Thread by @ManyATrueNerd

Y'know what, this is a fun topic, and I used to work in marketing myself, so let's talk about this.

Yes, there are marketing budgets, and spending money to guarantee a long-form video that will be a seen by a good audience for your game is a great investment.

BUT

Marketing teams generally won't spend money unless they have to. There's a finite budget, and it has to be demonstrated that it's being spent correctly; specifically in such a way as will maximise the return.

That means you'd NEVER spend money on what you could get for free.

A pre-roll ad on YouTube can never be got for free. You have to pay for it, or you don't have it. Display ads, search ads, most marketing costs money.

But not YouTubers. The vast majority of us work for free. Send us review code, and if the game's good, free video.

This is mostly called 'earned media' - something you earn through good outreach, rather than paying for.

Which brings us to the odd scenario - why would you offer to pay a YouTuber FIRST, before just offering them code?

Well, there are scenarios you might. Maybe you have a good but buggy game and you'd like some editorial oversight - you want the videos, but only on condition that no glitches are shown. I have been asked to do this before (I refused, of course)

Maybe you have a AAA game with a massive budget, and the priority is to get a lot of hype to occur on launch day itself, so paying YouTubers to put out the video at the exact right time, all together, is a sensible approach.

Maybe you have a slightly odd game, but which you're still very confident in the quality of, but you're worried that it might be overlooked because it's weird.

But these are exceptions. The vast majority of games aren't like that. Most games are small or mid-sized games that fit into established genres/aesthetics, and have a small marketing budget.

For those games, offering YouTubers money as an opening move is a warning sign for me, because why wouldn't you at least start off by offering review code?

There could be reasons, of course. Maybe an indie dev is so tiny that he doesn't know anything about marketing, so just getting a PR agency to arrange some paid videos is easier. Maybe it's a good security policy if you have a REALLY tiny game you don't want overlooked.

Maybe it's just honestly not very good marketing, where money is being wasted unnecessarily, because they could get the same result for free, and somebody - in-house or in an agency - is being incompetent or underhand.

But for the most part, it's still a warning sign, because 99% of the games people email me about offering payment to play are trash (and often mobile free-to-play trash).

Receiving such an email about any game always makes me a little more lukewarm about it.