valid. Except for the fact that THOUSANDS of other creators can say the exact. same. thing. Sometimes, campaigns only have 100 keys, and there are 500 applications, and that means only 1/5th of creators get picked, and you have a 20% chance of acceptance. Not the best odds, all things considered. SO, please remember that even if you have an awesome channel, and you work super hard on your content, and you would generate wishlists/sales, that doesn’t mean you’re ever “entitled” to a key. That said, if you truly think a game is a good fit for your community, and that they would love it, and you would love it, then buy it. Buy it to support the developers. Now more than ever in this industry, they need customers, not content. That is the entire purpose of offering keys in the first place: to generate customers. If we give every single creator a key, then the game will utterly flop because they’ll barely scratch the surface of what they paid to develop/market the game. This is especially true for indie games. So! Remember, at the end of the day, we create content for the love of the games we play. If you’re doing it with the ulterior motive of “getting free games”, your heart isn’t in the right place. PR teams can smell it a mile away when a creator is just trying to get something free with no intention of following through with content, or no desire to promote the title in a way that might generate actual wishlists or sales. Stay genuine, be humble, and buy the games you love. I do it ALL the time as a creator. If I don’t get a key for the games I want, I buy them. Period. Variety Versus Focused: Before I touch on something like “numbers”, I want to address the actual most important elephant in the room, and that’s what type of content you create. When PR considers a creator for a campaign, the first thing they’re going to ask is, “Does this creator's content fit the game?” For example, if you’re a cozy creator with 10k subs on YouTube covering cozy games, and you apply for a horror game, you’re probably not going to be high on the acceptance list. Why? Well, your audience doesn’t watch horror content; they watch cozy content. Meaning? That even if you were to get 5k video views for the content you create, you’re very unlikely to actually “convert” any wishlists or sales for the game. Those views are going to be from folks who purely wanted to watch you play a horror game that day, but have no intention or desire to play it themselves. So, if all you’ve played on Stream, or the only videos you’ve made on your YouTube channel, are about “The Sims”, or “Animal Crossing”, or “Escape From Tarkov”, or “Baldur’s Gate 3”, then yeah, sadly, you’re probably not high up on the list. People watch you for those games only, your audience isn’t into variety, and they’re not likely to take lightly to you swapping to some random indie game with 0 notice. This is ESPECIALLY true when the main thing you play is Triple-A games. Triple-A and indies don’t typically mix unless you’re a review channel that actively covers and streams both types. If your audience is accustomed to the swap between the two, then that’s fantastic, and you’ll be considered, but if you only play the big bois, then… sorry 🥲 Viewers Who Are There For YOU: Believe it or not, a huge number of creator audiences are only there for the “creator”. They don’t care about buying the games they play. They have no intention of wishlisting anything; they’re just purely consuming their entertainment for the day and logging off to go do whatever it is they do. Those channels don’t bode well in the PR industry, and sadly, MOST Twitch / Kick channels fall into this unfortunate category. Viewers on Twitch are so fickle. They want to watch their favorite streamers, and that’s all. This is why, a large portion of the time, YouTubers are preferred over streamers. YouTube, by nature, is a platform where people go to find content for games. Reviews, let’s plays, lists, gameplay videos, etc. are all content that gets consumed for the purpose of learning about a game. This information helps viewers decide if they want to wishlist/buy the game, and is infinitely more valuable than Twitch/Kick 9 days out of 10. Yes, I know, you might be the streamer going, “well damn”, right now, but YouTube content stays forever, generates more views over time, and typically trends upward with every video someone creates. A Twitch stream happens once, might stay on the platform for 30 days, and then is gone forever. That… sadly doesn’t have much value in terms of PR/Dev teams. So why do Twitch streamers still get keys? Well, when a game is launching, it can be hyper beneficial to have 20 people all playing the same game. This pushes the game onto the Twitch discovery page, and people might actually decide to check the game out because they see a fair few people playing it. It drives human curiosity and can lead to wishlists/sales, so don’t worry, it’s not all for naught if you’re only a streamer. There are still times where we want to intentionally include Twitch/Kick streamers in our campaigns, but it IS typically at launch, so early previews and access periods are usually out of the question. Don’t hate us - that’s just the nature of the two different platforms. CCV / Follower Count: The biggest assumption for most creators is that it’s purely a numbers game. So let me explain that in-depth. Yes, having 20k subscribers on YouTube is fantastic, and being a Twitch partner helps your odds, no doubt, but the two points above can change that in a quick second. MOST campaigns have a bare minimum number you have to hit. For indie games, we typically look for a 15-20 CCV for streaming and a 100-view average on YouTube. Pretty low