u/Moaning_Clock

Hey,

I'm Daniel and I developed Flufftopia: Fluffmazing Edition together with my fiancee for 1.5 years. It's a remake of Flufftopia which was only released on Itch.

The game is my most successful game monetarily speaking but still is nowhere near paying the bills (currently sitting at around 400 sales and 9 reviews).

Around the launch (mostly after) I contacted 300 people. This went well, I got a couple of videos and streams, so I thought I would contact 100 more. After the initial discount, people kept buying the game, and I looked at the 400 people I contacted and decided on a whim to contact 800 more to help with the sales. I'm not done with all 1200 but I'm at ~1070.

This resulted in over 50 streams/videos (I stopped counting deliberately at 50, I estimate it's more or less 80 now).

The game is now out for almost 4 months and every couple of days I contact a few more people. I search for games or combination of games that streamers play, use Sullygnome to gather more potential people and also plain YouTube search.

Most people I contacted this time are Twitch streamers. With earlier games I mostly contacted youtubers but I changed my opinion thinking about how it was when I streamed on Twitch many years ago: I had a pretty small channel with 400 followers or so and just streamed random games. Even though I didn't have many viewers (concurrent viewers usually between 4-12), some people told me they bought for example Delver because I streamed it.

Now, I don't think contacting small streamers works with every game and I think the impact of small streamers on Flufftopia was pretty low BUT if you have some highly replayable roguelite or a long playing simulation game, it might actually help.

I also think marketing shouldn't stop a few weeks after release, contacting people can be worth it even many months later.

Was it worth it?

For me definitely. Seeing one of the big streamers that I personally watched in the past play MY GAME was such a great feeling - mix of nostalgia, surprise, happiness.

It doubled my sales and that was also great

^((but of course there is always an opportunity cost and it's) ^(super boring) ^(work after a while.))

Some stats:

- My cutoff point was with very few exceptions 100 Followers on Twitch and 1000 Subscribers on YouTube. If I would do it again I would at least double that numbers.

- Around 25% activated a key.

- More than 5% but less than 10% made a video.

- 6 asked for money (less than 1%)

- Some People picked the game up after seeing a large streamer playing it

- 5 videos got over 20k views

- I would guess that around half of my sales (200) came through the videos/streams.

- My heuristic is that every email I send out is worth 50 cents soon and 50 cents in the long term. I think it's actually higher than that

- More than 250 of the messages were send as a Twitch DM (don't do that!)

- More than 800 were send as a mail

- A few dms on speedrun .com, one discord message, two insta dms (overall <10)

- Cringe mistakes happen (wrong names, already activated keys, wrong game (many mails had "because you played Berry Bury Berry, you might like ..." and a few people didn't played it, to fast copy paste). It's an awful feeling

- Some people take literal months to reply or make a stream/video. Don't count on it but it does happen. The most successful stream (and later edited video on YouTube) in terms of impact was made 2 months after I send the mail

Some things/obstacles/questions you might have:

Many streamers don't have a mail address on their about page

- When they have youtube channel, it's often there, sometimes on Twitter. Often they have a discord but I don't use discord a lot, so I only contacted one person there.

I can only see X amount of mails before YouTube cuts me off

- Use multiple accounts, you can create multiple channels pretty easily with the same mail address

The streamer I want to contact doesn't have any other contact information

- If you have no other option (and only then), try the Twitch DM system. You can only write pretty short messages and it's regarded as unprofessional but I got a lot of positive replies and streams through that. It shouldn't be a brandnew Twitch account also. Don't contact too many on a day (<10), you can get banned from whispers (got it 2 times, one for 24 hours, one for longer but the support resolved it since it's perfectly okay to do this)

I fear that my mail goes to spam

- Especially in the beginning use 2-3 mail addresses and test it out. I usually contact around 30 a day without any problem. Don't send all emails with a few seconds apart, wait 1-2 minutes between mails. I don't follow the wanderbots formular usually, my email doesn't contain any gifs or links but the Steam key

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!