January 26, 2024 marked eight years since the moment I’ve left my job and decided to work for myself. At the moment of writing this, Coldwild Games, the company I’ve founded, company consisted of seven people. You can find my last year’s summary here.

A tough year

It’s been a tough year expense-wise. Expenses were way higher than income and it took a few miracles to get this far. Big thanks to our previous games that helped us stay afloat.

Am I tired of games?

At one point, I started having an identity crisis. I’ve been running the studio for 8 years and developing games for more than that. I noticed that I don’t enjoy playing games as much, except for very rare exceptions. Does it make sense to make games with an attitude like that? Should I just treat it as a business and milk it entirely? In the end, I got diagnosed with depression and after a treatment course, things are starting to look up again. I don’t really doubt that I want to have my life devoted to making games, I just want to figure out the extent of how invested I am going to be in this.

I definitely became much less social and outgoing. Running a business, with its successes and failures, affects all spheres of my life.

My own personal goal does not change: I still want Coldwild Games to be an umbrella of talent; so that no one would need to leave Latvia if they want to make indie non-mobile games. I don’t have any vision or drive for the new games; it does not mean that I don’t care. I want games to be part of culture and I want to place my country on the map as an indie hub.

Stories from the Outbreak results

For almost two and a half years we were working on a zombie roguelite game called “Stories from the Outbreak.” It’s about a group of survivors trying to leave Riga, a capital city of Latvia, and reach the ferry heading out to North Sea. This is the highest quality game we’ve made.

The launch has been a flop. I got overconfident and decided to do the game I wanted despite getting mixed signals. We had ~20k wishlists on early access launch and close to 30000 wishlists for full release, but it still was not enough to sell at least 5000 copies total up to date.

Some valuable lessons for myself:

• Stick to one year projects
• Stick to wholesome / cozy games
• Don’t expand unless you are confident that you are going to get twofold returns; small studios can’t afford getting employees to fill specific roles, you need to become a generalist of sorts
• Porting games to consoles helps

Belarus Simulator

I published my story on how valve decided to stonewall my anti-war game and simply ghost me. It did not get a lot of traction, but I’ve been getting private messages on how ridiculous that is. In short, my idealistic side definitely got a hit. In my opinion, Valve is there for transactional relationships with the devs and they will tolerate you as long as you make them money and not put them at risk, even if you are not doing anything illegal. It’s no longer a company that I look up to, more like a business thing that I need to get my games out there. It definitely influenced my game-making drive for the worse though.

Studio Expansion

When we had 2 good projects in a row, expanding the studio felt like a good idea. The studio went from 3 employees in late-2020 to 7 employees by late 2021. We always wanted to create bigger games so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to start doing that. Unfortunately, I did not read the market correctly and taking Stories from the Outbreak off the ground turned out to be a challenge, despite everyone doing their best.

It’s a major financial loss for the company, but ultimately I’m glad that I decided to give it a try: I always wanted to make larger scale games. It’s just my dreams and expectations from the process did not match reality. Managing the team that makes games is not the same as making games.

I think a lot of bigger developers fell into the same trap. The industry can’t just expand indefinitely: having bigger teams adds so much pressure into making successful games and it’s not always possible. I think it would make sense for experienced studios to budget for 3-5 games and expect 3 flops, one break-even and one success.

What’s next?

We’re not closing down, but we are going to stick to smaller projects. Non-combat, wholesome games are going to return as a main focus. We are renewing our search for freelance jobs, mainly pixel art. Check out our portfolio of latest games if you want to hire a pixel artist:

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1968630/Stories_from_the_Outbreak/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1040070/Merchant_of_the_Skies/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1477950/Lazy_Galaxy_2/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1651090/Crown_of_Pain/

Despite not having better news, I don’t intend to give up. I’ll see you next year!

On January 26th, 2022, my sixth year of running the indie game development studio, Coldwild Games, is over. The company expanded from 3 to 7 people, published one game in full release and one – in early access and is expecting a year of growth ahead.