right? Yeah, it’s a small indie game, so we don’t expect you to be the “biggest YouTuber on the block”. That would be a bit ridiculous. Now, sometimes developers set higher requirements, and we often advise against it because… well, no offense, but unless you’re a Triple-A title, you need to manage your expectations accordingly. If you want BIG YouTubers to play your tiny indie game, you’re typically going to have to pay for it, and on the one-off chance that you get a few who will do it free, it’s going to be a few, not 20-30 of them. So, smaller creators might love hearing this, but ironically, we typically target the small bees. Those above 500 subscribers on YouTube who are getting steady views, and Twitch streamers who can maintain a 15 CCV. Creators in this range typically have a far more dedicated and focused audience who are there for the creator, but also probably still enjoy taking their game recommendations, and value their opinions pretty heavily on a game. You might think, “I’m so small, no one considers my opinion”, but statistically, channels that have a steady audience and are growing at a nice pace will convert more wishlists and sales than some millionaire channels. Yep, you read that right. Your millionaire channels that cost 20k for a sponsored video end up converting LESS sales than a lot of your small to mid-size folks. For the most obvious reason, these channels cost an arm and a leg to get on anyway, so you’ve already tanked a huge chunk of money into the garbage just to get their video, and then you’re REALLY unlikely to convert enough sales to even cover the cost of the video. So, in the indie industry, it’s much better to work with everyone but them. Sure, Triple-A’s can afford it, but that’s a whole different ball game, and 99% of getting Triple-A games relies on having a high viewer/sub count, and being on-genre. That’s pretty much it. Of course, all this said, I will say that some big YouTubers specifically highlight indies, and DON’T charge ridiculous prices, and in those instances, we love them and worship them and all that they do. Sadly, that’s just not the norm. My last point related to “numbers” is that even if you don’t have the most video or stream views, a lot of what we look at is “engagement rates”. Is your community liking your videos? Do they leave comments? Is your chat active? Anything that shows you have an active community that engages with you on video/social platforms can and will help your success rates. On the flip side of this, we try to weed out channels that look like they might use any type of viewbotting, or fake engagement that points to the channel being for key farming/selling. Believe me, PR is trained to keep an eye out for “sus” channels. You might think you’re being sneaky, but as we joke about at work, we put our boots in the mud and trudge through the trenches to ensure the people we’re offering keys to are REAL people. It’s Okay to Not Like a Game: Another thing we deal with a lot in the industry is failure to deliver. We’ll give away 50 keys, and only 10 creators will create content. We’ll follow up with the other 40, ask what was up, and MAYBE 50% of them will come back with, “hey, I didn’t like it, I don’t want to play it on my channel”. The other half just won’t respond, and half our keys are in the garbage. Here’s the thing… we need you to tell us if you don’t like a game, OR deliver content. If you take a game key, you are absolutely expected to hop into that game and give it the ol’ college try. That means sit down, play it for two hours, and if you absolutely hate it, write up all the feedback you can possibly muster to explain why. If you prefer, record your voice with the feedback instead if you’re not the best writer. This helps us more than content ever will. Sounds weird? Well, that’s because a lot of the times content creators do one of two things. They either fluff it all up and act like a game is great, snuffing their complaints out because they think the PR / dev team wants them to just blindly promote it. OR - they blindly insult the game, say it's bad, tell their followers it's trash, and call it a day, after playing for 30 minutes. Neither of these is helpful in ANY way to a game. Not to mention, you typically lose credibility with the industry as a whole because you either aren’t a critical reviewer or you’re just a hate media outlet, and we’ll never offer you a key again. I will say being on the nice side of this spectrum will still get you keys, but… it might make you lose credibility with your audience instead, so be mindful not to be a “blind promoter” either. People who take the time to provide genuine feedback, even if they don’t end up covering the games on their channel, are a special kind of bread and butter that money can’t buy. I offer keys to tiny channels all the time because every time I do, they give me a LIST of feedback my developers can use to improve their game. Those folks stay on my list. Permanently. Even if they do like a game and it gets barely any views, at the very least, I know 10/10 times that we’re going to get an honest player, great feedback, and someone that’s a delight to work with. To round all of this out, if you accept a key, then you need to either cover the game on your channels, tell us why you won’t, or DON’T ACCEPT A KEY! Don’t just take a key from a dev/pr team with no intention of playing the game, featuring it, etc. You will get put on a blacklist that you don’t want to be on. Legit one of our jobs the week after we send out keys is “content creator follow-ups”, and your name is on a spreadsheet tied to a key. If we come back to you and you don’t respond at all, I will personally ensure you don’t get another