TikTok has proven to be a potent source of wishlists (read case studies of going viral on TikTok here and some TikTok tips here). However, this week I have a new TikTok strategy to potentially earn thousands of wishlists: leveraging TikTok influencers. The team behind cozy room decorator game Momento, recently earned 1,600,000 views and helped trigger bonus visibility from Steam. 

Market Testing

Last May the 3-person team which is a collaboration between the two studios Fat Alien Cat games and Nomo Studio market-tested their new game concept for Momento with a TikTok teaser video.

@playmomento

Each choice effects the life of your character. #momento #wholesomegames #cozygames

♬ original sound – Momento

Overnight it earned 300,000 views and has since gone on to earn 1,100,000. That was all the validation they needed to move on to full production.

That visibility also resulted in an article from gamesradar. 

(Side bonus tip: if you ever go viral on any platform, immediately start reach out to as many press outlets as you can and brag about how many views you got. Games journalists are usually on the hook for generating traffic to their site and nobody knows what will actually do that so they use your viral video as a sign that your game is also going to get them traffic. For more details, I wrote about how to trade up from social media virality to press coverage in this post)

Side side note: The team started with a personal account so it seemed like they were just an individual person. Once they went viral and started getting Followers they had the magic 1000 that allowed them to add a custom url to their bio that could eventually link to their steam page.

Festival featuring

The team leveraged that TikTok visibility to get on the radar of the Wholesome Snack event. The team promised the Wholesome game organizers an exclusive trailer. They also launched their Steam page to coincide with the event.

Side note: If you are making a wholesome game, you should be pitching your game to the team at Wholesome Games. Wholesome Snack is invite only. There is no application for it so we can’t track it via our Festival list at howtomarketagame.com/festivals. It is best just to reach out to that organization, say hello, share your game and just hope that when they are building their next line up they remember you. Similar to journalists, it also helps if your game has proven to go viral before.

Reaching out to influencers 

Now here is where the Momento team really did something unique: they used their previous success to reach out to “Cozy Influencers” on TikTok to see if they would like to cover their game.

In the weeks leading up to the Wholesome Snack premier, the Momento team also contacted influencers that had liked, or in some way interacted, with their content.

“We reached out, providing them with links to the press kit and for the larger channels we sent them the whole trailer. We asked them to hold off posting until after the Wholesome Snack as we promised Wholesome Games the premiere. “

Julian from the Momento Team

To reach most of the influencers, the team just used TikTok DM with the message “Thanks so much for liking and following us! We can’t wait to show you more.” Then if they responded, the team would ask them if they would like to be kept in the loop as Momento developed. They all said yes. 

TikTok DMs require both parties to be following each other, so for a few of the influencers, they had to track down on another social media platform to reach them.

One of the influencers was local to where they lived and so they organized a meetup at a conference!

Once they made initial contact, all the influencers wanted the team to send them to send their trailer footage to their individual business emails (see even EXTREMELY online people still prefer email). 

Only one of the many influencers they contacted asked for money in return. Another influencer said she wasn’t interested but as soon as all the other videos from other creators started going viral, she jumped in and made one. 

TikTok Results

Combined they got over 1,600,000 views from the various resulting videos:

If you watch the videos you will see that the content is very simple. They just show clips of the trailer and explain how the game works. 

No memes, no wacky dancing, just the purity of gameplay (and usually the Up soundtrack).

@cozygamingclub

Journey through a life where the objects you choose to keep influence the life you lead. A cozy room decorator with whimsical settings; relaxing gameplay; and charming branching narratives, Momento will be a warm ode to the challenge of following your dreams down the winding road of life. #thecozygamingclub #upcomingcozygames #cozygames #cozygaming #cosygames #cosygame #cozygame #unpackinggame #momentogame

♬ Married Life (From “Up”) – Gina Luciani

“Interesting note is the biggest video is from one of the smaller channels(The Cozy Gaming Club). I see this whole approach as kind of a shotgun effect. You try and get as many people as possible to make content and then fingers crossed one of them goes viral (over 100k). You only need one to blow up to get millions of views on your game. Best thing is that it is not us self promoting, it comes across as the “recommendations from a friend”. From this a bunch of other influencers covered us on YouTube unprompted.”

Julian from the Momento Team

The results

As I have written before, when you bring a lot of external visibility to Steam, the algorithm reacts by giving you MORE visibility. 

As you can see the biggest sustained wishlist increase was not from TikTok, but from Steam promoting the game. That is how Steam marketing works. You market your game to prove to Valve that your game is worth promoting and then it does the heavy lifting.

If you have been reading my blog long enough you will know that the “heavy lifting” is done by the Discovery Queue (DQ) (Read more about how the Discovery Queue works here) and (read about how to get featured in the Discovery Queue here)

This is the Discovery Queue chart for Momento:

Sustained Discovery Queue featuring lasted for about two weeks and the peak number of Discovery Queue impressions was 44,000 on December 30th.

This is very typical DQ behavior. In my research on the Discovery Queue I found that 2 weeks is the typical duration games get. Here is the graph of 14 games that got pre-release featuring and how long they got DQ featuring:

Because of Momento’s virality and subsequent DQ featuring, the game is now sitting on 75,000 wishlists. 

Summary

So if you have a game that has recently received a lot of attention (like an article, a viral video, or appeared in a festival) ask influencers if they would be interested in covering you.

See who liked your videos. Search TikTok for people who do these “summary” videos by people who specialize in your game’s genre. For instance here is a guy who covers horror games, This other influencer covers strategy games.

I just googled “TikTok <your-games-genre> steam recommendations” and found a bunch of these influencers. Just dive in.

Bonus Bonus Side note:

A lot of people try to promote their own game using their own TikTok channel and they try meming up their game and their videos. It doesn’t really seem to work as well as just explaining your game and how it works. If you watch all these influencer TikTok videos you will see they are just explaining the game in a very matter of fact way. There are no memes, just straight up like here is the game, take it or leave it. 

So I guess my advice is just explain your game in a concise way and focus on gameplay

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