Game Title Collaborators

A part of our mission to empower independent games is to see more open communication and collaboration between indie developers, publishers and marketing/pr agencies.

With Coverage Bot's reporting tool, publishers and agencies can now clearly communicate the value of their marketing work, and developers are now more 'in the loop' than ever in that regard.

But – you guessed it – we wanted to go further.

So, much like Team Invites before this, we are building more collaboration tools into the core IMPRESS platform... From today, teams can invite other teams to collaborate on their game titles!

Whether, as an agency, that's you wanting to delegate your coverage monitoring queue to a developer, or as an indie, having your publisher edit your press kit content, it's all possible! Giving collaborator access let's another team do anything that you can do to your game data – with the exception of deleting it, of course!

In the future, we will look to add more granular access levels. If you're looking to grant access to limited features/actions, please let us know your circumstances and we'll see what we can do.

All the best, and happy collaborating! 👥 🎉
- Ashley

New Coverage Overview

Slowly but surely, your dashboard insights are improving!

Today we've published a new Coverage Overview, and game navigation – and it's more mobile-compatible.

You now have a horizontal scroller for selecting games and for viewing top coverage. The time filters have now been moved to the top bar, too, so your date selection is platform-wide. This allows you to more easily benchmark your metrics week-on-week. (We'll have more on weekly digests soon!)

Until the next one!
- Ashley

Press Kitty – Instant ZIP Downloads

Today marks the first feature update to Press Kitty! Wahoo! (Meow?)

All of your published press kits now have Instant ZIP Downloads for Screenshots, Logos, and for all combined Image Assets!

When you upload new assets, they will be automatically included in the zip downloads after a minute or so. These zip files help press & creators bulk download your press kit materials quickly, rather than having to wait for files to generate on-the-fly. Looking at you, Google Drive! 👀

Just an extra note: if your assets were imported from Steam, they are presently very low-resolution (600x380 or so). This import will be fixed in a future update, but for now, I advise that you remove all screenshots and manually replace them with higher-resolution versions. Very sorry about that!

- Ashley

Team Invites

Happy New Year! 🎉

During Q4 2022, a few bigger customers signed up to use Coverage Bot or Press Kitty, and they all had the same problem: having to ask us to add their staff members to their accounts...

To improve customer autonomy and reduce support, today we are introducing Team Invites! Yes! We have renamed companies into teams. It's just more appropriate terminology!

With Team Invites, you are now able to add additional users access to your account data.

Team members can do all of the same things you can do: add & remove games, add & remove subscriptions, edit your press kits, generate coverage reports and even add other new team members!

With that front of mind, please only invite members you completely trust!

We will work on a permissions system in the future, as well as multi-team access, but for now it is not deemed urgent. If you need to be part of multiple teams, or need to delete your team, please contact support and let us know your use case.

That's all for now!

All the best
- Ashley

Coverage Bot – Slash Commands

Now that Press Kitty is launched, for the rest of the year (and maybe a bit more) we're knuckling down on our big backlog of quality-of-life improvements. The first of which is ready for you today...

Yes! Your favourite coverage & stream tracking bot has received a new virtual processing chip – so to speak – and now supports... Discord's Slash Commands! 🎉

This update completely removes the cb!* commands prefix, improves bot setup and onboarding, limits spontaneous restarts, and generally improves performance and robustness. Oh, we also now use Discord Timestamps.

On the tech side, we had to complete rewrite the bot in TypeScript, which was a huge undertaking, and also involved changes to deployment pipelines and infrastructure! Whew!

Furthermore, we've added cloud logging to improve our monitoring and investigative capabilities, as has been necessary in the case of some very unique Discord server setups. 💪

These are the new Slash Commands:

• /init – set up the bot in your server
• /pending – show pending coverage queue, approve/reject coverage with new buttons!
• /streams – show top currently live Twitch streams, with buttons to share with your community or ignore!
• /about – show more info about Coverage Bot
• /help – show urls for help & support

Lastly, as part of this update, we're also including Charts in Coverage Reports! and also Notifications when Coverage Reports finish generating. No more hitting refresh. Woop! 🙂

We're quite pleased with ourselves, and hope you are too. Let us know how you get on.

If you've not heard of Coverage Bot yet, you can check out the full details here!

All the best
- Ashley

Press Kitty Launch

We've officially launched our second tool: Press Kitty!

Put your best foot forward, and create your indie game press kit today — it's completely free!

For more information, check out the product page, and/or read the full announcement blog post!

- Ashley

Newsletter Launch

We've officially launched our newsletter!