key. If that sounds brutal, then please remember point 1 from this long post. There are hundreds of creators who’d like to cover the game, and I’d rather give someone else a chance. Of course, you can always come back at a later date and apologize for your lack of follow-through and try again, and I might be willing to forgive you and offer a second chance, but believe me, it’s only going to be 1 extra chance 🙃 Well, Creators Aren’t Supposed to be Playtesters! To follow up on my previous section, I’m diving into the comment above because undoubtedly some people will think that it’s not their job to be playtesters. Ironically, you’re absolutely right! When we offer up a build to creators, it’s not our intent to send it out with bugs, issues, or problems that we need creators to find and fix. It’s always our intent to do the very opposite. We don’t intentionally showcase demos or previews that “aren’t good” because, well, that’s just bad for business. Playtesting and feedback should be complete BEFORE it goes to the creators / general public. That said, it’s impossible to get a build “perfect” before releasing it into the open world. Creators and players end up experiencing the game in ways that developers and playtesters just don’t. Or perhaps, they find something super obscure that no one has found before. In this instance, it’s much better to be the “helpful” creator than the hateful one. Believe me, I’ve had a few builds go out that were rough, and it SUCKS when it happens, but it does happen. Just be mindful of the team, understand that it was never their intention to have you be a playtester. Then, offer your feedback, and tell them why you do/don’t want to cover the game. It’s really okay. We’re all humans, and all games are made by humans (at least any worth playing), so there’s going to be bugs and issues. Really, a simple line of communication can fix these issues. Steam Curators Are Sus: This title hurts me personally, because I myself am a Steam curator. I’ve generated nearly 1 million views on Steam directly and have contributed thousands of views for indie games galore. The moment I curate a game its free views for whatever the game is. When done right, Steam Curators are great! However, typically they’re key farmers. Yep. It’s true. Typically, they’re people who just take keys and never do anything with them. Of course, you can’t “sell” keys offered through the Steam portal, but usually they’re everyday players who won’t create content, and rarely leave a review on Steam itself. What’s worse? Is that a lot of these folks will email in saying, “hey I’m a Steam curator and I’d like a key”, and those keys DO get sold. I won’t ever offer a key to someone who is a “Steam curator”, who doesn’t also have a video channel tied to it. That’s just a good way to ensure a key ends up in the garbage. SO! If you are a legit Steam curator, then it’s probably best not to mention your Steam page and just stick to promoting your video channels. I’ve heard a ton of PR teams that actually block any emails with the word “curator” in it automatically. I personally don’t, because… well, I am one. That said, some do, so be mindful. Asking for Multiple Keys Is Sus: A big red flag for us PR folks is “multiple keys”. Which, for a multi-player game, seems perfectly reasonable to ask for a key or two, and for these instances, most of the time, we’re happy to accommodate at least a second key. That said, asking for more than one key when it’s a single-player game is typically just bad manners. This goes for “giveaways” as well. These keys are dedicated to creators, so any giveaway keys mean that another creator is losing out on the opportunity. Sometimes, offering giveaway keys can make sense, especially for creators who do it frequently and have a proven track record of success with them. That said, most of the time it’s considered respectful not to ask. Another point to this is that we PR folks will typically “choose” which creators we want to offer giveaway opportunities for, so it’s usually better to just allow them to offer, versus ask. Yes, I know, you should always take your shot, and if you’re a big creator with proven success, then go for it! That said, if you’re much smaller or just starting out, stick to just requesting a key for yourself for a while. But I Want To Get Into Game Reviewing / Variety: Then you should! But you’re going to need a proven track record of content in this genre / field before you’re going to be seriously considered for keys. So, start up a YouTube channel, upload some gameplay videos (even if they have 0 commentary), make some good thumbnails, craft some great written reviews, and pour your heart into the idea that you ACTUALLY want to be a game reviewer or create variety content for indie games. Start having an “indie day” on your Twitch streams and promote that on your social media. Upload the portion of your Twitch VODs to a YouTube channel that is dedicated to a game specifically, and give it a good thumbnail. Edit out all the community fluff and make it good. Make shorts that feature your favorite upcoming indie games on Instagram / TikTok. There are a million different ways to be successful in this, but really what matters is that you’re making a genuine and consistent effort to it. Working Links and Contact Info: You don’t know how many broken links I come across, and sure, I’ll chase them down, but if you’re already a small creator and I discover nothing but broken links, mismatched branding, and 3 different names on different platforms, this is going to hurt your chances of success. Make sure all your links work, neatly nest them in a LinkTree/beacons, and make sure your email address is tied to your YouTube