At tinyBuild, we've been working with Twitch and livestreamers for a while now -- in fact our best ever sales day was thanks to a livestreaming session we put together with PewDiePie last year. If you can get the livestreaming community to care about your game it can yield incredible results for building a fanbase, and of course, scoring sales.
For those of you who have no idea about the ins and outs of Twitch, it's best to get to know how these services really work first. Once you begin to watch lots of content that is in a similar vein to how you'd want to be covered, you'll get a good idea of how to proceed with your Twitch strategies.
Twitch streamers love to focus on interacting with their audiences, so you'll want to give them reasons to use your games to build their communities, rather than just spamming them with links and codes for your game.
When you're contacting Twitch streamers about your game, the best way to make them care is to give them exactly what they need, as quickly as possible. Streamers want a quick description of your game, a code or link to download the game for free, and a video or two of the game in action, so they can assess whether it's worth covering.
As mentioned previously, they also want ways to use your game to interact with their audience, be it extra codes to give away to viewers, or an assurance that you'll tell your own fanbase when a livestreamer starts broadcasting your game.
But before you even get in contact with them, make sure your game actually streams properly! Go download all the most popular streaming software, like Open Broadcaster Software and XSplit, then make sure your game plays nicely with each. If a streamer is put off playing your game because of technical issues, that's just the worst.
There are opportunities to work with Twitch directly too. The company is still pretty fresh and the team is exploring how it can help game developers out. At tinyBuild we've been working with the Twitch team to market some of our upcoming games, including featuring on the front page of Twitch, and it's working rather well for us.
Before I sign off, you might find the following link useful. It's a list of contact information for hundreds of livestreamers, as collected together by myself. Enjoy! http://tinybuild.com/twitch
By Mike Rose. Formerly a video game journalist of eight years, Mike Rose is now the talent scout and general firestarter at indie developer and publisher. tinyBuild Games.
