How to find relevant streamers and youtubers for your game

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.

The first step is to compile a list of 5-15 games that are similar to yours. Apart from being similar to your game, these games should also:

• Be moderately successful (>100 reviews), so they have been already covered by creators
• Be relatively recent, so creators who played them are still relevant

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:

1. Manual search requires a lot of manual work and it’s hard to be exhaustive.
2. 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. However, in my experience, YouTube is a bigger source of visibility than Twitch so it’s well worth it.

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:

1. The completion rate should be decreasing with time because it’s hard to keep people engaged for long periods.
2. 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:

Selecting the best streamers

I use two main criteria to select the best creators for my game:

• Streamer-game fit: how the game fits with the creator’s taste and audience. The more games in your list they played and the longer they played them the better.
• Streamer popularity: streamers with more viewers will show game to more people leading to higher sales and wishlists.

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) and made it publicly available. Check it out here.

I hope this article can help you through your game’s promotion. Until next time!