Asked to pay $22,000 by popular YouTuber for our game to be featured.

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).

EDIT: Since this was posted, SteamSpy have Tweeted that there is some correlation between the two. This can be found here

So my questions are...

1. Are there any devs out there that have paid to be featured on YouTube? If so, was it worth it? or do you regret the decision?

2. Are there any devs out there that have noticed a correlation between their sales and a popular YouTube feature?

If you have any other comments on the matter, please feel free to join in!

Cheers all, Ben.

EDIT: I must stress that I emailed the YTer first to ask if they would like to receive a free code for our game to play for their channel. The YTer did NOT mention anything about making a 'positive' promotion nor was this a scam from a fake YTer. Finally I'd like to state that I refused the offer.

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