Since there has been quite a number of things happening, I don’t expect you to know / remember anything. I’ve added links for context.

Peaceful Games

After the release of Merchant of the Skies in 2020, we wanted to keep working on peaceful games. We’ve made Luna’s Fishing Garden by collaborating with illufinch and other contractors.

Merchant of the Skies sold close to 70000 copies across all platforms and is doing well. Luna’s fishing garden has sold around 16000 copies across all platforms and has not broken even yet, but it’s going to within the next six more months, by my conservative estimates. In the end, I’m just happy that we managed to make a game with 95%+ overwhelmingly positive rating.

While we are not working on peaceful/wholesome games currently, we still have them in mind when planning for our future.

Other games

Lazy Galaxy 2 is one of the games scheduled for release in Q1 2022. With roughly 3000 copies sold, it is currently a net loss, but it’s been gathering wishlists during its early access phase and we are planning to do extra marketing effort for full release. The team is still super enthusiastic about it and we are nearing the final sprint towards the release.

Coldwild Games is also publishing Crown of Pain, an attempt to enter the gamedev scene by a local Latvian developer, Jagit Games. It’s an experimental match 3 RPG game in darker atmosphere. The development took longer than expected, but I’m OK with it and I am happy with what we are getting as the result.

Both of the games are relatively small, but have a lot of heart in it and made me ponder what am I looking for when publishing games.

Data

Yearly income/expense ratio below. Overall, the income has not been as high as before, but still higher than expenses. A significant part of the expenses is related to royalties. This is going to be the case will most of the projects that go beyond breakeven.

Realistically, the chart puts us in a danger zone for this year, but there are still enough savings and passive income, even if we make zero games, which is not going to be the case (hopefully).

Being a head of the studio

Running a 7 people team + contractors is not the same as running a 3 people team. I’m filling more of a producer / business developer role now, but my feelings are mixed on this.

I love the team and every person on it. Honestly, we all work from home, but occasionally meeting every one of them is like a small celebration to me. I love spending time and talking to them. They are all skilled and driven, and I consider this to be the biggest treasure of expanding Coldwild Games.

I am closely monitoring how I feel and if I don’t adapt to the CEO role well enough – I’ll probably be looking for a different head of the company while focusing on the art. Honestly, I’m fairly sure that the company is going to reach the yearly revenue of $1m eventually, but I don’t think this matters since I’ve been doing this for my own satisfaction / feeling. If someone would say “Vladimir, let me buy the company for $1m” – I’d say no to this just a year ago, but now I’d think hard on this offer.

Ideally I see Coldwild Games as a collective of artists who do what they like, but I’m not sure how realistic this is. I would rather think of myself as one of the employees, rather than the boss, but it’s not entirely possible in the environment when I have to take responsibility for the business income and further plans. Larger part of the latest game income ownership is still held by employees, but in order to create new games, a common vision is necessary. People are often interested in making different things which puts these two statements in conflict. I’ve still not given up on this and looking into ways of making this work.

Existential Crisis

I think realization that I’m in my thirties only hit me in 2021. As a way of coping with this, I’ve published my own short interactive story called Late Bird. It’s an experimental piece about birds, movies, suicidal thoughts and not growing up in time where I tried to process my own feelings and the search for the meaning of life.

I don’t really consider myself as an artist, but if I ever made something close to an art by myself – it is this.

What’s Next

Right now I’m trying to establish a routine that I enjoy. I thought that I can handle running two projects at the same time, but 2021 proved me wrong 🙂 After an internal studio discussion, we’ve decided to consolidate our efforts and work on one, bigger thing. Sure, it is riskier. But it also allows us to make something bigger and focus on one thing. What is that thing? The time will tell.
Till we meet again in a year.

When I started developing games, I thought that it’s going to be fun and I’m going to enjoy it. Well, the last two weeks of February have been anything but fun. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that these weeks have been the worst weeks of my professional life.