We'll be sending out knowledge & resources on how to succeed in indie game development, as well as the occasional product updates. 🙂

Go here to subscribe to success!

- Ashley

Coverage Bot – Rolling Metrics & Twitch Streams

Hey! Your favourite games marketing and insights dashboard (yes) now includes rolling metrics! Simply select a time range and see how your marketing efforts are changing week-to-week or month-to-month... or any time period!

It also now includes metrics for your Twitch streams rather than just the Clips/Videos.

What's your average stream length and CCV? (How you doin'?) Share your benchmarks over on Twitter or Discord.

Let me know if you need any more data made available and easy to digest. I take all your suggestions on board. Thanks to Jacob from Ghost Ship Games for this one. 🙂

Cheers,
- Ashley

Steam Review Wordcloud

We're back with another tangent today! It's still super effective!

We set aside some time to keep the non-Coverage Bot wheels rolling recently. (We have a lot of wheels, ok?) Inspired by a chat with PanicBarn's Tim Constant, we built a tool to give you qualitative data on Steam game reviews!

You can use this data for market & competitor analysis to provide insight and solidify decision making, or... to look at your own Steam game's changing review sentiment!

It's only available to Discord members at the moment, so get on down, give it a try and give us your feedback. We have more to come on this front... soon!

Until then,
- Ashley

Coverage Bot – Auto Approve Rules

Alright alright alright. Once again, you asked. Once again, we delivered.

Following the "Batch Approve/Rejection Tool", we realised that some of you don't want 100% pure curation, but would rather live dangerously and auto-approve and post content to your team & communities based on the video/clip/article titles.

With this update, we've enabled just that!

Head to your game's tracker settings and toggle the "Auto-approve" box shown in the image above.

Until next time, let us know what you think on Twitter or Discord!

- Ashley

Steam Revenue Calculator

A wild 'tangent' appears! You use 'numbers'. It's super effective!

It's only been a few days since the last update, but today we're kicking our first mini/side-project out of the door — a Steam Revenue Calculator!

You should use this tool to look at competitors in your market analysis, and to solidify your pitch deck before sending to games publishers. It's using the Boxleiter method, which has a few caveats (below), but it works for a large proportion of games that perform around the average.

Caveats:

1. This formula calculates Net Revenue based on an estimated "Number of Sales Per Review". Estimates are just that: estimates!

2. If you're checking your own game and the calculation is way off the mark, consider trying to improve your review rate! You could be getting more Steam store visibility – and making more money! Thank me later!

3. If a game has adult/mature themes, consider that not everyone will want to review that publicly!

4. Players of certain genres will leave reviews more often than others. If you have any concrete data on this, please reach out!

Data Source/s:

1. The excellent GameDiscoverCo.

That's it for today. Let us know what you think on Twitter or Discord!

- Ashley

Batch Approve/Rejection Tool

Woo! The first product updates after launching! So what have we got...

A number of customers were getting A LOT of coverage coming in, and the dashboard didn't quite hit their needs with wrangling all their data. Customers could not approve/remove more than 30 items at a time, and paginating through thousands of results made this a very time-consuming process. Nobody wanted that.

So: we built a batch approve/rejection tool!

The new tool now lets you search & filter your coverage by text strings – and then from those results, let's you perform batch actions on up to 1000 items at a time! It a took a bit of fiddling with the code on our side, but it's totally worth it.

Alongside this, we have a number of other changes too.

We've made the server infrastructure more stable, we improved health checks, and we also added backfill scripts in case of any future hiccups. Lastly, we also made the Coverage Reports pipeline more robust, and reports should now generate within an hour or so.

Thanks so much to Conor and Sylvia for their suggestions!

- Ashley

Coverage Bot Launch!

Excitement intensifies! We're pushing the Coverage Bot launch today! Here are a bunch of links/resources to cover the launch.

• Introducing Coverage Bot – Press & Media Monitoring for Video Games (Launch Trailer!)

• Introducing IMPRESS (Blog Post)

• Press Kit

If you know someone who could benefit from Coverage and Twitch stream tracking, now's the time to go tell 'em! We'll of course be reaching out to loads of people ourselves, too.

• Join the conversation on Discord!

Let's go!

- Ashley

Audience Data – In Full!

One of the final pieces of the puzzle has always been letting you view the data that Coverage Bot collects on your behalf. That piece of the puzzle is now here!

We're filled out the Audience tab to let you view not just the Top 10 creators in each platform/category, but to also let you paginate through the entirety of your audience data. Yes!

Believe it or not, there still more work to be done in this area. We can't wait to show you what we have planned. Stay tuned for the next milestone: launch!

