Publisher FAQ

Before your product can start receiving requests, you will need to create a campaign. That can be done by clicking on the ‘+ NEW CAMPAIGN’ button at the bottom of the ‘Product’ page.

You will be prompted to fill in some information about your campaign and once done you will be redirected to the ‘ACTIVITY’ page of your campaign.

Creating campaigns allows you to separate requests from different campaigns such as a product release campaign or a new update campaign.

Note: You will need to create a new campaign for games added after this update. For old games, they will have a legacy campaign already in them.

The Requests table is now found inside the ‘ACTIVITY’ page which can be reached by accessing your product’s campaign.

To get to that page, you will need to first select a product in your CATALOG, which will bring you to the ‘PRODUCT’ page. From there, scroll down to the bottom of the page and either select an existing Campaign or create a new one.

The system supports organic requests, promoted requests, influencer outreach, invite, offer favourites, and giveaways.

The basic campaign type is organic requests. Creators can request your game from the creator portal, which shows as a request in your game request tab.

In order to achieve much higher visibility you can buy an ad. Our smallest ad typically leads to 50-250x, while our biggest ad typically leads to 500-3500x  more requests for your game, higher coverage and more views.

Influencer outreach allows you to filter our network of over 800,000 active members to find creators who play or review games like yours, then send them your game at the click of a button. Each offer contains a key, and you can configure your settings to outreach to channels that are likely to be interested and have a track record of playing similar games on their channel. 

This is a value-added feature and can be purchased separately from your dashboard. 

You can email your existing contacts, media list or friendly influencers, and invite them to make their requests through the system so you can use our campaign management tools to process their requests.

You can add influencers who helped you on previous campaign to your favourites list. This makes it easier to invite them to your next campaign.

Giveaway is a feature that allows you to send extra keys to influencers to be distributed with their audience.

You will first have to setup the giveaway. Then you will be presented with the option to send keys for giveaway alongside the key offer to the influencers.

The influencers will receive a link for the giveaway which they will be required to distribute with their audience.

Keys are distributed to the first selected amount of viewers who registered with us. It's first come first serve!

The virtual assistant is a tool that helps you with your campaigns by providing you with suggestions for your product. Additionally, it gives you recommendations on when to get a subscription and the best time to place ads in order to get the best results.

The virtual assistant checks in what stage of the campaign your product is and how it is performing. Then it provides you with automated suggestions and recommendations to improve your campaigns based on various parameters.

First, you need to make sure your game is listing all the platforms you plan to send keys for. If you are only sending keys on Steam, that should already be displayed in the key configuration console of your game page. You can add or edit the available platforms by clicking the green 'EDIT' button on your campaign management page.

On the far right end of the corresponding platform (e.g. Steam) there will be a ‘Manage’ button. Clicking the ‘Manage’ button will create a pop up, with the ‘Add keys’ tab displaying.

You can either upload a .txt file of keys by clicking the ‘Open’ button, or copy and paste your list of keys into the box. Make sure you don’t include a header row and your keys are displaying one key per line; if more than one key is on a single line you will send all of those keys to one creator. 

When you offer a creator a key for this platform, it will take a key from this list.

In the key configuration console, you will see a list of platforms that are available for your game. Each platform has a column for ‘Remaining’, ‘Redeemed’, ‘Pending’ and ‘Declined’. 

‘Remaining’ shows, after uploading at least one batch of keys, the number of keys still available to offer out of the total number of keys uploaded for that platform.

‘Redeemed’ shows the number of offers sent to creators that have been redeemed out of the total number of offers made.

‘Pending’ shows the number of offers sent to creators that have not yet been redeemed out of the total number of offers made.

‘Expired’ shows the number of offers sent to creators but has not been redeemed within a span of time and was automatically expired. Creators will not be able to redeem an expired key. You can also expire a key manually on the Activity page, Offered tab.

‘Declined’ shows the number of offers that have been declined by creators. These keys will have returned to the ‘Remaining’ pot.

With a request campaign, you need to first upload keys for the corresponding platforms and then scroll down to the requests campaign table. Here you can review which creators you want to send a key to and then select the platform you want to offer on the right hand side of the row. Next, you can either click ‘Offer selected’ to batch offer keys, or the green tick to offer to one creator at a time.

Please note, the ‘Offer selected’ button allows you to batch send keys, meaning that it will send keys to every creator that has a ticked checkbox on the right hand side of their row in the campaign table. 

For other campaign types, see the Campaign Types FAQs page. For help choosing channels to send keys to, see the Choosing Channels guide.

Key Expiring is for when you want to reuse keys that you offered to a creator who hasn’t redeemed it. 

For example, if you send over 100 keys and 30 of them are still Pending after a few weeks, you may assume they are better utilised by being offered to other creators. As such, you can recycle the keys. The offers will be rescinded and the keys will be added back into the ‘Remaining’ section of your key management console.

You expire keys by clicking on the ‘Manage’ button of the keys you want to expire, go to the ‘Expire Offers’ tab and click the ‘Expire offer’ button. 

Please note, as the offers will be rescinded, if you offered keys to creators who requested a key, those creators will return to the Requests campaign table after you recycle the keys. Additionally, we don’t allow expiring until 7 days after the offer has been made to allow creators time to view and redeem the key.

When your campaign has finished you may want to remove the keys from the system. You can do this by clicking the ‘Manage’ button for the keys you want to remove, going to the ‘Remove Keys’ tab, inputting the number of keys you want to remove and then clicking the ‘Remove keys’ button.

Once you have removed the keys there will be a file available for download that will contain all your game keys. 

Yes! We have over 30 different platforms that you can use in your campaigns.

You may edit the platforms available for your campaign by selecting your game and clicking on the 'EDIT' button. The platforms section is at the bottom of the page. Click on the 'Select Platform' drop down menu and select the desired platform. You will also be presented with a text field where you can write down the requirements for that platform. Don't forget to click on 'PUBLISH' at the bottom of the page to save your new settings.

The new platform is located under 'KEYS FOR INFLUENCERS'. When the toggle on the right side of the platform’s row is set to ‘On’, that means you are advertising to creators that you are offering keys for that platform, so you will receive requests for that platform.

There are various reasons why you might want to stop advertising to creators about a certain platform, such as you ran out of keys. You can turn a platform off for request by setting the toggle on the right hand side of the key configuration console to ‘Off’. 

If these toggles are not visible it may be that you don’t have Admin access and you need to get in touch with a colleague who has Admin access.

If you haven’t already sent a key offer to a creator, when uploading keys to the system you can input multiple keys on a single line. This will not register as several offers on the system, but the creator will receive all the keys input onto that line. 

Once you have sent an offer to a creator, you can’t offer additional keys to one creator within the same campaign. However, If you've ended/closed your previous campaign and started a new campaign, you can send an offer to the same creator again.

Yes! There are several ways to send messages to creators, although you have to send or have sent a key offer to them.

First is sending a message with the key offer. Whenever you send a key, the creator receives a message in their inbox and to the email address associated with their account. You can set up this message in the ‘Message Templates’ page: Hover over your organisation in the top right corner and click ‘Message Templates’ from the dropdown menu. You can also set it such that creators are allowed to reply to these messages in this page. 

Additionally, once you have sent a key offer to a creator, we will keep a record of that message in your ‘Messages’ tab. Here you can see everyone you have sent a message to and send a follow-up message. If you have allowed creators to message you, you can also find any of their messages in this page. 

Another way of sending messages to creators is through the Offered tab. If you have sent an offer to a creator, you will see their name as an entry in the Offered tab. In the rightmost column, there will be an open envelope icon where you can create a new message to send to the creator.

Once you offer an influencer a key, they will receive the offer along with your message in their inbox. They can review all of their offers before redeeming them. This means the influencer may have too much on their plate to keep to the content commitment and decline the offer.

If the influencer accepts the offer, they will have a set amount of time to create content or else it will harm their reliability and potentially lead to suspension.

We encourage all publishers to make an influencer account and browse the other side of the system so you can better understand how it works.

We have an automated mechanism in place to handle creators that fail to deliver content based on their commitment.

Creators should:

1. Always create content for their 100% content commitment requests
2. Create 2 in 3 content for their 66% content commitment requests
3. Create 1 in 3 content for their 33% content commitment requests
4. Even when creators select "Play then decide" we still expect them to create content every so often

Creators who fail to follow the rules above will face the following sanctions:

1. For every key they receive and don’t submit content, their Reliability Score will be decreased. This information is visible to every publisher in our system. We recommend always checking a creator’s Reliability Score prior to sending a key.
2. By repeatedly failing to fulfill commitments across multiple games, they'll receive a warning notification.
3. Following continued infractions, their account will be in line for suspension, fully preventing access to our website. Their channels are also fingerprinted, meaning they won’t be able to use those channels in a new freshly created account.

Yes. You can invite team members individually, or your PR Agency can sign up their own account and connect their entire team to you. You can connect as many agencies as you like and ring fence them by game and by country or regions.

