If you’re a Twitch streamer, or a YouTube creator, you’ll most likely want to cover a whole host of different games, but that costs! If you’re looking at how to get free game codes as a streamer, you’re probably already visiting sites like Keymailer and Woovit, signing up to PR lists, and reaching out to devs directly. But how do you know if you're doing a good job?

If you’re a new streamer, a veteran creator, or somewhere in the middle, it’s good to know the best practice on how to get free game codes via email.

Here, at Auroch Digital, we deal with a lot of our own game code requests, sometimes our publishers do too, but otherwise we do it all in house. You’ll be emailing Jem, Alice, or Ladell, signing up to our main influencer list, or various game specific ones.

If you’ve never emailed anyone for a game code before, we have some top tips on how to get free game codes as a streamer.

Before we start: make sure you’ve streamed in the last month, if you haven’t, please let us know when you’re planning on returning - we’re all human and we understand the way the world works!

📧 Email us from the address that’s listed in your bio 📧

If your email isn’t listed in your Twitch bio or on your YouTube channel, we can’t verify your email address against the email that comes into our inbox. Bigger creators often have people pretending to be them, with masked email addresses, or addresses that are a few letters different. We need to fact check to see that you are who you say you are, and if you don’t have your bio in your Twitch, Twitter, or YouTube bio (and not behind the CAPTCHA), it makes our job a lot more difficult.

This is also helpful with us reaching out to new people we’ve not worked with before. If we have noticed your content lines up with a game we have coming out soon or a game we already have out, we may want to reach out to you. We can’t do this if you have your DMs closed and no email listed. It’s also a lot easier for us to keep on top of emails rather than Twitter DMs.

Sure, you may get a little bit more spam to your email address, but if you set your filter up properly you should be able to avoid most of it. That being said, sometimes emails that we send out with game codes in can get flagged as spam - this is because they often look the same to each creator (with the game codes changed). Check your spam regularly, confirm what’s spam and what’s not, and get on top of inbox management.

😇 Be polite 😇

We are people too! Remember that when you’re about to send your email. Write the email like you’re writing to any professional. If you’ve not worked in a job that requires you to send emails you may find this a little bit more difficult at first, but making sure you’re polite and helpful is often enough.

If we have to come back to you and ask for more information, remember we’re doing it so we can get you a free game code, so be your best self. We want the best types of people to represent our games, so make sure that comes across in the email.

You’ll be emailing or receiving emails from Simon, Ladell, and Alice.

💡 Top Tip: Community mangers talk to each other from different studios. Being polite can go a long way, and being rude to someone can affect your relationship elsewhere in the industry.

📝 Give as much (important) information as necessary 📝

We don’t need to know why you got into gaming, what you got in your GCSEs, or what kind of background you come from. What we do need to know is a fair amount of other information from you.

Let us know your pronouns - only so we don’t misgender you in any socials or emails
Your various socials - any extra ways we can verify your information/email is important!
Average 30 or 90 day viewership - be honest, we’ll check! We aren’t focussed on follower count but it’s great for us to get an idea of how many eyes you can bring to our games.
Your preferred platforms - We sometimes get limited game codes for specific platforms, so if you let us know you can stream on Nintendo Switch AND Xbox (for example), you’ll be more likely to receive a game code. But please don’t ask us for a PC game code for a game we’re porting to console (we don’t have them!)
Your region - Whereabouts in the world do you live? Some game codes are locked to regions, so we need to know this to allocate you the right game code

And finally, not as important, but always useful:

What your schedule looks like or when we can expect to see content
- We can then keep an eye on our socials if you tag us in your posts
- We can swing by to a stream, or watch one of your videos
- We’ll know if you’re not going to be able to get round to making content for a while

Be honest with all the information you give, we will be able to check all of what you send us, and we often watch videos or VODs before we give out game codes, so we can get an idea of who you are and what you’re about. We only want to give game codes to people who are the best of the best, so put your best self forward.

💡 Top Tip: Have your social media linked, your pronouns, and your 90 day average CCV (Concurrent Viewership if you’re a streamer) in your email signature. It’s really helpful and saves a lot of time when creating a new email with all of the information in.

💬 Keep your socials up to date 💬

Your social media is the best way to market yourself as a streamer - don’t just use them to post go-live links. This will make your page look spammy and insincere. Even retweeting the occasional meme or posting the odd thought will make your social media look even more legitimate.

💡 Top Tip: Having a pinned tweet is a great way for us to see your most proud achievement, most recent achievement, or your channel trailer. We can learn a lot about you in a quick glance, and it’s really helpful for us to see if you’re someone we want to work with!

💕 Keep up a great relationship with the studio even after you’ve got the game code 💕

If you decide that you’ve got everything you want from us after you’ve received your game code, that’s fine. But what’s better is for you to keep up a good relationship with the studio. When we have more new games come out our first port of call are streamers or YouTubers we’ve worked with before as we know them and already have a good relationship. You can do this in a few ways:

Reply to emails
- If we send around emails seeing if you’re interested in covering any of our other games, please reply to us even if you’re not interested in it! It helps us a lot and makes us see you respect our time
Reply to tweets
- Becoming active on Twitter with us really makes you stand out from the crowd of other creators we work with
Become active in our Discord
- We have a whole room on Discord dedicated to creator coverage, where you’re free to share your go-live links and videos!

💡 Top Tip: Another great thing you can do, as shown by the wonderful Hannskini, is call out the studio a lot in your content. This support from a streamer means a lot to us and builds strong relationships so we want to work with you again in future.

🌟 We hope these tips will help you when contacting studios and help you conduct yourselves professionally when you do! 🌟

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, like our Facebook page, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and join our Discord to ask us any questions you may have.

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How to get free game codes for streaming 🎮