How I Stopped Watching Speechless Disappear

I’ve been making games for 15 years in Blazingfallgames. Shipped in a few genres, learned the hard way which mistakes hurt the most. Last year we put out Speechless together with TrueMotionStudio, a first-person horror game for Windows, in a subgenre we ended up calling escape the loop. It launched on Epic and Steam after a long, painful development cycle, and for about two weeks it was right there in front of people.

Then it wasn’t.

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You know how this goes if you’ve shipped on Steam before. The visibility window closes. The algorithm moves on. You’re not on the front page anymore, you’re not in any “new releases” rail anybody actually scrolls, and your traffic looks like a heart monitor that flatlined. We had a polished game. Smooth gameplay. A genre we’d put real thought into. None of that mattered if nobody was looking at the store page.

So we did what most indie devs do at that point. We tried to do the marketing ourselves.

The 30-emails-a-week trap

I started inside YouTube. Manually searching for horror streamers, opening channels one by one, copying contact info, writing personal emails. YouTube caps how many you can send a day, so even grinding it out, week one we got 30 emails out the door. Thirty.

One reply. No video.

That math will kill you. If you do it for a month at that rate, you’ve sent maybe 120 emails and lost most of a month of dev time you could have spent fixing bugs. I’m not exaggerating when I say it almost broke me. You can feel the game slipping away while you sit there refreshing a Gmail tab.

Finding CreatorFetch

Eventually I ended up at CreatorFetch. Honestly, at first I assumed it would be another one of those sites that look promising on the landing page and then make you fight the UI for an hour to do anything useful. I’d already tried two competitors and dropped them inside a day. Confusing dashboards, weird filters, no clean way to actually reach anyone.

CreatorFetch wasn’t that. I won’t pretend the first hour was magic, but within a couple of evenings I had it dialed in. Filters for genre, platform, follower count, engagement. I pulled streamers and creators across Twitch, Kick, YouTube, Instagram, all in one workflow.

Then I let it send.

Inside a week I’d reached out to more than 2,000 influencers. Out of that, close to 200 wrote back and asked for keys. Not polite “thanks for thinking of me” replies. Actual creators who took a free key, played the game, and started producing videos. For free. No sponsorship deal, no per-post fee, nothing under the table. We sent the key, they played, they posted. That was the whole transaction.

Videos went up on Twitch and YouTube. They’re still going up. The pipeline didn’t end after the initial blast. It kept rolling, and every one of those videos is content we didn’t pay a creator a cent to produce.

If you’ve done manual outreach you know how absurd those numbers feel. I’d been chewing through 30 emails a week and barely getting a reply. CreatorFetch pulled in about 200 active creators, all making free videos, in roughly two weeks.

Using this feature, I was able to track which influencers I had contacted and identify who had actually created content for Speechless.

Why this shape of tool actually works for indies

The thing I want other indie devs to hear, because it took me a while to figure out: the reason this works isn’t the volume. It’s that the creators who say yes are the ones who actually want to play your game. They’re not getting paid. They’re doing it because the game looked interesting and you offered them a free key, and that’s it. A horror streamer who picks up Speechless because the pitch caught their attention is going to make a much better video than someone you paid to talk about it. Their audience can tell. Mine could.

And the cost? Look, I won’t post our exact spend, but compared to what a marketing agency would have charged us, and compared to what a paid sponsorship slot from any of these creators would have cost individually, the subscription is on another planet. For a solo or small-team indie, this is the right shape of tool. Reasonable price. Clean UI. A few clicks gets your game in front of the right people across YouTube, Twitch, Kick, Instagram. They play it, they post about it, their viewers see it, and your store page traffic stops looking like a flatline. If you’re an indie dev sitting on a good game that nobody’s seeing, go look at creatorfetch.com. I don’t think I’d ship another title without it.

A note on Speechless itself

Quick aside, because people ask. Speechless is first-person horror, escape the loop subgenre. If you played Silent Hills P.T. you already know the shape. You wake up in a hallway, solve puzzles, reach the end, and the hallway loops back on itself, but now everything has changed. Environment, puzzles, story, all shifted. P.T. introduced the idea. We expanded it into a full subgenre and built the whole game around it.

The setting is a run-down old prison. You wake up there with no idea why and start moving through fixed hallways that keep rewriting themselves at the end of every loop. Mechanics are simple: walking, running, a flashlight, switches on the wall, locks and keys, handwritten notes that carry the story. Puzzles range from medium to hard. Enemies range from generic zombies to the one nobody forgets, Monica.

Design-wise, the hardest part was the loop transitions. How do you make sure the player understands they’ve started a new loop? How do you change the environment enough to stay interesting without making it incoherent? We rewrote those mechanics more than once. That was the central design problem of the whole project.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369350/Speechless/

https://store.epicgames.com/p/speechless-d31e08

What I’d tell another indie dev

You can build a great game and still watch it disappear in two weeks. I know because I did. The fix isn’t a bigger marketing budget. Most of us don’t have one. The fix is finding a way to put the game in front of the people who’ll actually play it and tell their audience about it. That’s it. That’s the whole job.

For me, that was CreatorFetch. Your mileage will vary. But please, don’t sit there sending 30 emails a week and hoping. There’s a better way to spend that time.

, Abouzar Pourranjbar, game designer & developer

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