Click Manage Team from your account menu to add colleagues and agencies. Free tier accounts only allow one login.

Complete the signup form at account.keymailer.co/signup and our admin team will check and authorise your account. Please note: If you don’t sign up from a company domain email, we may require additional information from you to verify your account.

Please contact us directly using the form.

Please contact us directly using the form and we will resolve this for you.

Yes. We can either link them together or assign access to different individuals. Reach out to us by using the contact form at the bottom of the HELP page, selecting 'Account' and describing your issue.

Our "Indie Special" pricing is designed to help solo devs and budget-constrained indie devs launch their first game.  It gives a steep discount off our standard pricing, and so is only available for organisations that meet these criteria:

• No external funding (e.g. publishing agreement, investors, crowd-funding, commercial loans)
• No other paid marketing
• No paid freelancers, consultants, advisors, or agencies 
• No more than 2 full time workers
• No more than 2 publicly listed titles
• No multi-platform titles
• No games costing over $12.99

The reason for these rules is simple - our indie special is us giving back to the community, we're not making any profit on indie specials. If there is a marketing budget, we can't offer these discounts!  

We understand when you’ve stopped actively promoting a game that a late subscription cancellation can be frustrating, but we incur real costs, and you receive real benefits, as soon as a subscription renews, and it’s not as simple as simply removing your Outreach or Ad allocations. 

We aim for fairness in our approach and want you to understand the reasoning behind our no-refund policy for subscriptions. 

Transparency: For most subscribers having automatic renewal is a good thing, so they don’t lose continuous service. And the recurring nature of our subscriptions is made clear. This involves:

• Naming the service a "subscription," indicating its recurring nature.
• Highlighting on the purchase page that it's a monthly subscription.
• Displaying the renewal date on the billing page.
• Reminding users on the checkout page about the automatic renewal.

Flexible Cancellation Policy: You can cancel your subscription at any time during a subscription month, even the first day if you only plan taking out one month, with access continuing until the end of that period. 

Account Management: Each subscriber is assigned an account manager, with enough capacity to service their clients for that month. This resource allocation incurs costs from the start of each subscription month.

Recommendation engine: Our recommendation engine suggests games to creators browsing the catalogue, favoring games and publishers based on their subscription status. This means your game receives enhanced promotion and visibility each day your subscription is active, an advantage that cannot be quantified or retracted if a subscription is cancelled.

Unlimited Requests: Subscribers have the benefit of unlimited requests for their games, a benefit which is often utilized, when a game receives more requests than granted in the free service, immediately after the subscription renews.

Promotional Work: From the start of a new subscription period, staff start working on creating newsletter features and press releases for subscribers, for that month, which incurs real staffing costs. 

Efficient Pricing: Our ability to offer our services at such low prices compared to agencies hinges on planning and the allocation of resources and staff based on the reliable recurrence of subscriptions. Offering refunds after renewal disrupts this delicate balance, potentially impacting service costs and, by extension, affecting all our clients. 

Economic Cost: Reviewing which benefits have been consumed, such as influencer outreach, press blast allocation, ads, social posts, involves administrative efforts that would necessitate an administration fee for ‘no fault’ refunds which would reduce, or may even exceed the subscription cost, making refunds of monthly subscriptions economically impractical.

Common Convention: Most other online services operate the same policy for the same good reasons, so we hope you understand we are not doing anything unusual or unreasonable. 

Our no-refund policy ensures the sustainability and quality of our services, reflecting our commitment to delivering value while managing operational costs efficiently. We appreciate your understanding and are here to address any further questions or provide additional clarifications you may need.

Your game needs to be set up BEFORE content creators can livestream it. 

YouTube - add your game to www.wikipedia.org with a DVD-style packshot image. YouTube uses this for populating the game description that shows underneath video content.

Twitch - you need to set up your game on IGDB in order to get a Twitch category. Go to IGDB, click on "Games" and then "Add Game". Here you fill out all of the information about your game and also upload the Game Cover. As soon as you save it, Twitch will add the category for the game in, which usually takes up to 2 weeks. Once it has been added in, you can link the Twitch category to your game in the system. 

Please note: If you don't have a Twitch category we may not find any coverage that's made on Twitch. Full details can be found here.

You can edit and manage all your listings, including disabling requests, adding game platforms, pre-approving channels, etc.

If you don’t have an account and you see a game listed with something wrong, or requests shouldn’t be enabled, talk to whichever of your colleagues at the publisher, developer or agency who manages the listing. If you cannot identify who that is, contact us for assistance.  

