Indie Game Creator Marketing: How Indies Win With Creators Without Big Budgets:
There is a persistent belief in indie game development that working with content creators requires either a large budget or the luck of going viral. Mercedes Boberg has spent years proving that neither of those things is true.
Mercedes is a Indie Game Creator Marketing specialist at First Look Pragma, a Sweden-based platform built to connect game developers with content creators and playtesters. She joined the IndieGameBusiness podcast with host Dan Long to break down how indie studios can build effective creator relationships without spending money most of them do not have. What she laid out was a practical, nuanced framework that challenges several assumptions developers commonly carry into creator outreach.
Why Passion Beats Reach Every Time:
The central argument Mercedes made is one that sounds obvious until you examine how most studios actually run creator campaigns. Developers frequently chase large follower counts and established names, spending significant portions of their marketing budgets to get a well-known creator to play their game once. The result is often a single video with decent view numbers and little else.
What actually moves the needle, according to Mercedes, is finding creators who genuinely want to play the game. A creator who is personally drawn to a game’s genre, aesthetic, or mechanics will play it more than once, talk about it between sessions, and respond authentically to their audience’s questions about it. That authenticity is something viewers feel. It is not something a paid placement can fully replicate.
The question developers should be asking is not who has the most subscribers but who would actually enjoy this game. Those are very different searches, and the second one is where the real value lives.
How Early Is Early Enough to Start doing Indie Game Creator Marketing:
Mercedes was asked directly: when should a studio start involving content creators? Her answer was as soon as there is anything for them to play.
Some studios she works with bring creators in during early development, before the build is polished, before all the systems are in place, sometimes under NDA. The reasoning is straightforward: getting content out early starts building a community around the game before launch. It generates feedback. It creates early advocates who feel invested in the game’s development because they were there from the beginning.
The instinct to wait until the game is ready, until there is ten or twenty hours of content, until the bugs are fixed, costs developers the one thing they cannot manufacture later: early momentum. A creator who plays a rough build and says it is rough but interesting carries more credibility than a creator who plays a polished launch build. The roughness signals authenticity.
For studios that find this approach uncomfortable, Mercedes suggested the next natural trigger point: demo release or early access. These are structured moments that give creators something concrete to work with and give the studio a clear context for outreach. But her preference, where possible, was earlier.
Thinking About Your Game as Content Before You Launch:
One of the most practically useful ideas in the conversation was the question of whether a game is designed with content creation in mind. Not in a cynical, optimize-everything-for-virality way, but in a genuine awareness of how creators will interact with and present the game to their audiences.
Mercedes gave two examples from the conversation that illustrated this well. The first was a developer who designed his game to be playable both horizontally and vertically. Turning the monitor ninety degrees still produced a functional, visually coherent game. That deliberate choice meant creators could record vertical short-form content for platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts without the game looking broken or awkward on a phone screen.
The second example was a developer who built a keyboard shortcut that stripped out all the UI, leaving only raw gameplay on screen. For a game heavy on interface elements, this small feature made a significant difference for creators trying to produce clean footage. The developer told creators about it directly, which meant the content coming out of those partnerships looked better than it otherwise would have.
The broader point is that small, intentional choices during development can meaningfully affect the quality and volume of content creators produce. Things worth considering include:
- Whether the game produces natural, shareable moments that do not require explanation
- Whether the game can be recorded vertically without losing visual coherence
- Whether there are UI-free or clean-screen options for footage capture
- Whether player interactions produce unexpected or funny moments that spread independently of the game’s core loop
- Whether the game has a central character or visual element that translates well to short-form thumbnails and clips
Short Form vs Long Form – Choosing the Right Indie Game Creator Marketing Type:
Mercedes was careful not to give a single prescriptive answer about which platform or content format works best, because the honest answer is that it depends on the game. But she laid out the logic clearly enough that developers can apply it to their own situation.