- Ashley

Brand New Landing Pages

I am beyond proud to announce the new landing page designs for IMPRESS and Coverage Bot!

We've invested a lot of time, labour and love in putting it all together and... just look at at, it's super special. Coverage Bot has been brought to life. The new product images really shine.

On the technical side, there's even an interactive demo that mimicks the bot interface in the Discord UI! Wow!

Many thanks to Tom Waterhouse (@2dforever) for the excellent key artworks.

- Ashley

Longer Login Sessions

Contracting and recovering from COVID has been horrible, but now we're back on track!

Today we've pushed a fix which will keep your login session around for a number of months, rather than a number of hours. You also will no longer be logged out every time we deploy an update – whew! That one's been a long-time coming!

- Ashley

Ludum Dare 50 – Coverage Report

Following on from releasing our fixed-time Coverage Reports, we have adjusted the tool to track live events coverage!

We're huge fans of the global game jam spectacle that is Ludum Dare – and have participated several times ourselves. So now, we're running an experiment. We want to know who else loves Ludum Dare; Who else is covering it in the press? Who is mentioning it on YouTube? Who's streaming on Twitch?

Our live report will answer all of those questions, and in order to help as many indie devs as possible, we will be sending the final report to newsletter subscribers. You know what to do.

View the Ludum Dare 50 report!

- Ashley

Manual Coverage Submissions

Today's update brings Coverage Bot a step closer to launch...

At present, we only actively monitor the most popular games websites, publications and blogs. So, if your game is mentioned on a niche or small-time website, we'd sometimes miss it.

But that stops today! Now you can submit coverage manually, so you can always have a complete record of your coverage, and utilise that data point going into the future.

You can find this new input on the Pending coverage page, and can input not just a Web URL, but also a YouTube or Twitch URL too – all current tracking formats supported.

We're making many more improvements to the web tracker in the road to launch, so watch this space!

- Ashley

New Web Tracker

Hello! As hinted at in the last changelog update, today we deploy a brand new Web tracker for your video games!

The web monitoring service had to be completely overhauled to make way for this. It's a dramatic upgrade!

The new system can now find coverage – articles, announcements and reviews – that happened in the past! Previous to this, it could only find coverage as it happened, live, before it dropped off home pages and live feeds.

We are now tracking around 500 games news websites, and this number will steadily increase over time, as the tool also now bubbles new sites into the index. It's pretty excellent!

If you still find something it misses? You can submit it manually and it'll get plonked in.

What do you think? Let's keep in touch in Discord!

- Ashley

PR & Coverage Reports

Our Coverage Reports are now released in beta!

The reporting system refreshes your data when reports are created, so view counts on videos, subscriber counts on channels, and other digital PR and SEO metrics such as Domain Authority from SimilarWeb are fixed for that point in time.

View an example report generated for Toast Time.

- Ashley

Sign Ups are Now Open!

We're pleased to announce today that we're opening sign-ups to the platform, and making our toolkit available to all!

Though – this is not a launch! We still have a lot of work to do.

We're opening up today because our Coverage Bot is offering a lot of value to our pre-launch customers (see reviews on the homepage), and is at a place where it's stable, bug-free and can help a lot more studios and agencies on the way to our official launch.

No longer do you have to 'book a demo' to get started. Sign up today – or spread the word to people who you think could benefit. Thank you!

- Ashley

Ad Value Equivalency

Calling all PR & marketing agencies!

If you're looking to put a value on your work and communicate that to your clients, now you can!

We support customising the currency, base values and calculation formulas. If your in-house formula isn't supported, reach out and we can accommodate. We'll be adding more reporting features over time, based on your feedback, so let's keep each other in the loop!

- Ashley

Export CSV Data

The first update of the year is here. It's a customer feature request, and one that we 100% agree with.

So many platforms in our industry put a paywall between their users and their users' data. We don't blame them – they have to make their VC-money back somehow! We, however, don't believe in that. Indie devs should be able to have control over their data, and their approach to solving problems – and not be locked into platforms completely unnecessarily.

With that, we're very happy to announce: CSV EXPORT!

This allows you - our customers - to pull your data into other tools you might have for analysis and reporting, and do as you please with regard to your process. If you think there's something we can be doing to improve on our reporting tools, please get in touch and we'll be very happy to get stuck in.

Onwards!

- Ashley

New Changelog

We're kicking the year off by publishing our recent changes in this brand new changelog!

Development has been fast and loose lately, and updates have not been fully communicated outside of private chats in the Community Discord. Therefore, this changelog is a way of formalising and standardising our communication around updates and deployments - we'll also be posting to socials, of course.

