How to Get YouTubers to Play Your Game
How a dev netted 6,000 Steam wishlists with an unusually clean cold email
Hello! For all the new readers: I’m Ryan Rigney and this is Push to Talk, a weekly newsletter about the art and business of video games. These days I work in venture capital, but I previously spent years leading communications on games like League of Legends, PUBG, and Apex Legends. Today’s post is about applying comms strategy techniques to pitch emails.
Reddit posts are a bit like restroom wall graffiti: generally written by cynical degenerates, occasionally funny, and rarely worth reading.
But this week a top post on r/gamedev—provocatively titled The email that got me 6,000 wishlists on Steam—turned out to be unusually valuable for understanding effective marketing communication. The OP couldn’t embed screenshots in his post (very cool website) so I contacted the poster, a game dev named Jordan O’Leary, and he kindly provided the goods, shown below:
Crucially, beneath his email signature, O’Leary included this gameplay GIF:
The result: One day later the YouTuber in question posted a glowing preview of the game that drove 80,000 views and 6,000 wishlists. Within the week another YouTuber—one O’Leary hadn’t even contacted—posted his own video which earned over 96,000 views. How did that happen?
“I had passed out a lot of extra keys to the first guy,” O’Leary told me. “I'm imagining that he must've passed it along, but I'm not sure. I had given out tons of keys at that point.”
I like O’Leary’s outreach email a lot. It’s great comms. But in the comments on his Reddit thread, others weren’t so sure. Some speculated as to why the email worked so well. Maybe it was the personable tone, one suggested. “It's hard to know, maybe OP just got lucky,” another replied. Several posters debated the merits of O’Leary’s choice to withhold a Steam key in the initial email. “Usually sending an email without a steam key (or free demo) and without a press kit is a red flag for content creators,” wrote one user, before adding with a catty sneer: “so I'm surprised it worked but I'm happy for you!”
Why emails like this work
I’ve got a contrarian take on the question of including Steam keys in cold emails (more on that below), but first let’s examine why this email works as a marketing communication.
A few reasons:
It’s concise - The body of the email is barely longer than a tweet: 289 characters. No irrelevant backstory or time-wasting intro. The description is one sentence that successfully communicates both the genre and its unique gameplay hook.
There’s a reason to act now - O’Leary applies light time pressure with the mention of the release date, which was just over a month away. That’s plenty of time to make a video, and YouTubers love to be early to highlight a game.
A clear call-to-action - The next step is clear: hit reply and request a Steam key. O’Leary also includes the full link to his game’s Steam page instead of hiding it in hyperlinked text. That’s bait for YouTubers who are familiar with (and thus likely to trust) links using the store.steampowered.com URL structure.
It’s easy to overthink these things. I’ve seen hundreds of pitch emails for games, and the vast majority of devs tend to overwhelm the reader with detail: the backstory behind the studio, multi-paragraph descriptions of game systems, the deep lore behind the characters and world. None of this stuff is necessary. Any great game pitch should be able to fit in a tweet.
For marketing messages like this, there are really only two goals:
Persuade the other person you’ve got something they want
Make it extremely clear what they should do next to get it
That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame. And O’Leary’s email nails it on both counts.
There’s another, more technical way of visualizing this, which is the classic marketing funnel.
In this case, the main text of the email is primarily pushing steps 1 and 2—awareness and interest. If the YouTuber clicks the Steam page link, and the trailer on that page is really good, you’ve successfully made it all the way through step 3: desire is sparked. Then, back to the email for step 4: take action by replying and requesting. At that point, O’Leary was free to follow up with a proper press kit and not just one Steam key, but multiple in case the streamer wanted to share with their community.
Whether or not the YouTuber actually posts a video from that point is out of your hands (though obviously it helps if the game is actually fun and makes for great content).
The point: When doing marketing comms, you can achieve your goals in far fewer words than you might expect, so long as you know what the other person needs and you have a clear idea about the next step you want them to take.
A little barrier can’t hurt
One more contrarian take: IMO it’s generally fine to not share Steam keys right away in cold emails to creators, because inviting them to request a key first opens up a chance to build a relationship.
I’ll share a personal example. Back when I led marketing at Odyssey Interactive, we put out an early trailer for one of our prototypes and followed it up with this tweet:
Over 500 content creators DMed in response to this post. In part, that was due to the strength of the reputation Odyssey built with its first game, Omega Strikers. But the principles behind the message mattered too: it was a concise, targeted message with a time-sensitive CTA and juicy assets to bait the hook.
The idea behind asking creators to DM me was premised on the belief that if we could talk to people directly, we could move past transactional “cold” conversations into something warmer. For every person that reached out, I replied with details about the preview event we were holding plus a link for a private Discord channel exclusively for creators. If people had questions or follow ups, we talked it out and joked around. I told people to bring a couple of friends to the preview event. And in the end, not everybody showed up, but many of those who did brought others, and the total attendee count in our Discord server the night of the playtest was slightly over 500.
If your hook is good enough, these things work themselves out.
That’s it for this week.
And speaking of clean CTAs: