Indie game PR: who actually covers a game, and how you reach them

Curator Connect gives you one hundred curators, five copies each, and no undo. Your first game cannot request a single Steam key until three weeks after you create the App ID. And the moment you hand a creator a key through a distribution service, you have contractually given up any leverage over what they say about it.

This page is the hub for everything on this site about coverage: press and content creators, Steam curators, and the keys that reach all three. It is the part of indie game marketing with the hardest limits and the least written about it.

Keys: the rules that decide your schedule

The three-week wall on your first game

Start with the rule that reorders your calendar. Valve: "Developers launching their first game on Steam must wait three weeks after the creation of an AppID before they can request Steam keys."

Three weeks, first game only, counted from App ID creation — not from your Steam page going up, not from launch. The documentation does not carve out press or beta keys, so plan on it covering everything you might send.

If your outreach plan starts with "send preview builds to a few people", the App ID has to exist three weeks before that. For a solo indie developer who creates the App ID late because the $100 fee felt like a milestone, this is the single most common way a press schedule slips before it starts.

Two key types, and one question the documentation does not answer

Valve grants "up to 5,000 Default Release Steam Keys to support retail activities and distribution on other stores", and past that "all Steam Key requests are reviewed on a case-by-case basis".

There is a second type. Release State Override keys are described as "intended for small beta tests and press/influencer access" and "generally limited to 2,500 total".

Here is the honest part, and it matters more than the numbers: Valve's documentation does not say whether those two limits add up. It is tempting to read it as 5,000 plus 2,500 and build a campaign around 7,500 keys. Nothing on the page supports that. And "generally limited", sitting one clause away from "case-by-case basis", is a guideline rather than an entitlement.

If your plan depends on the total, ask Valve before you commit to it — not after you have promised keys to a hundred creators.

What you may and may not do with a free key

The giveaway rule is the one people misread, usually in their own favour.

"Steam Keys shouldn't be given away for free if you aren't also offering the same deal … to Steam customers. This includes giveaways for promotional purposes, unless that giveaway is very small (under 100 Steam Keys)."

So press keys are fine — but not for the reason most guides give. It is not that press keys are a magically different category; after launch you will often be sending ordinary default keys. It is that Valve names providing keys "for free for beta testers or press/influencers" as a normal use, which puts influencers on the same footing as press, and that the under-100 carve-out covers the size most indie campaigns actually run at.

Cross that threshold with a giveaway and you are in the rule, not the exception.

The rules that get accounts in trouble

Four more, short and absolute.

Never sell a Release State Override key. Valve: "It is never OK to sell Release-State Override keys."

Price parity applies. You should not give Steam customers a worse deal than key holders. Timed discounts elsewhere are fine if a comparable offer reaches Steam within a reasonable time.

Bundles cannot generate keys, free-to-play titles cannot request them by default, and Playtest access can never be sold: "it's not OK to charge customers to access your Steam Playtest."

Abuse costs you the tap. "your request may be denied and you may lose the privilege to request keys." For a studio that plans to ship more than one game, that is not a slap on the wrist. Most indie games only get one shot at a key budget this size.

Curator Connect is one shot

A hundred curators, five copies, no undo

One hundred curators. Five copies each. That is the entire allowance, in Valve's own words: "You can send offers to 100 Curators, with a maximum of 5 copies of your game each."

And it does not roll back. Once a curator accepts, the copy is gone: "You cannot revoke a game from a Steam Curator once they have accepted it." You can expire an offer that has not been accepted yet. That is the only undo there is.

Nobody owes you anything for it either: "There is no obligation on the part of Steam Curators to accept, play, or review your game."

So this is a research task, not a broadcast — and for indie games without a marketing budget it is one of the few levers that costs nothing but attention. Spending your hundred in an afternoon is the most expensive hour in indie game PR, because the cost is invisible until you need those slots for something better.