Tagging is what makes social media work, so it’s important to set them early and use them throughout your PR and Marketing activities. Leaving content creators to make up their own often dilutes the searchability of your campaign.

If your game is on Steam, any updates are automatically imported into the system. Console and other game catalogues are updated manually, so either use the Intercom chat or the contact form and tell us.

For games controlled by more than one company, for example where both the publisher and the developer are using the system, or two agencies in different regions, please make sure your colleagues are in agreement before asking us to make a change.

Products normally go through stages e.g. alpha, to demo, to early access, to release.

Add the lifecycle stage to the CAMPAIGN NAME, so creators understand your progress.

If you want to add it to the product name, that's fine too.

Update the release date to reflect the release of the next VERSION of your product, for example if your product is due for full release in 2 years, but the open beta will be in 2 months, set the RELEASE DATE for 2 months away, and update the CAMPAIGN NAME to "OPEN BETA".

On your Game Management page, click the ‘MANAGE’ button then use the tabs in the pop-up screen to Add more keys, Recycle unredeemed keys, or Remove to have all remaining keys in the system emailed to your account.

Yes. Click on the ‘REPORT CONTENT’ button and we will check it for review. The content tag you use for your game should be as unique as possible to avoid false positives. Be aware that a content creator may tag a video with multiple games if there is sufficient content relating to a specific game, despite not being the main focus.

Whenever you buy an Ad you get 30 days of unlimited requests.

By extending your Ad duration or by purchasing another one, the 30 days count will restart from the moment the newest Ad goes live.

Raise awareness of your game, in good time, with as many press and influencers as possible.

Use our indirect marketing (newsletters, social posts, and ads) and our direct marketing (outreach and press blasts) channels. Indirect marketing goes wide, and direct goes deep.

Make your offer simple, clear and attractive - give premium keys in advance of launch. 

Make your trailer short and punchy - no one has time to watch lots of long trailers unless they already know and love the game.

Offer giveaways to bigger channels and press.

Sometimes there will be problems with content.

Review content from the coverage menu and anytime you have an issue with a content item hit the report content button. This will let you identify the nature of the problem and send it back to our compliance team for review.

We normally review content within 24 hours and take relevant action with the content creator or press outlet immediately. 

We normally get back to you shortly afterwards to let you know any results but feel free to reach out if you want to learn more. 

Content creators are allowed to give their honest opinion in organic content campaigns. 

Section 8.2.2.3 of our terms says "you may not provide malicious, unreasonably negative, bad faith, or retribution coverage". Report content if you believe this has been breached.

Press and influencers in general give neutral or good reviews, so we consider the occasional negative reviews to be normal. And even if you didn't give games via our service, players will buy games and write negative reviews sometimes. 

However if you discover a reviewer being consistently negative, or dishonestly negative, report them and we will ban or suspend their accounts.

Our advice if you receive negative reviews, and if you think there are factually incorrect parts, is to reach out to the source and offer to discuss their experience and see if you can turn it into a learning opportunity with the possibility that they will update their review once you fix any potential issues or once they learn they've made a mistake.

We normally encourage clients to review coverage in the content feed daily,  Create a summary report weekly, and perform end of month analysis by exporting a report.

A weekly in-system report will show you the throughput of key codes and coverage views and content. 

You can export on Excel file containing all of the information about participants in the campaign so that you can slice and dice using pivot tables in a worksheet.

We require content creators using our platform to meet our professional standards and comply with our terms and conditions. 

Sometimes they fail to do so, or there is inconclusive evidence that they may be failing to do so. 

Depending on the circumstances, accounts may be “red flagged”, suspended, or closed. These statuses have different effects on the creator accounts and the actions the system takes with them. 

Whilst we cannot share personal details in individual cases, if you cannot complete an action in the system, it may be due to an interaction with a restricted account or a flagged email. 

Please talk to your account manager for details.

Coverage and Reports

The two main reports, Coverage and Reports, can be exported or printed:

- Coverage can be exported as a formatted PDF, or the raw data exported in a CSV file.

The export buttons are underneath the search button. If you cannot see them then they are not included in your current subscription.

- Analytics are viewable on your browser or you can export the raw campaign data as a .xlsx file.

The xlsx file contains a row for every item of coverage, and should be sufficient for generating custom reports. Export the xlsx using the "Create XLSX Report" button next to the "Create Report" button. If you cannot see the export button then it is not included in your current subscription.

Campaign Participants

If you need an export of the campaign participants who were declined, or who did not create coverage, please contact us. There is an export function on the "Offered" campaign tab currently in trial, and only exposed to limited clients.