Having a streamer play your game is probably the most effective way to market it. This can happen organically, or via streamer sponsorship (you pay the streamer to play your game).
Having creators organically cover your game is great, but I’d also be happy to pay them to cover my game. In fact, I’d love to be able to reach sponsorship agreements that are profitable to both parts.
However, all the sponsorship deals I’ve seen had one thing in common:
Streamer Sponsorship prices are way too high for the value they deliver to indie games
This is a bold claim, let’s dig into it. First we’ll look at the value the developer gets from a streamer playing their game.
Game devs make most of their money by selling games. Additionally, wishlists can convert into future sales. In this article, I analyzed many instances of streamers playing my games, here’s a summary table:
TOK is The Ouroboros King and GvH is Gods vs Horrors.
Value/view is relatively consistent, with each view translating to 0.01-0.04$. Obviously value/view is not a constant, it will depend on the game quality, the fit between streamer and game, the number of hours the streamer has already played, concurrent discount, etc. Since those figures come from organic videos (high streamer game fit) from moderately successful indie games (not shovelware), I’d expect them to translate to other similar indies.
Now let’s get into sponsorship prices. I’ve sent hundreds of emails to streamers asking them to play my games, and some of them offered me sponsorship deals. Here are the asking prices of those deals, with their average views and the value I could expect to get from them (with 0.03$/view):
None of the sponsorship deals would allow me to break even!
An attractive Price / value ratio would need to be below 1 (software sales commissions typically pay 0.12, and a good ad campaign pays 0.3). So these were all completely off.
Why are prices so high?
Here are my hypotheses:
- Sponsors with higher revenue per customer (AAA games, live service games, non-games like a certain VPN service, …) are driving prices up
- Publishers with a high marketing budget, and no real alternatives on how to spend it. Devs be careful, if they have a recoup they’re spending your money on this!
- Sponsors hope that they will get more from the deal:
- The streamer may play for longer than specified
- Other streamers may pick the game up after seeing the stream
- Steam may give you extra traffic if you reach some critical mass
- Some sponsors may not have even estimated their return on investment
A more sustainable sponsorship model
The current sponsorship model puts a lot of risk in the hands of the developer, and almost none on the hands of the content creator.
A more sustainable sponsorship model would align what the developer pays with what they get. Here are some ideas:
- Make a flexible contract and pay for the actual amount of hours streamed (instead of 1k$ for an hour, it could be 300$/hour, for up to 5 hours)
- Make a flexible contract and pay for the content made. Instead of paying just for one stream, allow the option to pay extra if the creator decides to also make a YT video
- Pay a percentage of the value gained (for isolated sponsored content, otherwise it’s hard to do attribution)
- Pay based on views and the average value/view
- Pay upfront, giving creators more security
- No editorial control
I understand these may result in reduced overall prices. Most streamers will probably decline offers in this line. But those who accept them will be the ones that would have played the game anyway or were on the verge of playing it. In that case, this may work for both parts as it will mean the game is aligned with the taste of the streamer and their audience.
EDIT: I tried and failed
For the release of Gods vs Horrors I manually researched lots of streamers and narrowed it down to 45 that I felt were a great fit. I sent emails to them with offers of paying 50% of the expected value generated based on views and conditions similar to what I exposed above. I got 6 replies: 1 declining, 3 saying their price was a lot higher than what I offered, 1 accepting, and 1 saying they liked the game and they’d do it for free. Those who accepted had already played the demo and I was pretty sure they’d play on release, so I’d say it doesn’t even count.
This took a lot more effort in both crafting a compelling email and manually filtering the streamers and coming up with a reasonable expected value from their streams. Based on my results, I’ll probably never actively seek sponsorships ever again.