What Valve shows you, and why it changes the pick

The barrier to becoming a curator is essentially zero — "All you need is a non-limited Steam account" — so Steam follower count on its own is a weak signal.

But Valve shows you more than that. Alongside Steam followers, the tool displays each curator's YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and Twitter presence, and lets you filter by genre tag, language, operating system and VR. For pc games that is usually the only filter set that matters.

Which means the curators worth your five copies are frequently not the ones with the biggest Steam following. They are the ones with an audience somewhere else, who happen to also curate. That is where a lot of indie games find their first real coverage. Both numbers sit on the same screen, and only one of them is the one everybody sorts by.

What you need before you can send

Two prerequisites, easy to miss. You need the "Generate CD Keys" permission on your Steamworks account, and you need a public store page with an uploaded build.

It works before release, which is the point. Curator coverage that lands while you still have a Coming Soon page is worth more than the same coverage a month after launch.

The key services, and the leverage you give up

Keymailer, now inside Partnier

Keymailer is now a product inside Partnier, and this trips people up: the Keymailer pricing page no longer lists prices and points at Partnier instead. Most third-party articles still quote the old figures.

Current tiers run from a free plan through roughly $25 a month for a single game, up to a few hundred a month for larger catalogues, with one-off paid "boosts" on top. It is free for creators.

The clause that says the leverage is gone

The interesting document is not the pricing page. It is the publisher terms, and it is the firmest primary-source statement in this whole area.

Publishers must not "revoke, void, disable, or otherwise interfere with" a key "solely because a Creator or Influencer does not produce coverage". Nor because a creator produced coverage "the Promoter disagrees with, dislikes, or considers unfavorable" — that one carries a condition, that the coverage follows the platform's own creator policy. And redemption data may not be used to "penalize, retaliate against, or selectively void activation codes".

Read that as a developer and it is unusually clear: once the key is out, the leverage is gone, by contract. The firmest written rejection of coverage-for-keys trading does not come from Valve. It comes from a key distributor.

That is worth sitting with before you send anything, because the informal version of this — "I'll just pull the key if the video is unfair" — is not available to you.

When an agency is the answer, and when it is not

Search for indie game PR and the first page is mostly marketing agencies. That is not a conspiracy, it is what the search means to the people paying for ads against it — and it is worth understanding what you would be buying.

A PR agency, or an indie game marketing agency selling the same service under a different name, offers three things a solo indie developer genuinely lacks: existing relationships, someone whose whole week is the campaign, and a reason to hit deadlines. What it cannot sell you is a game worth covering. Agencies have clients, not miracles, and advertising spend is a separate line item from coverage. The published packages in this space start around $2,000 and run to $6,000 for a launch window, which is a real number to weigh against a few weeks of your own time.

The honest test is whether you have a marketing strategy that an agency would be executing, or whether you are hoping to buy one. Game marketing bought without a plan tends to produce activity rather than coverage.

Lurkit, Woovit, Terminals

Lurkit publishes no prices. All three tiers say "contact for pricing"; the only public number is a 20% commission on paid campaigns and quests. Their own homepage claims "90k+ verified creators" in one place and "100k+" in another, on the same page, at the same time. Treat any network-size figure in this space as a vendor claim, not a measurement.

Woovit looks abandoned, and that is the most useful thing this page can tell you about it. The pricing on record — a free tier with one active campaign, a paid tier around $199 a month for unlimited campaigns, publisher-set minimum requirements, automated reporting of key delivery and video completion — comes from Woovit's own blog, which carries no date and is now the only part of the site that answers. The root domain serves Vietnamese sports-betting pages, the pricing and developer pages return 404, and app.woovit.com does not resolve at all. Checked again on the day this page went live. Look for yourself before you count on it, but do not build a launch around it.

Terminals.io is not self-serve at all. It sells launch packages, roughly $2,000 to $6,000, bundling newsletter blasts, a window of key distribution, consulting hours and coverage tracking. That is an agency engagement wearing a pricing table, which is fine — just price it against a freelancer rather than against a software subscription.