It all started when I posted the ad for the writing position on Feb 11. The conditions were simple:

• We need a writer for Luna’s Fishing Garden, our next game
• Someone with a published game
• We’ll do a paid test for the writers that we like
• I’m going to respond to everyone who applied via email twice: once to acknowledge the application (unless they applied really close to deadline) and once to let them know about the final choice

I knew we’d get some traction and I certainly wanted to have some choice. I knew I’d have to turn down people eventually. I did not expect that many. I counted the applications and we got over 70 over the course of two weeks.

Well, I realized that picking a candidate is anything but fun. I mean I do love the final result, but the process has been agonizing. It showed me that:

• I have very little idea about good video game writing. Imagine you had to pick a nuclear scientist for your project while knowing only basics about nuclear science. “Can you create a nuclear thingy that works great please?” Yes, I know the monomyth and three act structure. No, I don’t know what makes dialogues good and how much control a writer should exercise over the game plot.
• Paid tasks are a double-edged sword
• I might not have the right mindset to turning people down

What’s wrong?

Imagine that you need to determine whether a person is a good fit for a project. If you spend quarter of an hour for that (I think a very moderate amount of time) – that would be almost 18 hours for 70 people. I quickly realized that I can’t do it this way.

Choice paralysis is a thing: what if I am missing a candidate that is a great fit because I’m only giving a brief overview? Can I reject someone because of a poorly written resume? What if I am judging a book by its cover and missing the ideal person for the job?

It took me roughly 40 hours to go through all the candidates and more than 6 hours to write replies. This does not include the correspondence with shortlisted candidates. I am confident that we ultimately picked the best person for the job, but even if we did not: it’s not a pass/fail thing, it’s more of a spectrum and someone can still be capable of doing the job despite not being an objectively best candidate.

Paid Tests

While I think that assignments should be paid and this is how things are going to happen in Coldwild Games while I’m in charge, I realize that it does make the whole thing quite complicated.

I have a very limited budget to pick ~4 people for a paid test. I think this inherently favors more experienced writers: if someone has a strong track record, I am more inclined to pay for the test. At the same time, it would feel wrong to ask the beginner to do a test for free.

But what if, hypothetically, I am missing the best candidate again? I can see why some richer companies ask people do the tests for free (even though they can probably pay every person who applies). With huge influx of candidates, you might miss some eager writer without a solid track record, who’d still do a great job. No way you’d pay them for the test as this seems too risky.

Another part of the process is contracting/bureaucracy: signing the paid test contract for small amounts of money just seems like an overkill (that still need to happen for accounting purposes).

All in all, this is not an open-and-shut case so I can understand the companies that might be asking everyone to submit a few pages of work for free, even though I do not condone it personally.

The “Why”

More than anything, it made me think why am I going through this sort of discomfort. My office job was quite cozy and paid more. So why am I willingly going? It seriously triggered an existential crisis and the question that I’ve been trying to answer myself over two weeks.

Ultimately, I know the answer: I just want to make good games. I know Luna’s Fishing Garden would be passable with as-is writing. But the whole point why I’m in this is that I don’t want to have just passable works in the studio portfolio.

Thanks to everyone who applied and I’m sorry I had to turn most of you down.

On January 26th, my company became exactly 4 years old. As a brewing tradition, I’m publishing my yearly reports and experiences about being an indie game developer. Last year’s post is here. I’m going to go through the year’s event and just summarize the things that I’ve learned.

“Aesthetics first” approach

We started development of “Merchant of the Skies” by figuring out the graphic style and it worked out really well for us. I think aesthetics help to sell games, but good gameplay makes people stay. You can probably make a decently-successful game with only one of these two, but the real trouble will be to keep traction.

For the next games that we make, we are going to try finding out the style first and tuning the gameplay later. Basically the process would go:

Theme → Style → Gameplay

Game designer Adam Mayes visited the Latvian Gamedev Conference in (I think) 2017 and he said something like “You wouldn’t start filming a movie by throwing a bunch of explosions in and then asking to write a script.” At that point it did not resonate with me as I was very gameplay-first type of person, but as time goes I tend to agree with this more and more. You don’t have to sacrifice good gameplay if you go with art and theme first. Rather, you are just building strong game design and marketing foundation right from the start by working on a theme and art of the game.

