I emailed over 400 content creators. Here are the results.

There’s an important symbiotic relationship between indie devs and content creators. We all know that. And so I spent a lot of time reaching out to creators as part of a promotional effort, and recorded the results to share with ya’ll.

Context: I was sending out closed demo access for this game:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3141310/Inkshade/

TLDR Results:

I found 408 content creators to email, and 7 (2%) made a video or streamed the game. The resulting impact was gargantuan.

Timeline (not a how-to, just what I did; some of this stuff happened in parallel)

1. I created a demo of the game, polished it a lot, and tested the heck out of it. Spoilers: there were hardware specific bugs that I didn’t find.
2. I absorbed all the relevant HTMAG articles, Reddit threads, and other related media from the last year or two. If you look up content creator outreach stuff you’ll find all of it easily enough.
3. I created a press kit and made a template email largely following this awesome Wanderbots blog. I shared my template with some streamer friends to make sure it didn’t come off as weird or sleazy.
4. I spent several weeks in August 2024 scouting out Youtubers and Twitch Streamers that I earnestly think will like Inkshade. This included checking out channels that played similar games (https://sullygnome.com/ was helpful when I ran out of creators I watch personally), getting a feel for their content, and making sure they were still active. If I truly thought they’d have fun playing and their audience would have fun watching (and their contact info existed), then they got added to the list. This took a while (weeks) because I spread it out, trying to find 10-20 relevant creators each day until I hit at least 400. I did not pester people on their socials—my assumption is that if someone doesn’t readily list a business email then they don’t want business emails.
5. Right after the Inkshade Steam page launched in early October 2024, I emailed 3-10 creators a day until the list was exhausted. This included the succinct and strictly professional template email (i.e. the Wanderbots thing), but also a short, manually-typed portion before the template to explain why I was contacting them specifically. I did this manually (laboriously) because I didn't want to feel like spambot who didn’t actually consider the human on the other end of the line, especially after going through all the effort finding the right creators.
6. Early January 2025 (a few days ago) I queried all the Steam keys sent out to see how many were redeemed (so about 1 month of emailing followed by 1 month of letting things sit).

Here are the results:

Some notes:

• I did not discriminate by channel/follower size.
• Most people who responded did so within a day or two. A few people responded around a week after I emailed them.
• Most people who redeemed a key did so within a few days, but the range was same-day to three weeks. There might be some people who haven’t even opened the email yet, but I’m assuming anyone who was interested has already taken a look.
• There’s a drop-off between the 408 people initially scouted and the 350 I actually contacted because I did a second screening before sending a key. It must have been pretty late at night when I found some of these creators because upon second glance it was clear Inkshade wasn’t a good fit for them (e.g. they only covered Roblox games, they’re only into grand medieval 4K strategy games not turn-based tactics, or in one extremely embarrassing instance, the channel was entirely in French). Some creators were also clearly a better fit for the full version only, not the demo. I also excluded bounced emails (there were 9 of these) in the “Email Sent” counts. Fun fact: I emailed Markiplier and the bounce message said “The recipient's inbox is out of storage space and inactive”. It made me laugh because of course it’s both those things.
• Percentages for the last 3 rows are calculated using the “Emails Sent” count as the denominator. I.e. what percentage of people that I successfully emailed a key redeemed that key.
• A handful of people who responded asked about or insisted on a sponsorship. I don’t have a budget for sponsorships at this time, which is exactly what I (politely) told them.
• Every talent agency that I emailed immediately asked for a sponsorship and ~10 more keys. I politely told them the above bullet and that the singular key I sent was for the Streamer who I think will like the game. Just a heads up that some of these managers might be pushy about asking for more keys even if you tell them you can’t do sponsorships. I think they were simply trying to conduct business and collect potential games for their talent and they weren’t trying to scam me or anything (I did in fact send them an unsolicited business email after all). Either way, practice good key hygiene guys.
• I think the percentage of people who responded (7%) and the percentage that redeemed a key (13%) is amazingly good. I expected a 2-5% response rate (not data-driven, just my gut).
• 7 people (2%) actually made a video or streamed the game. One of them even talked about the game a little bit in a blog. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but the YouTube videos subsequently made the wishlists and Discord blow up (order of magnitude increase; <800 to >5K and <50 to >300 respectively), and the Steam discovery queue even turned on for a bit! Not to mention that seeing a stranger play your game on YouTube/Twitch is always amazing. My first game was a complete flop, but there’s a lone YouTube video out there of a short let’s play, and to this day that video warms my heart.

Parting Takeaways

1. I think having a good, clean press kit was vital to people actually making content. The YouTube video that had the largest impact clearly had a super-talented editor, and I put a lot of stuff in the press kit with the intention of making a video editor’s job as easy as possible.
2. The effort was absolutely worth it. The impact from the coverage blew my socks off, and I think part of that was due to spending time looking for creators (and audiences) who would like to play/watch the game.
3. I’m glad I did this instead of using a service like Keymailer or Woovit (er… apparently Woovit recently and mysteriously imploded?). I can’t tell you if these key-mailing services are worth it because they’re so opaque and you can find conflicting information on their effectiveness. I can tell you that doing all the legwork yourself is 100% transparent and you can measure the results directly. So solid ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ from me regarding key-mailing vendors.
4. Reaching out to YouTubers was by far the most effective thing I've done regarding wishlists so far. It’s hard to parse exactly how many came out of it because I took Chris Zukowski’s advice and did the social-media-month thing (I believe he called it the "social media hell month" in a stream) although I didn’t go as crazy as he suggested because I still wanted to work on the game at the same time. Either way, Reddit and TikTok were blips compared to what the YouTube videos did regarding awareness and store page traffic. Since you can find other topics here of people saying [platform] had a huge effect, I think the best thing you could do is try a few different platforms and see what works for you/your game.
5. I think the results could have been better if I tested the demo on more hardware first. There are graphical bugs on AMD cards that very likely turned some people away. There’s another bug that definitely turned exactly one person away, but they very kindly pointed it out to me and will give the game another look when I fix it.

I haven’t planned out how I’m going to do creator outreach for the full release of the game, but if I’m lucky, more creators will be interested in the full game compared to the demo. Honestly, I was mentally prepared for there to be zero interest during this round of outreach, so I see these results as a sign that the passion I'm pouring into Inkshade is crystalizing into something that people will enjoy. (Less corny statement: I feel that taboo external validation.)

… Oops, that’s a lot of words. Hopefully they’re a little helpful to at least one person!