Short-form content on TikTok and YouTube Shorts works well for fast virality and broad discovery. A clip that catches attention in the first two seconds can reach an enormous number of people quickly. The limitation is format: viewers hold their phones vertically, and games designed for horizontal play can look small or awkward in that orientation. If the game has a strong central character, a visually striking moment, or a mechanic that reads clearly in fifteen seconds, short form can be very effective.
Long-form content on Twitch and YouTube is better suited to games that need context to be appreciated, games with depth, progression, or player interaction that unfolds over time. A Twitch stream lets viewers see the full arc of a session, which builds investment in a way a clip cannot. For games where the interesting stuff happens twenty minutes in, long form is the vehicle that actually showcases it.
Many studios benefit from both. A short clip drives discovery. A longer video or stream gives the viewers that clip sent their way something to watch and decide whether to buy. The funnel works better when both are present.
What to Do When You Only Have a Few Hours a Week:
Dan asked a question that reflects the reality most indie developers are working within: if a studio only has a few hours per week to dedicate to creator outreach, where should that time go?
Mercedes’s answer was to use platforms that automate the sourcing process. Rather than spending those hours every week identifying, researching, and emailing individual creators, a developer can list their game on a platform designed to match it with interested creators. The developers’ active time then shifts from outreach to review: confirming or declining the creators who express interest. That is a significantly more efficient use of limited time.
For studios that prefer direct outreach over platform listings, she recommended narrowing the focus to a small, carefully chosen group. Not one hundred creators, but five. Interact with them on their social channels before reaching out formally. Watch what they play. Comment genuinely on their content. By the time you send an email or DM, you are not a cold contact. The relationship already exists in a small way, and that matters.
First Look Pragma and What It Actually Offers Indie Studios:
First Look Pragma is the platform Mercedes works for, and it was built specifically to address the sourcing and management problems that make creator outreach hard for small teams. The platform covers three distinct functions:
- Social listening and player CRM. Developers can track how their game is being talked about and manage their player relationships in one place.
- Playtesting. Developers can run playtesting campaigns through the platform, with a free tier available for up to five hundred players. Players.gg, a companion marketplace, lets playtesters browse and apply to available game campaigns directly.
- Creator campaigns. Creators.gg, launching shortly after the podcast was recorded, connects developers with a waitlisted pool of content creators for both paid and organic campaigns. Full access to the creator pool is available for studios at one hundred ninety-nine dollars per month.
Free trials of thirty to sixty days are available depending on what a studio wants to test. The pricing is publicly listed on firstlook.gg without any gatekeeping, which Mercedes pointed out directly as a deliberate choice.
For a solo developer or a small team trying to figure out how to run creator outreach without hiring someone to manage it full time, this kind of tooling represents a meaningful change in what is actually achievable. The manual work of sourcing, vetting, and tracking creators gets reduced to a review and confirmation process.
The Advice Every Indie Developer Needs to Hear About Indie Game Creator Marketing:
Mercedes closed with a single piece of advice that she would give to every indie developer working with creators, and it is worth taking seriously.
Stop chasing the biggest creators. The developers who get the best results from creator marketing are the ones who invest in the creators who genuinely want to play their game. Find those people, stay in contact with them, bring them along as the game develops, and treat the relationship as ongoing rather than transactional. Those creators become real advocates, not hired promoters.
That shift in how you think about creator relationships, from a transaction to a partnership built on shared interest, is what separates campaigns that produce sustained attention from campaigns that produce a single video and then go quiet.
Getting Started With Indie Game Creator Marketing as an Indie Developer:
If you are an indie developer who wants to start working with creators but does not know where to begin, the practical starting points from this conversation are:
- Start as early as you have a build, even a rough one
- Think about how your game will look and feel as recorded content before you reach out to anyone
- Identify five creators who play games in your genre and interact with them genuinely before pitching
- Consider listing your game on a platform like First Look Pragma to automate sourcing and reduce the weekly time commitment
- Prioritize passion over follower count when evaluating which creators to work with
- Keep the relationship going after the first piece of content, not just before it
Want more insights like this?:
Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Sessions, taking place on September 30th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Mercedes and other industry pros.
The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now
