Hey everyone I recently made a game and I want some YouTubers to play it so it gets some publicity, however for starters I cannot just provide them with the name of the game as you can’t really find it and no one’s playing it and they never respond. Does anyone know any small YouTubers or how to get the word out? Thanks!
Well there’s no easy way to say this so I will just say it: Youtubers will not play your game for free you must provide them a decent payment or if your game has some sort of player base, the youtuber of your choice will be more interested if you include them in your game as a pet or something.
Ah yes that is true. I mean it’s pretty difficult to get a player base and a payment is not what I can do. Plus there isn’t really pets in my game so… I’ll have to try something else to get more players…
This is unfortunate for you. Do not lose all hope though: You could attempt other advertising methods on off platform social media which are quite obvious and that I don’t think I can mention on the DevForum. (tt, yt, x)
I’ve used TikTok to promote my game Streamer Life before I released it. On release, the game had around 20-100 players for a month or two. A YouTuber made a video on the game, Rock Steady (had ~2k subs when he made the video on my game, has 9K now), which afaik is a friend of Seniac. After a few days he uploaded the video Seniac made a video too increasing active players from ~130 to ~600. Now since almost no one made videos on the game before that, I’d say Seniac saw the video from Rock Steady or something like that. After that the algorithm pushed my game more and more every day going from 600 to 1000, the next day the game had 2000 active players. After that Sketch, Nightfoxx, Russo, and many others made videos on the game getting the game to ~7k active players.
As @Sindious said, advertise on social media, and after that YouTubers will start recording it if it’s good content. I think that Rock Steady made the biggest impact on my game, and he is such a nice guy.
Did you make any sort of advertisement when you had 20-100 players?
Nope, never used ads. Only used TikTok to advertise the game at the time.
At this point ROBLOX has nerfed advertising on ROBLOX way too much, nowadays it’s better to turn to social media for advertisement. But making a good social media ad still requires a lot of work and effort and possibly money if you lacked a certain skill you needed for the ad e.g cinematography. Personally I have never tried any advertising but what I would do is make the video seem more of a “I have been working on this game for 1 year” than an advertisement because ads are known to be annoying and irritating for users and they rarely attract anyone’s attention to be entirely honest.
Yeah, from my experience ads on Roblox are horrible. TikTok i found to be the best for me, i made daily videos on the game before and after the release but i found many many problems with moderation on TikTok. I’ve had ~1M views in less than 30 days and 7.5K followers, but my videos got falsely deleted for “Frauds and scams”. I guess because I was showing money in the game and TikTok thought it was real money? Appealed and my appeal got denied, ok sure. I started adding disclaimers like fake money etc… A day after I noticed another video gone, and it’s the most popular one (had ~200K views and growing fast). Same reason, frauds and scams. this happened a few times, and then i got perma banned. Made a second TikTok account i still use to this day, has 3k followers but i feel i’m sorta shadowbanned because lately im getting 500-1000 views per video, whereas before i got 10k-50k.
I may not have much experience with getting youtubers to play my games but I can say I don’t think its quite as impossible as it may seem. Sure, asking big youtubers to play your game for free isn’t gonna work, but getting smaller, more inexperienced and younger youtubers to play your game can very well work. Just give them a stupid incentive like “free youtuber chat tag”, “free hat” etc and they may well be so flattered you gave them this they will make a video on your game for free. There are also people like Rogurt who play games like yours no matter the player count, so it’s not completely impossible to get large youtubers to play your game.
Of course this is all assuming that your game is actually good in the first place. That being said I think your game could do with some improvements such as:
- explaining clearly that the eye emoji means the monster is looking for you
- giving a reason for the monster to start or stop going after you, currently as far as I’m aware it randomly spawns and despawns which is very annoying and confusing
- making the monster ai see you from further away and being much faster (it goes at like 1mph right now)
- making a model for the monster instead of just having a default roblox rig (you could probably get away without doing this but I think it would certainly help considering nothing else in the game really stands out as being particularly cool / interesting, given the classical roblox design)
- there seems to be an invisible part in the main doorway, not sure what that’s about
- I haven’t tested it but is it possible to just stay in the locker the whole game? Because there was no warning at least after when I stayed in it for a little bit
Anyway good luck with your game, I think with enough work put into it it could definitely become successful
Honestly, this may sound like a dumb idea but you might be able to gain some traction if you make your own YouTube channel first and make promos for the game. I get random videos with only a few likes all the time on my feed and at least a few big YouTubers out there have hired people to find games for them, so your content is bound to reach someone eventually. This plan is probably made more solid by the fact that your game is super interesting and has gained a bit of traction on the Devforum already, so a few of us are guaranteed to interact with your game’s promotions.
Good luck!
Hey there, the monster just patrols inside and outside and its slow because or else it would be wayy to hard to serve customers and you cant stay in the lockers as the timer for the customers would run out. I will work on the other things you have mentioned. thanks!
Just added restocking and SFX to the game, also reduced all proximity prompt times
any hashtags or tips to record and edit it?
I mean the game is just “The Closing Shift”, but with less gameplay elements and not as scary, so I’m not sure why they would choose this over the original game.
But to answer your question you should use Tiktok and Youtube like everyone else said, just make sure the editing is decent and try to use your actual voice if you think you can do it without stuttering, people get tired of hearing the same AI voice after a while.
Thanks for your feedback! I was going to say that this was inspired by “The Closing Shift”. It was orignally intended to be a story based game until I thought serving customers while being chases would be a better gameplay feature. Of course the could play " The Closing Shift" but its £6 and also its on steam if they wanted to play something like that on roblox. Also im going to add more drinks and food perhaps.
I’d reccomend OBS or Streamlabs (both free) for recording, and I have used MovieMator Video Editor on Steam for any editing I need to do. I don’t need to do much editing of course but it did what I need to do (Text, premade animations ready-to-use, etc.). Costs $17.49 CDN but it goes offsale quite a lot.
Alright I’ll try using them, just need to see how my pc handles it.
Does contacting a youtube through the email may achieve something?