When promoting your game, finding the right streamers to contact is key to increasing the chances that they’ll play it and help you gain visibility. By following this strategy, my first game (The Ouroboros King) reached over 4.5 million views on YouTube.
In this post, I’ll walk you through my methodology to identify the most relevant streamers for your game.
How do you know if a streamer is likely to play your game?
The best way to find the right streamers for a game is to focus on those who’ve played similar games. The more games they played and the longer they played them the better. Also, you’d want them to have high average views, so the impact on sales and wishlists is higher.
The first step is to compile a list of 5-15 games that are similar to yours. You should pick games that have already been covered by many content creators (usually already released games with >200 reviews).
Next, you’ll need to find content creators that have played those games.
Finding Twitch streamers
You can easily find Twitch streamers who played a certain game by using third-party data aggregators such as Sullygnome and Streamcharts.
As far as I know, none of these databases allow you to filter streamers based on a list of games. You’ll need to download the data and make your own database to find those who played multiple games on your list.
How to find YouTubers
I don’t know of any YouTube aggregator that tells you who played each game. This makes the search much more complicated and time-consuming. There are 2 main possibilities to find Youtubers who played a game:
- Manual search requires a lot of manual work and it’s hard to be exhaustive.
- Using the YouTube API, which requires coding and takes away from you developing your game
The lack of accessible data tools makes it difficult to gather detailed analytics, making it harder to be exhaustive and efficient
Aggregating the data
Once you’ve gathered a database of streamers and YouTubers who played similar games, it’s time to aggregate the data. You’ll want to know how many games on your list each streamer played, for how long, and how many viewers they had. This will allow you to filter the ones more likely to play your game. For example, you could target streamers who played at least 2 of the games in the list and had more than 1000 average viewers.
Merging YouTube and Twitch data can be tricky because you’ll need game and channel names to perfectly match, and a way to compare YouTube views to Twitch viewers.
I use watch hours to compare both platforms. Watch time is the amount of time that people spend watching videos on a channel so 1 watch hour means that people altogether spent 1 hour watching videos/streams.
Sullygnome already reports this metric. For YouTube, I had to make estimates using the following formula:
watch hours = number of views * video duration * completion rate.
Estimating completion rate
Completion rate isn’t a public metric on YouTube and I haven’t managed to find any reliable data. For this reason, I’ve made an estimation based on video duration with the following assumptions:
- The completion rate should be decreasing with time because it’s hard to keep people engaged for long periods.
- The average will be between 30 and 50% (I read this on Reddit).
After a bit of adjusting, I came up with this formula:
Completion rate = (20 / (video duration in minutes + 30)) + 0.05
I know it’s not perfect, but I think it’s reasonable and the error we’re committing will be relatively small. Here’s how it looks on a graph:
Getting streamer emails
Not all content creators have their emails in the same place, so searching for them is a time-consuming task. There are several places where you can find streamers’ emails, including:
- Twitter bio
- The “About” section on their Twitch profile
- Creator personal websites
- YouTube’s “about” page, however limited to 10/day to protect creators from spam
Once you have all the email addresses, you can start contacting the content creators. Here’s an article I wrote about writing emails to streamers with some extra tips to avoid spam filters.
Conclusion
This can be a frustrating and time-consuming process, so I automated part of it (YouTube API, data aggregation) for personal use. Now, I’m launching a service to help fellow developers. Check out Streamer Finder if you want to save time and get an exhaustive list of content creators who might be interested in playing your game.
I hope this article can help you through your game’s promotion. Until next time!