What the services see that you don't

The platforms track creators as carefully as they track you, and for indie games without a game marketing budget that data is the whole advantage. On Keymailer a reliability score drops each time a key goes out and no content comes back, and channels are fingerprinted so they cannot be recycled into a fresh account.

Before you send anything you can see views, followers, preferences, coverage history and that score. Most indie devs send first and look afterwards, which is backwards for a resource this limited. Indie publishers run the same checks before they sign anything, and for the same reason.

What outlets literally ask for

The best pitching advice is not advice. It is the submission page, where publications say in writing what they want, and it is shorter than any guide.

Games Press wants Word or plain text, not PDF

"Word docs or plain text files are best, or just include your text in your email body." Images "as attachments rather than pasting them into your email body". And then, unambiguously: "Please DON'T send press releases as PDFs: they're hellish for us to copy and paste from."

Your beautifully designed PDF press kit is the exact format the aggregator asks you not to send. They also make no promises: "We can't promise to publish everything we receive."

Game Developer does not edit what you send

Submitted blogs go up unedited — "not edited and will be posted in the condition they are submitted" — which is a gift and a risk in the same sentence.

They reject blogs that "wholly advertise products or services", teaser posts that link out instead of carrying the whole piece, company profiles as authors, and vendor submissions. What they want is postmortems, design analysis and business writing, and linking to your own game inside one is fine.

For indie games made by someone who can write, this is a more reliable route to being read than a press release ever was.

Nintendo Life splits news from review code

Small detail, real signal: their contact form separates "News Tip / Press Releases" from "Review Code / Samples" as different categories, and they say they will "do our best to reply to every pitch".

Sending a key when they asked for news, or news when they wanted a key, is a self-inflicted wound.

The Next Fest press window moves your deadline

This one is not a format, it is a date. "Valve will be sharing the list of participating games with a list of press outlets 10 days prior to the start of Next Fest."

Your store page, trailer, demo and press materials need to be finished ten days before the festival opens, not on the day it does. If you have been planning around the start date, everything moves forward by a week and a half. The Next Fest breakdown covers the rest of that timeline.

Valve's own event tips add the practical part: test live streaming well in advance, use a tool that supports RTMP, and turn on broadcast chat by default.

What to send, and when

Three moments are worth a real email, and the rest is noise: the announcement, the demo, and the launch. Everything else — a new screenshot, a devlog, a milestone nobody outside the team can feel — is content for your own channels, not a reason to contact media.

The timing rule that actually binds is the one above: ten days before Next Fest opens, not on the day. Work every other deadline back from the events you have committed to, because journalists and the wider media plan around the same calendar you do and the week of a festival is the week they are least reachable.

When you do write, the ask should be one line and the assets should be one click away. Games Press wants attachments rather than embedded images; a link to a Google Drive folder is fine as a backup but it is not a substitute for making the thing openable. Press coverage is a scheduling and formatting problem far more often than it is a quality problem.

Creators: disclosure, rights, and one real programme

Disclosure is enforced, not encouraged

YouTube requires creators to flag paid promotion in the video details, which adds a label at the start of the video, and the creator stays "ultimately responsible for ensuring your disclosure is clear and prominent". Certain categories cannot carry branded content at all — recreational drugs, weapons, hacking software, counterfeit goods.

Steam has its own version for curators: anyone who accepted compensation "must disclose this fact in your recommendation".

You are not the one who files any of this. You are the one who caused it, and a creator who gets it wrong because you were vague about the arrangement becomes your problem too. Say what the deal is, in writing, in the first email.

Monetisation runs on your licence, not theirs

YouTube: "Video game content may be monetized depending on the commercial use rights granted to you by licenses of video game publishers." Whether a creator can earn from your game is something you decide, in whatever video policy you publish.