page, Twitch page, or in a social media bio. You’re going to say, “I don’t want my email public”, and that’s exactly why you create one especially for content. If you’re getting harassed by someone, block them. All professionals in this industry either have an email or an agent. If you don’t want one, then you’re automatically going to be disqualified for a lot of ops. Social Media: Ironically, being your natural self and being active on social media can do a lot to help your chances of success! Even sharing some beautiful in-game screenshots with a small blurb, or retweeting a developer's post saying you’re excited, is more than enough to show that you’re active and serious about helping promote the games you love. Social posts can generate a lot of buzz, so if I find someone who has a small video channel but is incredibly active with a decent social media following, then they’ll likely get a key. That said, don’t burn yourself out! It’s much more beneficial to stick to ONE platform that you really like, than balance a bunch of them. This goes with video platforms, too. I recently made the cut to remove all of Meta’s platforms because I just didn’t enjoy them. I now only focus on 2 social platforms and 2 video platforms. It’s much more manageable, and it looks better because the platforms we do use, we’re successful on. So, pick a few platforms, stick with them, and build them BEFORE expanding to others. Going back to the PR of this, I’d rather see someone with only a YouTube and a Twitter page that are both successful, or a Twitch streamer with a successful Twitter page, than someone with 5 platforms and 50 followers on all of them. Tons of platforms doesn’t actually look good if you aren’t utilizing them well. Network with your favorite PR teams: Believe it or not, we are humans! We recognize names and faces, and the more we see yours, the more likely we’re going to put you on a “good” watchlist. Even if you don’t qualify right away for our campaigns, I can personally say I have a “monitor growth” checkbox that tells me to check how your channels are doing every time you apply for something, and the moment you hit a proper threshold, you WILL get an email. So don’t be disheartened when you constantly don’t see anything in your email inbox. Keep trying, keep growing, keep putting in that effort, and it will pay off. We Hate Saying No: I don’t know how to say it anymore simply than this, but I wish I could give a key to everyone, I truly do. It hurts when I have to exclude someone from an opportunity, especially if it’s someone I interact with and enjoy. That said, it’s my job to be critical and help these games see success, and that means picking the absolute best people to help promote them. Sometimes we have indie devs that say, “Give keys to everyone that wants one!”, and that’s a great day, but it’s not every day, so be mindful of that. How to Improve Your Odds of Success: This is so much text, and I’ll be shocked if you take the time to read all of it. I hope you will, but you might not. That said, I want to round it out with a few “tips for success”; a TLDR if you will. Make sure your content aligns: Don’t ask for keys to games that do not align with your community, content, or audiences. Branch out: If your current content doesn’t align with game campaigns you want in on, then adjust it and start now! Set reasonable expectations for yourself: Before you even ask for a key, be sure that you have 100% intention to create content for the game. Don’t get into the habit of requesting 8 games in a week and then only covering 1 because you overloaded yourself. Provide your content plan: When asking for a key, don’t just make the request; lay out your content plan and provide links to all of your accounts that the content will be on. Always follow up: If you’re given a key, and you hate a game, provide thorough feedback as to why it’s not for you / your community. If you love a game and post about it, send that video to the team you accepted a key from! Ask for 1 key: Only ask for one key. Be respectful: Don’t ever expect a key, and if you aren’t chosen, never, I repeat, NEVER, email a PR person that you’re upset about it. That’s a great way to end up on a blacklist. Be critical, but kind: When a game is bad, it’s okay to talk about it; you won’t be blacklisted for leaving a less-than-optimal review for a game, but your reviews and thoughts need to have real context behind them. Offer actionable items that the developers can use to improve the game. Bad publicity is fine if it’s valid, but bad publicity for the sake of clicks and views never will be. Working Contact Info/Links: Update all your stuff and make it neat! Make sure an email is able to be found. Social Media: Stick to a few platforms, and be active on them! Don’t stoop to dirty tactics: Viewbotting on any platform is ridiculously easy to spot, believe it or not. Don’t do it! Once you’ve been marked as a viewbotter, it’s a list you just can’t get off of. Network with your favorite PR teams: Just as you network with your audience and other creators, take the time to interact with your favorite PR teams and members, too! This was hopelessly long, but… hopefully you learned a lot and took away some good info from it! Feel free to ask any questions you might have, and I’ll do my best to answer them mindfully and completely. Please note: anyone who can’t ask questions and share comments with respect will be blocked. I took 2 hours out of my day to share this, and I don’t settle for “ick” in my online spaces, so please play nice kids! A special thanks to @AllAgesofGeek and @HitherYonGames for contributing some thoughts too!

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