How do letplay youtubers really own an early copy of games before the release date?

A

Acktomy

Active Member
Does the conversation usually start more like this?

"Hi this is (insert game company), would you be interested to letsplay our latest game? We'd be happy to send a copy to you one month in advance"

Or does it start more like this?

"Hi this is (insert famous youtuber), I'm aware that you guys have a soon to be released game. I can help you guys advertise it for free. So please send me an early copy."

Is it most definitely through twitter or youtube's business email?
 
Depends on how large your following is. For the top dogs it's often even like "hey take a copy of our game for free and if you make a video on it saying good things we will even pay you a large sum of money to do this!". That's not most people but you can still get games through services such as keymailer. I just got a key yesterday for Techwars Online 2. Not a popular game... but still a game.

In terms of getting the game "early", this depends on the game. Some may not give out any early copies. I remember for Call of Duty even some big YouTubers used to get copies from "contacts" in the studio or from Ebay. The YouTubers who bought off ebay would create all their content ahead of time and then release it once the game was officially released with a huge advantage having tons of content ready to upload on release.
That's not really a normal way to do it, some YouTubers may also get invited to closed betas or be given alpha/beta keys just because they have a decent following. Or just following games, Lawbreakers has been inviting me to these for a while but I think a lot of people are in them.

It is possible to get a company approaching you though, I've had one request to play a mobile game so far and also a couple of offers from companies to give me premium currency in mobile games to "give them more attention on my channel".
 
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The bigger YouTube channels are actually registered companies and they have whole departments that handle are these relations - sponsorship, early bird releases, advertising etc. i.e. there are several people who research what's trending, what games are going to be released soon, so they contact game developers and request copies.
 
The bigger YouTubers probably have contacts with the different game companies, so they get sent early copies without even asking is what I'm guessing.

GameXplain for instance regularly gets invited to closed off Nintendo events etc, and gets review copies of pretty much every game from Nintendo.
 
Kinda, me and my team are on the TinyBuild press list so i can shed some light on how they contact us atleast - They send us an email saying XYZ game is coming soon and do we want a key to do a video on it, if we say yes they reply with a steam key/download link for X game.

In other cases you can contact the developers and ask them to give you a key to do a video/review In other times you can just be friendly with developers and make verbal agreements.
 
I have a tiny channel (1426 subs) and mostly cover indie games with first impression style videos, but even I get review copies of games sent to me ahead of release. I assume it's because I have decades of gaming experience and am very honest with my commentary and post lots of videos and write steam reviews etc. I have my email on my twitter and also on my YouTube about page and steam profile. I assume this is how they are finding me because I really don't do much self-advertising. I have heard of places you can register as an "influencer" to have keys sent to you but I have never looked into it really. I have heard of people actively contacting game developers or publishers and asking them for keys too, I would never do that though I would feel kinda weird doing that but some people do it.

Get your email address out there so people will know to contact you about upcoming games. Also if they do, make sure you respond to them don't just take the key and make a video. Let them know you got their email and will take a look at their game. Maybe they will mention you word of mouth style to other devs who will then send you a copy of their game. You never know :)
 
I never got soft but I was sent some hardware by a few companies and they found me because I was the top hit on related items so if you can get a good review video and rank it high, people come knocking
 
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