Predicting the success of the upcoming game

Last year, I was 100% sure that success of one game does not guarantee the success of the next one. I still am. But I’m fairly confident that you can predict if your game is going to work out or not. It does involve a good bit of self-criticism.

Wishlists is the #1 stat for me now before launch. If I had access to Kickstarter – I’d run it for most of my games. Financing is secondary, the primary function is to measure interest / gather response from the audience that you have already gathered.

I don’t think high amount of wishlists matters by itself, you still need to have a decent quality game on launch to maximize the effect. Player feedback at conventions can help, but this is not an ultimate indicator. You also have a hunch, but you really need to be honest with yourself here. If it is not turning out to be amazing – it’s hard to admit it to yourself. You can still release an OK game, just don’t ramp your hopes up.

Statistics and Data

Despite paying for plane tickets / partial stay at the GDC, year 2019 expenses are lower than 2018. This surprised me, but it has an explanation: we had one more worker for 4 months of 2018.

I guess the overall lesson is “employees are expensive”. In Latvia, I (roughly) have to pay 0,66-0,7 EUR in taxes for every 1 EUR of salary that workers get paid to their bank accounts. This was not a surprise for me by itself, but it reinforced my tendency to be extra careful when I consider expanding the studio.

Income sources by year: freelancing vs from our own games

I think this is the first year where our games could effectively sustain us, even if we skipped freelancing altogether. Let’s hope this is not the last.

Merchant of the Skies early access launch ramped up the resources a bit, but essentially that only means that we can self-publish the next game comfortably. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a good result for us. The final release and console ports are a bit further down the line, which could boost the income quite a bit for 2020, but I don’t expect the same peak as in 2019.

Continuing to work on Merchant of the Skies made little sense financially roughly around November 2019, but making the game as good as possible (at least within our abilities/deadlines) has been our #1 focus right from the start. The plan right now is to release a final patch in April, take a break in May and port the game to consoles in June/July. I think the part that “we would be earning the same passive income if we were not doing anything” gets to me a bit (especially since we are trying hard to come up with cool content and campaigns), but ultimately I just want to have a good game in my portfolio that I’m proud of.

My personal regular income would be at least 4 times higher had I stayed at my Software Engineering job

I still take different types of freelance jobs occasionally, albeit much rarer now. It still remains mostly a passion-driven career choice. Quitting my job was 100% worth it, as I enjoy this type of journey with insane ups and downs much more than I enjoyed office work. Always have a backup option though. Always.

The Pressure

I thought that I was ready for anything, but I’m not sure now. As soon as I posted the game, I did not feel like it belongs to me anymore (but that was the plan since the purpose of Early Access is exactly to get player feedback). I think what got me is the constant need and pressure to deliver meaningful updates every month. I don’t mind the work, but the constant anxiety whether I’m doing it enough made me question every life choice that I made. It extends far beyond just games. I took a step back to maintain better work/life balance now and I think this is helping. Drink more water, take more walks, etc.

I’m giving a talk at the GDC

My talk about aesthetic driven development got accepted to GDC this year. I’m going to be talking about how we picked the graphics before we actually started developing Merchant of the Skies and how everyone (with access to art) can do something similar. Don’t be shy and come say hi if you visit GDC this year.

Summary

I think persistence pays off, since financially 2019 has been our most successful year so far. I still see posts on gamedev reddit saying how someone has spent 3+ years on a game and it did not work out and I feel really bad about it, especially since my first game took 2 years (after-work hours) and it turned out bad. Do not think that you are entitled to grants/publishers/sales just because you worked on the game for too long, otherwise you’re setting yourself up for disappointment, it is easy to fall into that trap.