As a bonus, we've also added a little pre-2021 background history, or - if you will - our 'origin story'!

Let us know what you think - and Happy New Year!

- Ashley

Advanced Discord Notifications

We noticed a few of our customers had separate channels for sharing Web news and YouTube content.

So now, instead of limiting to one #coverage channel, we now allow you specify which coverage goes where based on its type/platform! It's routing configuration galore! Let us know if you require any other options.

That's all for this year! A Merry Christmas to all - and see you for a wild 2022!

- Ashley

Twitch Analytics

We are working behind-the-scenes on data visualisations for your coverage & stream data - and today's update comes in the form of a new Twitch stream graph.

You can now see hourly/daily/weekly aggregate stats for your game's streams! This allows you to identify whether your marketing/pr campaigns are improving, streamers who can bring in a high-volume of traffic, and peak streaming times for your game.

Let us know what what you think!

- Ashley

Audience Insights

You now have access to a top-level overview of your game's influencer/streamer audience. You can view the top 10 channels by stream length, number of subscribers, total reach, and other metrics.

We will be improving this data over time based on customer requirements, so let us know what information & insights you think we can pull for you. The more feedback we receive, the better product we can make and the better service we can provide!

- Ashley

Invoices & Receipts

You can now view and download your invoices and receipts for your subscriptions within the platform.

- Ashley

Custom Date Range

You can now filter your coverage data by a custom date/time range - you are no longer limited to fixed time periods!

This is the first step in improving the analysis and reporting tools within the platform.

- Ashley

Twitch Live Streams!

It brings us great pleasure to announce the monitoring and alerting of Twitch live streams!

These alerts/notifications - straight into your Discord - allow you (or your community manager/s) to jump into your game's live streams, engage with the streamers and their audiences, and grow your community! Awesome!

This had been a requested feature for a long time. We've got this out early so that you - our current customers - can set it up, have a play, and offer us feedback on the details of your specific requirements. We want to make this feature as useful as possible!

In addition to this, we now allow multi-quantity subscriptions (i.e. subscriptions to allow for tracking multiple games), and the use of promo codes on checkout. We might have promised some discounts to our earliest adopters, you see!

Let us know what you think, as always, on the Community Discord!

- Ashley

Soft-Announcement

Hello! Today we publicly announce that we are onboarding new customers onto the brand new IMPRESS platform. We've soft-announced the project to industry friends - and lots of new contacts - at Develop conference in Brighton.

Everyone that we spoke to really loved the idea, which has been incredibly encouraging, motivating and pleasing to hear.

Get in touch for a demonstration of the platform.

We're now kicking development up a notch! Let's do this!

- Ashley

The Great Migration

tl;dr. A lot had to happen to make the platform production-ready.

With taking the project more seriously (see next changelog entry), I made the decision to effectively start from scratch, a decision I did not make lightly.

The old platform was built with haste, without considering code quality and maintainability, site availability and reliability, without automated regression testing for robustness, and without a standard deploy process. The list goes on...

New features were bolted on over the years without consideration for, really, anything*. It was built for personal/internal use - between multiple game releases and contract project deadlines - where these factors were of low-importance. If it broke for a few days, I was the only one affected. But now, if customers were involved? These factors would be of critical importance, and non-negotiable.

Given this gargantuan task - for one developer working in the moonlight hours - YouTube video content had to be dropped (sorry!), and the new development effort started.

I decided on a backend written in Symfony (PHP), and Svelte (JS) for a slick custom UI - languages I know through and through. For cloud infrastructure, I chose the well-documented, scalable & reliable Amazon Web Services. For configuring it all I chose Terraform, so that's all nicely modular, and written in code too.

I used test-driven-development (TDD) methodologies to reduce bugs and maximise robustness. I wrote a deployment pipeline that's 95% automated, to minimise human error. I wanted make everything as trouble-free and as low-maintenance as possible. I wanted to do everything 'by the book'.

Some of that process was new to me, so these months were a learning experience. I'm very fortunate, however, to have had a background in web development before starting on game development. I worked on large-scale social/facebook games at Mediatonic back in 2009 & contributed to Game Jolt's marketplace in 2016!

Coming back to web development and building on my skills has been an incredibly rewarding experience. I simply cannot wait to continue building on my skills in other areas too - marketing, business development, sales, hiring - you name it, to make this endeavour a success.

Special shout out to all the educational writers, podcasts, resources and Bootstrapper communities out there - Indie Hackers, Startups For the Rest of Us, Twitter #buildinpublic, etc. You're an absolute inspiration! I never considered this possible.

