Get more viewers for your twitch channel or indie game

Rarely do you organically discover an awesome new marketing strategy that is mutually beneficial.

We’re an indie dev trying to get exposure for our game. Getting letsplayers on twitch or youtube to play our game is a great way to get our product in front of potential customers.

What developers and streamers have in common is that we rely on getting exposure. Having new people find out about our service or product is key to getting traction.

The strategy

We attended our first big conference IndyPopCon to demo our game — Furdemption. During the conference we noticed a tweet notifying us that our game was currently being streamed, live. Awesome.

Excited about this, we had the idea to put his live stream on one of our monitors in front of the masses that is IndyPopCon. It was purely spur of the moment fun. It only took seconds to download the twich app and get the monitor set up. I didn’t even care if would murder by data allowance.

A streamer who primarily streams games wants the attention of players in their demographic — gamers. We were successfully able to get this streamer in front of the right demographic. Having a stream live and physically placed in a busy location is a great way to get people’s attention. Have you noticed if there’s a TV in the room you’ll watch it even if you aren’t interested in the content? Passive entertainment is magnetic. We had people coming up to our booth staring at the stream and asked us what was going on. They were grinning with excitement that they were seeing live content and not some looping promo video.

There’s no better way for a potential customer to get to know a game than to watch it played live with good commentary — while standing in front of the two people who made it.

Authenticity

Streamers are a lot better at providing commentary than the typical game dev. Interesting conversation and a fun personality are key to entertaining viewers. Let the streamers pitch your game for you by reacting to the experience in a natural and authentic way. Consumers are more likely to trust a real person that is being authentic than any other advertising strategy. Twitch and Youtube is now the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth.

Here’s part of the recorded stream:

What other ways can indie devs help letsplayers and streamers help each other succeed? Let us know on twitter or Facebook and we might write about it!