I think we managed to get where we are now by making games  with a smaller scopefirst and then ramping up gradually as our skills grew. We are not successful, but we are sustainable so far. I still have major doubts every time we ship something; I acknowledge the issues with the games but I am just very strict with my own deadlines. Occasionally, I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

You know, I have plenty of reasons to enjoy releasing new games. I am sure you can relate to most of them: anticipation of warm reception, fan excitement, monetary gain. But one rather unconventional thing is my anticipation of scam emails. When I’ve started publishing games two years ago, I quickly figured out that people will try to scam you out of the keys. I simply ignored them or asked for verification and they never replied. But since about a year ago, I’ve actually started asking them to share their reasons and insights. I’ve learned a few things that I think could benefit you too if you are publishing games on Steam.

Group of Egrets by Ohara Koson. The images are just here to make text easier to read. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

Background

The usual conversation starts like this:

Scammer:Hi [studio name in best case, generic greeting at worst], I’m a huge youtuber and I need a few keys [first red flag] to review the game.
Me[after doing checks and figuring out it’s a scam]: Oh sure, can I ask a few questions then?
Scammer[best case]:Sure
Me:

Great!
Since original [youtuber] email is different, I know that you are pretending to be someone you are not.

That’s fine, I’m not judging you for that. I always wanted to ask some things (in non-agressive way) to people who try to get keys this way. If you have some time, do you mind answering a few questions for the interviewing purposes (anonymity guaranteed of course)?

1) Is this more of a hobby or does it actually sustains your living?
2) If you sell those on platforms like g2a/kinguin/etc – are they trying to identify you in any way? Have you ever faced repercussions for their side (i.e. if dev sent you a bad key)?

Thanks for your time,
Vladimir

___

After that, if they reply, the conversation starts. I’ve spent about a year gathering these replies, trying to persistently follow-up some people for 10+ times. My small research outlines the reasons why people do it. Since my native language is Russian (and a lot of these people come from from Russia), it helped when I addressed them in native language too. The replies are translated. The research group is small: out of 20 emails I’ve responded, 6 answered and only 4 of them gave interesting answers. Three out of four replies were in Russian, I’ve translated them. Here are the cases and reasons below:

Crows at full moon (1925 – 1936) by Ohara Koson (1877-1945).

Case 1: codename “anonymous”

Letter not quoted directly by request [translated from russian + word order changed in some places].

Hi Vladimir.

For most people, me included, these shenanigans is, of course, a hobby. We just want to fill our libraries and exchange keys to get other games. For this to be profitable – you’ll have to make it a full-time job.

That means spending 10+ hours a day spending on boring routine: finding emails, names, registering fake mail accounts, working with key markets. This could bring significant income earlier, but now there are so many of us and markets are charging ridiculous percentages. To earn around $1000 a month now, you’d have to spend tons of time on routine. Most of the keys are getting exchanged by collectors. I feel like the used key markets only get a small amount of scammed keys (that were sent to fake press).

Speaking about key markets like g2a or kinguing: their owners are on a sketchy path. On one side, most of their profits are from those “gray” keys and they perfectly understand that: self-respecting publishers and developers don’t want to cooperate, but legal key sellers can’t compete with “gray” keys because they can infinitely underbid them and still turn profit. The platforms have to publicly show their honesty and fight against fake key resellers, but in truth they do these things half-heartedly, since if they move the platforms towards legal key sales – their profits will drop significantly and someone else will take the niche.

Regarding the fines from the gray key markets: it’s against their best interests. If the trader’s every second or third key is fake – he will get banned, but this probably does not happen often. Maybe there are 5% of problematic key sales, so platforms and traders can easily refund the money to the buyer. One interesting thing is that since there is no official check whether the key is legit, some buyers actually purchase the key, activate it on their other accounts and send the support request about receiving a fake key. G2a and Kinguin almost always take the customer’s side, that’s why sellers literally “gift” the keys to the buyers. That’s one more reason why traders are not fined and legal key sellers have no reason to be there.

It’s not surprising that not many people respond to you. Most of them are just kids and not seasoned criminals, who think “it does not cost anything for developers – but we won’t buy the game anyway so it’s not theft and not a loss of profit.” No surprise that these types of talks make people feel guilty.

