The Secret To Getting Your Game To Blow Up

know you launched the game nothing happened you made 150 bucks which by the way for those of you listening that is probably what you would call a flop i think that's fair to say um you should bring in something like 10 grand at least for your first month if it's going to be a successful game generally speaking and and you also mentioned joseph before we started the podcast that you didn't have any real wish lists you didn't really do i guess a marketing plan to get wish lists right no yeah because i was really just trying to finish the game in such a short deadline and again it wasn't really meant to be you know as big as it is today yeah um so i was like just gonna put it out there and just see if if people liked it so there was no marketing plan going into it i had a youtube channel i think at that time maybe like a hundred subscribers okay i made a video i was

like hey i just made a game and i like told my friends and family that was pretty much it it's so funny to me um because like so much of what i talk about on this channel it's all about all the things that you can do to create that inertia and get a game to make a hundred grand there's like so many things you can do to market your game and to essentially kind of force it to work because a lot of games are great and they just don't they don't have success like roll um they're they're great games but they just didn't have a marketing plan but i love talking to you because you're kind of like the opposite um you you prove that you don't always have to do everything well that i say and that i do for my games that it just kind of works so my question is how did that happen how did all the sudden it just picked up a bunch of uh players what happened

so an important thing like i'm a big youtube viewer i love watching youtube videos especially your videos other game developers but i like watching like streamers i think you have aliens rock on the screen right now i just like watching other people play indie games it's inspiring me or inspiring for me to be able to see like all these other games without having to like buy and play everyone yeah um so i watch a lot of youtube content and so i'm kind of ingrained myself in some of these communities um and i know kind of what types of games certain streamers like to play and so i i was able to reach out to just a couple of the people that i regularly watch and as a fan just be like hey like i'm a big fan of your channel but like i and i this is my first ever game if you

want to play it that'd be cool like you don't have to make a video on it or anything just like knowing that you saw it and maybe like give me some constructive feedback so i can get better did you email them future yeah so i so i emailed a handful of streamers um people that that i knew and i was able to include certain like personal details about my relationship with their content so that it and and one thing i did which i think helped me stand out is i didn't use a template email i wrote i hand wrote an individual email to every streamer that i approached and so i think that helped me stand out i mean i'm sure they get thousands of emails over the course of a month and so you know seeing something that's not a template hi streamer this is my games yeah

go ahead sorry go ahead well i was just gonna say i would call it um it's essentially click bait but for email um and it's not you don't you never lie you never lie but when i reach out to bigger youtubers what i do is i make sure i tell i tell that personal story like if you don't have any credibility or credentials and maybe you do maybe you want some awards or something i'm not sure but for me when i was just starting out i had to just say my dream is making games and i love your channel um i can't or so even be honest and say like like the subject line is i can't get anyone to play my game but you'll love it like being super honest and kind of kind of tickling their emotions a little bit getting them to to think about maybe helping you out that stuff works and and i i encourage you guys if you want to reach out to me

let me know like how you're how you're feeling and that that's probably going to be more likely to get a response from me um so i think that's that's a great tactic i mean it's not really a tactic i think you were just being honest right yeah i just felt like i i had came up with this principle that like if i'm gonna expect someone else especially these busy people to take the time out of their day to read my email like the least i could do is to write it myself and not just copy paste to as many people as possible well how many did you reach out to first off i want to ask how did you get their email address i think a lot of people are curious how that's possible and the second thing is um how many did you reach out to um a lot of youtube channels you can go to their like home page and like there's an about where they'll usually have like a business email or um if they have a twitter just try to find

them on all social media you could dm them there yep or they usually have a business email somewhere and then you find that and you can just yep and that's that's my experience as well it's funny because i did the same thing for jacksepticeye and like you would think you would think he would have like somebody like a assistant sorting through all that stuff and maybe he does but i just he has his personal email address on the about page i was like surely this can't be his email address and then i emailed him and he responded uh i think it was like in a day crazy it's great yeah it's just really really weird um so i'm super grateful to youtubers because what they do is they eventually create traction for your game so is that what happened for you yeah so i got a little bit of traction off the start um again the game was i i developed it in three months total before i launched it on steam and that three months included like setting up

the steam page and going through all this stuff which i've never done before i've never finished a game this is my first ever game so it was a really slow process right um so it was kind of this tiny little game but luckily um it's kind of like a it's highly replayable um so even though there's not a ton of content um there's still a lot to do in the game right so are streamers still picking it up and playing it um they haven't so the last series of videos um i think was aliens rock although there is one small youtuber shout out to gothic lord uk he's made like 120 episodes yeah which is crazy that's crazy for this game on the game yeah wow so you know um they they put did you have to ask them to put the games the game in the description of the video

to get them to to go to the steam page to buy the game no i just i mean the i think all the creators pretty much at this point they have it down to its science so when they're covering a game they just you know they had all that covered right i really wasn't expecting any of them to like make a video on my game or anything i was just like looking for feedback or just like to know that they had played it would be really cool for me yeah well i'm curious how much you made if you don't mind like do you know like generally how much you made in that first month when well i guess once someone started streaming the game how much did it eventually pick like how much did it make within like a month's time so yeah when the first this first group of youtubers picked up the game i think i got up to about twelve thousand dollars like in that first month yep of

streamers and i think i mean that that's a long way off from the 100 000 today but because the game was so small and it was really buggy at that time and there was just a lot of mistakes that i made early on that over time as i continued to update the game and fix all those mistakes then once um more streamers came in and they had a more polished product to show off that's when the sales really took off by the way guys feel free to download my free 2d game kit below it's totally free it's my treat to you i used this exact 2d game kit to make a game for pewdiepie in 14 days and then i got to play it in front of his subscribers which was really awesome um so download that use it however you want it's my treat to you yeah okay