Migration... complete!

P.S. I know I've not touched on all the specifics around database schema migrations, third-party service providers e.g. payment providers, the deployment pipeline, Terraform modules, and so forth. It's all a bit technical, isn't it? Let me know if you're interested in that and I'll perhaps start blogging properly!

* For complete context of how bad it got, the old site was on a shared cPanel hosting service, and was just three core (read: massive!) PHP files - index/api/util (no tests) - @levelsio would be proud?

The Realisation

My Patreon wasn't started to provide the Coverage Bot service — that was just an extra perk. The primary motive was to create interesting video content, and secondarily, of course, to help wean off from contract work.

After making a number of videos — including how to procedurally-generate puzzles, how much money Toast Time made on Switch, and a few devlogs of a new retro FPS project — I came to a realisation.

People aren't patrons because of this video content... people are patrons because of this service I am providing!

This service is bringing money in. This service is providing value! This can genuinely help people across the entire games industry!

It wasn't something I could just ignore. After juggling contracts and indie life for so long, this seemed like a path to freedom, and a path with a purpose in helping others.

It was time to redirect my focus. It was time to take this project seriously!

Emoji Reacts & Twitch Clips

We gathered feedback from initial users through conversations on Discord.

One thing that came up multiple times was that it was a bad user experience to type `cb!approve` and `cb!reject` for each item in the coverage queue. We noted that other bots often used Emoji Reacts to perform user actions, so, we did the same! A simple thumbs up and down worked a charm!

The second piece of feedback was to have the bot look at Twitch data. So, we updated the tool to look at Saved Clips & Videos too - huzzah!

See archived Patreon post

New Command List

We added a number of commands to give users advanced access to their Coverage data through the bot.

Users could now query to see their aggregate stats across their YouTube coverage (total views, likes & comments), as well as see their 'potential' coverage matches and approve and reject them.

A few utility commands were also added - to show latest coverage (`cb!latest`), a random piece of coverage (`cb!random`), and to search their coverage (`cb!search`).

Initial user feedback was very positive!

See archived Patreon post

Patreon Launch

With the front-end interface never designed for external use, but with a drive to deliver useful tools the industry, we devised a plan to offer the existing Coverage Monitoring tool without giving access to the web dashboard interface - or all the other at-this-point unmaintained aspects of the platform.

This product of this came in the form of an interactive Discord bot — with subscriptions handled through Patreon, and user/game onboarding done manually.

$2 a month for this? Who could resist! And thus — Coverage Bot was born!

Region-specific Codes

With a Nintendo Switch release of Toast Time around the corner, the key storing & email merging functionality was updated to account for region-specific promo codes.

Self-host & Open-source

By this time, Friendship Club was put on hiatus, and Force Of Habit was split down the middle.

As a symbol of goodwill — and because we could no longer maintain the project — a setup & install process was developed, and the project was open-sourced.

The idea was for funded teams to pay for a licence, and to keep it free for small and solo independent developers. We were inspired by dopresskit() and similar projects, and wanted to give back to the community in a similar way.

We never publicised or marketed it though - oops!

(The code repository is now private again.)

Social Scheduling

Twitter's minimal & rapid-fire tweet format means the likelihood of all of your followers seeing your content was (and still is) very unlikely — the lifespan for any random tweet is incredibly short.

Knowing this, we built a tool to schedule retweets across the team at spaced intervals. This extended the lifetime of our tweets for a number of hours. Clever!

Email Merging

Up until this point, we'd been writing, tailoring and sending press emails manually. We did this to break our emails free of the 'promotions'/'updates'/'social' tab that exists in Gmail. This approach was fine in the short-term, but was an inefficient use of our time in the long-run.

So we built a mail-merge tool which integrated with Gmail / SMTP to send bespoke-tailored, and delivery-efficient email with a vastly improved open rate.

This also meant we were recording who we sent what keys to, and so we could send follow up emails with the same/previously sent keys. Voila!

Coverage Monitoring

Now that we had a collated database of everyone we'd contacted, we could use monitoring techniques to surface when our company or games were being talked about across the web.

This saved us from the cognitive load of searching every morning, but also gave us motive to thank everyone who enjoyed and/or covered our work and creative vision.

Hello World — PR & Comms Management

IMPRESS (then `impresslist` or `impress[]`) was born into this world as an internal tool for Force Of Habit's self-published releases.

Built to manage press outreach across the 5-person team after the spreadsheet became unruly, the tool was used extensively to promote Friendship Club's public beta, subsequent Steam early access launch, and bi-weekly development updates!