Long-eared owl on bare tree branch (1900 – 1930) by Ohara Koson

Case 2, codename “Rome”:

> Ok Vladimir

For me it’s a hobby, I collect games. Finance does not allow to buy a

lot of games, My friend advised to do so

Thank you.

>Got it, thanks for your reply! Why not just pirate them from torrents?

>Because I do not play games, I just collect them on Steam account.

It’s just a hobby

>If you are just collecting them, why do you need multiple keys?

>For exchanges with other collectors

Not much, but at least the explanations were clear.

Chicken and cock (1900 – 1936) by Ohara Koson (1877-1945)

Case 3, codename “Trader”

> Hey. OK, I’ll answer.
1) 50-50. It brings me hefty sums of money. It’s not my main source of income, since I still have a youtube channel where I create videos or dubs. I also own a few steam curator groups. It’s just a way for me to get some more money for more serious projects. I have a few original twitch ideas which are in development. In short: I want to stop doing it as soon as possible and move on to my own projects before the end of the year.
2) When you are registering on g2a / kinguin, you always need to show a source where the keys are coming from. The systems are different on both platforms. i.e. G2A sometimes asks for “screens” describing where the key comes from, but this is easily circumvented if you have some experience behind your back. Apart from that, the fake key shops usually don’t have names (that match youtubers name used in introduction) and the emails are different anyway.
2.1) The fines occasionally happen when developers send bad keys instead of simply ignoring us. Sometimes this can be noticed (developers tend to send their messages this way, I think I don’t need to explain the meaning of those), but often the other keys go straight for sale. The consequences are very different on both platforms: if key has been purchased and it did not work, you just give a chargeback. But if this repeats, say, 5 times a week, you get fined. Also, if we receive many keys in one letter, we check one for verification purposes.
If you have something else to ask – fire away.

Me:

Thank you! Since you’ve offered, here’s a few more:
1) if it’s not too personal: what does a “hefty sum of money” means? Everyone has a different definition: are we talking about thousands / tens of thousands / hundreds of thousands roubles? Not asking for exact sum, more like a range.
2) Are there any groups of people that do it collectively? Maybe you have some contacts that I can get more interviews? Pretty hard to get answers from other fake emails.

Reply:

> 1) It depends how “bold” the user of this method is. I know a man who could move to other country and comfortably live there thanks to this, having this as mostly his main source of income. If you spam a lot of people from 3-5 different addresses – you can get an idea how many keys you can get. I’ll tell it from my own experience: 400-600 EUR is a pretty average monthly income, especially if you have your own curator groups. If someone has lots of them and works tirelessly – 1000 EUR is definitely reachable.
2) I don’t think you’ll ever find these, and I don’t think such communities exists. Even if they do – these are going to be closed-type things.

Another thing is that the digital key has no price, since you can generate it for free. That’s why it does not seem like such a horrible thing. You sell the key, the game gets new audience. The only thing is that you, developers, are not going to get a percentage, which makes it mostly your problem.

Songbird on blossom branch (1900 – 1936) by Ohara Koson (1877-1945)

Case 4, codename “Not Really A Scammer”

this was actually a two very similar curator group requests for keys. I’ve compared them and they had the same owners, hence I sent my “clarification/you are a scam” email. While it’s not technically a scam, I still think it teaches a few things about curation circles.

> Hello, Vladimir. To be honest, you are making your conclusions based on inherently wrong assumptions, because you do not understand who creates curator groups and for what purposes. In truth, Curator Groups are a poor way for key acquisition.

