6 Weeks In: 339 Studios, 1,400 Keys Claimed, 426 Creator Videos
On July 21 the Dev Hub had zero studios in it. This is the honest six-week report: the numbers straight from the database, week by week, what actually happens in the hours after a creator mailing goes out, and what the developers using it told us - in their words, not ours.
Founder, Mad Octopus
The numbers, week by week
Everything below is pulled from the hub database on September 2, six weeks and one day after launch. No projections, no "up to".
The number I watch most is keys claimed by creators, because a claimed key is a person who read the mail, looked at the game and decided to play it. It went from 83 in launch week to 504 in the last full week of August.
Videos follow keys with a lag of one to three weeks. The coverage bot scans every claimer's YouTube channel daily and creators self-report Twitch and TikTok, so this is a floor, not a ceiling.
Studios joined in two waves: 156 in the first two weeks (the launch mailing to developers we already knew), then a steady 30 to 50 a week from cold outreach, word of mouth and the Discord.
What happens the day after a mailing
A creator mailing is a single send to a curated wave of 1,000 to 1,500 creators whose channels fit the genre, with a personal claim link in every mail. Three recent ones, with the numbers as they landed:
- Twin Tile, a cozy tile puzzle game, deposited 250 keys. 197 were claimed within a few hours of the send, the waitlist for the rest emptied itself the moment the developer topped up, and the first YouTube video came in the following week (here it is).
- The Hall That Devours, a first-person horror game from a solo Chinese developer: 547 keys, 281 claimed, and the first "FIRST LOOK" video published the same day the mail went out. Three days later the developer bought a second wave.
- A keyless demo announcement for the Long Rescue demo went to 3,000 curated creators: 63.6% opened it, the first opens within minutes. The biggest wave so far reached 4,000 creators at a 72.8% open rate.
My favourite single data point is smaller than all of those: one YouTuber claimed a key for Trees Inc, a small forestry management game, in the morning and had a full video up four hours later. That is the whole idea in one afternoon.
What developers told us
We read every reply. Most of the outreach answers are "not now", which is fair, and some of them are this:
“One of the best ideas I have seen for marketing a game.”
“Your work is awesome, big plus for us.”
“Extremely useful.”
“I really like the idea behind your site. I hope it takes off. Also, the site looks very slick.”
“Looking for exactly this. How does it work, is there a fee, can we chat with the other dev?”
“Tools got cheap, attention did not. Curation that connects small games with small streamers is becoming its own service - and this fills a vacant market.”
And one that came in this week from a developer doing serious due diligence before adding his game: "the matchmaking concept and the amount of control you've preserved for developers is pretty dank." He also asked hard questions about reach and bundle performance data. Those questions are why this post exists.
Why it works (our best guess)
Three things, none of them clever. The creator base is clean. Every creator in the hub was approved by a human who looked at what the channel actually plays, and farmers get cut from the entire base the day a developer flags them - so a claimed key is usually a real person. Developers keep control. Every bundle needs both sides to say yes, every mailing is configured by the studio (keys, copy, audience, even approve-each-key mode), and nothing is exclusive. It is free to be in. The hub costs nothing to join; a curated mailing is $9.99. Small studios can afford to try, and trying is how the numbers above happened.
What's next
This week every mailing got a proper campaign dashboard: delivery funnel, opens and claims over time, every creator who took a key with their Creator Hub tier and the videos they made, hub-wide benchmarks next to your own numbers, and a CSV export. Next to it sits the Beta of sponsored creator campaigns from $500 with a 10% platform cut, scoped by a human from a roster with real rate cards. And the Creator Hub moved to a new front end with a Steam-curator gate, so keys keep going to people who press record.
Join in
If you make indie games: add your game by its Steam link, it takes two minutes and costs nothing. If you cover indie games: apply once, get approved by a human, claim from the whole catalog. Come say hi on Discord, follow @MadOctopusGames or the r/MadOctopus subreddit, and if you want the long version of how the matchmaking works, it is here. The next six weeks are yours to skew.