Ben Tester, the man who handles Marketing and Public Relations for Indie developer Wales Interactive went on Reddit and posted something very intriguing. Ben claims that he recently e-mailed a popular YouTuber and offered him a free code for one of the company’s games. He stated that he got a reply for thousands of dollars in return for coverage of the game. More specifically, $22,000.
The YouTuber reportedly asked for $17,600 in exchange for 3 “talking points”, or $22,000 to add a description link. The official post states…
“Hi all, Ben Tester here from indie game devs, Wales Interactive (developers of Soul Axiom, Master Reboot and Infinity Runner)
On one of my normal PR rounds I received an email from a very popular YouTuber with a few million subscribers offering to have one of our games featured on their YouTube channel for a rate of either $17,600 for 2-3 talking points or $22,000 for 2-3 talking points AND a description link.
Upon reading this my jaw dropped. Is this real? Are there developers out there that pay that sort of money to have their game featured in one video?
OK, so it’s obvious that receiving a LP’er or YT star feature your game is great promotion and will certainly help spread the news. It will also no doubt have some sort of effect on your sales, right?
An interesting Tweet I saw from SteamSpy this afternoon claims there doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation between number of Steam sales a game has after it’s been covered by a popular YTer (in this example, they used TotalBiscuit and up to a period of 20 days after the feature of an indie game on YouTube).”