Promoting them takes money and 90% of the games we are getting through curator connect. Those keys can not be given to other people: they can only be accepted by group owner and moderators. That’s why it’s one of the purposes why some of the curation groups have similar owners and moderators. The developers often send multiple keys of the game so owners of the curation groups (and you have to understand that these people often know each other since they are all into game collecting) give each other access to redeem the extra copies between themselves. It does not mean that curators are trying to cheat the developers: developers get honest reviews, but curators get +1 game to their library + some more game copies that can be exchanged with other group owners. Apart from that, there are “hired reviewers” – people that are not owners / moderators of curator groups, but just help to write reviews. They get keys to write content for the curator group, thus reducing our workload.
In conclusion, I think you are mistaken in your guess. Curator groups can’t really make money on game reselling, since most games are given not as keys, but as curator connect copies. The expenses for promoting and maintaining the group are higher than potential income from selling the games. People who sell keys do not create curator groups, but at most can exchange their keys with other curators for less “liquid” game.

I’ll expand my previous explanation so you can get the proportions of this: you think everything is based on profiteering, but it’s a mistake. Everything is based on collecting games. I am number X[calls his position, very close to top, double digit number] of user rank by games owned on steam. I am a moderator in the curator groups of people who rank Y,Z,U,W [anonymized, single and double digit numbers], e.t.c. Realize that there are 100 million user accounts and we are on top of it. People who collect games, people like me, we do not earn money from games, we are the ones who spend it.

Me:

> Hey! Thanks for the detailed answer: that’s why I’m writing these letters 🙂 If you are curious about my position:
1) I have no problem with collecting, but I constantly get offers through paid promotions through curator groups + key requests for reselling from quasi-legit curators. Due to this my trust in curators has seriously been shattered, especially since multiple group have the same moderators and owners.

2) Another thing that makes me think: most of these groups have only positive reviews. I’m sure that some of the developers would like positive-only feedback for their game, but overall it creates a “fake” impression about the group.
3) Most of journalists introduce themselves. In your case I only get generic letter where the only thing has been replaced is the game name.

Reply:

> Hello Again. You know what, you are partially correct. Advertising through curators won’t give you the same effect as advertising through youtubers or magazines. On the other hand, indie-developers are glad to receive our help too. Firstly because the aforementioned youtubers and magazines are mostly concentrating on AAA games / AA indies and won’t cover it if you simply give them the copy of your $5 / $10 game. So curator advertising is actually free: for a few press copies that can’t be re-sold apart from giving it away to group moderators, you gt some exposure. For us, it’s a hobby and not a job so it’s easy to arrange a positive review.

On the other hand you need to explain what you think by “fake group.” Most of the groups have real, active subscribers. Yes, of course we bring them in through advertised free key giveaways. But nonetheless they are real players and if curator writes a review, the review is going to have some clicks. Roughly speaking, for every 10000 subscribers you’ll be getting 50-200 targeted page visits. It depends on the game: popular ones will get more, asset flips – much less. But those are real visits, which were triggered because player has seen a curator review in their timeline.

So of course don’t consider an advertisement through curators as panacea for successful sales or main marketing direction for your game, but a side thing that brings you conversions and essentially is free, for a meagre price of the game copies that can’t be passed to curator non-admins anyway. That’s why developers should actively use “Curator Connect” system, since it guarantees that no keys will be re-sold and even if curator does not make a review – the developer won’t get any financial losses.

____
Conclusions:

It’s up to you what you want to think about all of this. I suppose I can see it being lucrative side-business in eastern countries, mainly because of our low living expenses, so the keys can make a significant supplementary living income. Even if people ask it for their collecting hobby, they exchange your keys and because of that these keys might end up on key markets.

1) Most people who scam you out of the keys don’t see it as a theft.
2) Keys from curator connect can’t be resold. But think whether you need to send multiple keys to two curators that have essentially the same audience.
3) Scammers often register their own “real news” website domains now. Check the linked website twitter / facebook accounts. If it’s a “real” youtuber with 5k subscribers, check out their videos and if they get enough views and comments.

I’ll probably add more answers if I’ll get them, but I won’t stop sending my questions: even behind cold replies I saw the glimpses of personalities.

If you liked the article, you can follow my twitter or check out the latest game game that I’ve made with my girlfriend, called Lazy Galaxy: Rebel Story (I was able to complete my ‘research’ partly to its release 🙂

Great geese in flight (1925 – 1936) by Ohara Koson (1877-1945).