Valve's own policy is the standard example, and it is misquoted constantly. It says "You are free to monetize your videos via the YouTube partner program" and "Use of our content in videos must be non-commercial" — which reads as a contradiction until you get to Valve's definition in the next sentence: non-commercial means you cannot charge people to watch the video. Ad revenue is fine.

Quote only the second half and you have described the policy backwards. Plenty of people do.

Twitch Drops is the only documented developer programme

On the platform side, Twitch Drops is the one real developer-facing programme of its kind. Rewards must be non-transferable, carry no cash value and give no pay-to-win advantage. Campaigns run 28 days maximum. You must fulfil rewards for at least 14 days after a campaign ends. And account linking has to work in your game before you start — Valve's equivalent would be a store integration, not a marketing checkbox.

There is no YouTube equivalent. I looked, and could not find an official developer programme on that side at all. The asymmetry is worth knowing before you plan a cross-platform push.

An honest gap: Twitch's own policies

Twitch's policy pages — branded content rules, the advertiser guidelines, the terms of service — are served through a JavaScript portal that could not be read when this page was written. So the Twitch-side disclosure and rights position is not documented here.

If you need it, open it in a browser and read it yourself rather than trusting a summary. Including this one.

Community is a different job, and it is not on this page

Community building gets folded into indie game PR constantly, and the two behave nothing alike. Press and content creators are people you reach out to; a community is people who came to you and stayed. A Discord server does not replace a press list and a press list will never give you what a Discord server does.

This site treats them separately for that reason. If what you actually need is the second thing, community for indie game developers is the hub for it, and growing a Discord server is the practical version.

Where PR sits in the rest of the plan

Press and creator outreach is one channel among several, and it is the one with the least control attached. You decide what you send and when; everybody else decides whether it runs. That makes it a poor foundation and a good amplifier, which is the opposite of how most marketing plans treat it.

What it can and cannot do

Coverage brings a burst of audience on someone else's schedule. It does not compound. A week after a good piece runs, the traffic is gone and the article is still there doing very little — which is exactly the opposite of the two channels you own.

So the honest sequencing is: your own site and your store page first, because they keep working; social and community next, because they build the audience you can reach without asking permission; press and influencers last, because they multiply whatever is already true. Media attention pointed at a thin store page converts nothing, and no amount of outreach fixes that.

What to measure, and what not to

Coverage is countable, sales are countable, and the line between them is not. Resist attributing sales to a specific piece of media unless you have a link you control and a reason to trust it. In this industry the honest version is usually a range and a shrug.

What is worth tracking: which outlets replied at all, which events produced conversations, and which creators covered you without being paid to. That last group is the one to keep warm, because they are the closest thing to fans your marketing will ever generate.

For the channels this page keeps pointing at, the hubs are your website, social media for game developers and community. Between them and this page, the whole discovery side of development is covered.

What to ignore

"Send keys to everyone." You have a bounded number, an unclear total, and a rule against large free giveaways. Volume is not a strategy, it is how you run out. Indie games with a hundred keys left and nobody to send them to are the normal outcome of that approach.

"Keys for a review." Valve does not ban this as a developer rule — that claim gets repeated constantly and it is not in the documentation. What exists is a disclosure obligation on the reviewer's side, and, if you use a distribution service, contract terms that stop you clawing keys back over coverage you dislike.

"Build a press list." Build a submission-requirements list. Three outlets tell you their format in writing; that is worth more than three hundred email addresses.

"PR is what you do at launch." The three-week key wall and the ten-day Next Fest window both sit before anything ships. Indie game PR is mostly a scheduling problem wearing a writing problem's clothes, and it is the one part of indie game marketing where being early costs nothing.

Where to go next

If your Steam page is not finished, outreach is early — your Steam store page comes first, and the Steam publishing hub covers the rest of that ground.

If you have a page and you need the thing journalists actually open, that is your game press kit — a page on your own domain, not a ZIP, with the key art and screenshots where someone can actually take them.

And if you want people to find you before you pitch them, your brand and your website are the two that do that work while you sleep.