Your game is finished, it’s a few weeks until launch day, and you’re eager to get a few codes into the hands of willing creators who will not only love it, but also share it with their audiences. The question is: how do you do that effectively and without breaking the bank? In this post, we cover the best budget-friendly ways to distribute keys for your indie game.
Email Campaigns
The days of cold emailing are far from dead, and remain one of the most effective ways to connect with creators who might be interested in covering your game. However, to run an effective email campaign, you want to ensure you’re targeting creators and press who have covered titles with themes and mechanics similar to yours. For example, you might be developing a roguelike game, but that doesn’t mean every roguelike creator is going to want to play it.
- Learn Your Subgenres: Start by pinpointing sub-genres within your title, and then create a list of prospects who seem to enjoy them.
- Draft Your List: Once you’ve homed in on the finer details of your game, and found a few comparable titles, you can begin drafting your list.
- Spend Your Time Wisely: Start with 25-50 creators, and expand from there. The list can be as long as you like, but as you get deeper into the trenches of the creation world, targeting grows more difficult. Spend your time wisely and do your best to pick the optimal targets for the job.
Locating Targets
The easiest way to locate strong targets is to head to the YouTube search bar and type in the names of the comparable titles you compiled earlier. You’ll have to do a bit of scrolling, and manually check each creator’s pages to ensure they’re a decent fit, but once you’ve confirmed they are, snag their email and add it to your list.
Once your list is ready, prepare a good pitch, and get ready to press send. Remember, it’s often better to ask if they want a key in your initial pitch, rather than including it in the first email. This will ensure your game doesn’t end up on key-selling sites and encourages an open line of communication between you and any creators you’re working with.
Social Media
Marketing your game on social media can be one of the most cost-effective ways of getting your title in front of thousands of eyes. That said, it can also be time-consuming and sometimes with little reward if you approach it without a proper strategy. This blog post isn’t going to touch on the nuances of best social media practices, but it is worth mentioning that hosting key campaigns on social sites can lead to dozens of high-value creators who would otherwise never have discovered your title. Usually, those who are on sites like X or Bluesky are tuned into the indie game development feeds and use them as genuine ways to discover new titles. Rather than mindlessly scrolling through Steam pages or release calendars, they prefer a more organic exposure route and one that is served alongside their other daily content consumption.
If you’ve already put in a bit of time and effort into growing your own presence on social media, you can leverage it when it’s time to distribute keys.
- Create an Eye-Catching post: Put together a post with a few photos of the most interesting parts of your game.
- Include a Call-to-Action: Encourage interested creators to share a comment if they’d like to play it early.
- Exclude Links: We’ve found that posts tend to perform worse when a link is included. Your images and game title in the body of the post should spark enough interest to get creators over to Steam.
Now comes the tricky part. Once you have a list of comments a mile long, you’re going to have to filter through each of these targets to ensure that the person on the other end of it is, well, a real person.
- Filter Through Each Profile: Start by viewing each profile and searching for their relevant content links. If they don’t have any, it’s better to skip.
- Streamers: If they’re a Twitch streamer, you can use sites like SullyGnome to find their average CCV (concurrent viewers) and evaluate how effective a target they are.
- YouTubers: Platforms like YouTube speak for themselves in terms of viewership as you can view their recent videos and live streams to gauge their average viewership.
- Find Their Email: After evaluating whether you think their content is strong enough to offer a key to, track down their email address and add them to your pitch list.
New to social media? Check out our previous blog post, “Getting started with Bluesky and X”.
Key Distribution Websites
If you’d like to explore options that are a lot less manual, save you a ton of time, and are incredibly cost-effective, we’d highly recommend websites like PressEngine. This site, and others like it, help streamline the distribution process and make evaluating critical targets all around easier. The best part is, PressEngine offers free accounts for indie developers that will allow you to distribute keys.
PressEngine
This site in particular offers the best free option, giving you the ability to handle an unlimited number of key requests. Simply upload your title to the platform and open it up for creators to request to cover it directly. The site also offers a lot of discoverability, as once you’ve added your title, it will automatically be placed in their game database for creators and media to come across. The free plan doesn’t cover things like outreach though, so if you’d like an easy way to send out an email blast and get your title in front of thousands of verified media and creators, then it’s worth exploring their lite plan.
Regardless of whether you choose one key distribution site or multiple, platforms like these tend to be the most time-saving way to get your game in front of thousands of strong targets, and require very little footwork from you.
Closing Thoughts
We know just how exhausting this last bit of marketing can feel after you’ve spent months or years developing your game, and while you can save a lot of money doing it yourself, hiring a marketing team to handle it can eliminate a world of stress. This is one of the things we do best at Starfall PR, so if you’d like to hard focus on the ‘launch your game’ button without the headache of key distribution for media and creators, then be sure to reach out to us and we’ll craft a marketing plan that fits the scope of your indie game and your budget.
To those handling it themselves, we hope this article gave you enough insight to get you started, and we wish you the best of luck with your launch!
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