Before you sign with any gaming marketing agency or platform, ask these questions. A good partner will have straightforward answers for every single one. If they get squirmy on any of them, that's your answer right there.
Can they show you real reporting?
Ask for a sample report from an actual past campaign, not the polished case study numbers on their homepage. You want CCV (average concurrent viewers during a stream), watch time, CPVH (cost per view hour, what was spent divided by total hours watched), and creator-level breakdowns, the same raw data they'd eventually be handing you.
What exactly is guaranteed, and what happens if they miss it?
Ask which metric is guaranteed, whether that's contractual or just a projection, what costs are included in hitting it, and what the remedy is if delivery falls short: a refund, make-good deliverables, or nothing at all. A real guarantee is a meaningful signal of confidence, backed by an actual creator pool, and real targeting data. Many deals simply pay creators for content or hours on stream. That structure leaves you carrying the risk of underperformance and does not make the content more likely to go viral, which is the real goal.
What did comparable campaigns actually deliver?
Ask for results from campaigns in your genre and budget range specifically, not their single best case study ever. If they can't show you anything comparable, that tells you something too.
Who is doing the work?
Are you still on the hook to make sure each creator has a brief curated to make sure they’ll be successful with their audience - or is that something the agency/platform is taking on? This is the difference between truly freeing up your time to work on other priorities, and spending 10-20 hours a week to work alongside creators or agencies to get it right & avoid costly creator misfires.
Do they understand indie budgets, or are you going to get treated like a rounding error next to their AAA clients?
Ask how many campaigns they've run in your budget range this past year, and ask to actually see results from one.
What is their creator pool built on?
Ask how they match creators to a specific game: genre affinity, audience overlap, or just whoever said yes first. Have they vetted the creators in their pool for brand safety, do they have viewbot checks, have they manually checked the creators for quality - non-AI - content, do they have protections against their creators selling your keys?
How do they structure pricing: flat fee, pay for what you get, affiliate, revenue share?
Each has real trade-offs. Flat fee often runs on projections - so make sure you dig down on what you're really getting. Pay for what you get is relatively rare - if you're paying for metrics you need, it's a good pick. Also consider if the up side is capped, or if you get more baked in for free. Affiliate models are tempting, since they seem to align incentives between the game and the creator - but in practice they introduce a reason for viewers to distrust their creators. Revenue share removes the upfront costs of other models and means the partner's taking on risk alongside you, which means you'll pay more in total, but often tuned to when your game is actually selling and you have the money to pay.
Do creators actually perform better with this partner than normal?
On Dare Drop, sponsored content from the same creators has historically earned roughly 20% more views than their regular channel content. Worth asking any potential partner for their own version of this number. Also worth investigating what sample that number's built on.
Who actually handles selection, negotiation, and reporting, and who sees the data?
This matters more than the platform-versus-agency question, since either model can be transparent or a total black box depending on who's running it. Ask what creator-level reporting you'll actually get access to, who's doing outreach and negotiation on your behalf, exactly what's included in the service, and who keeps access to the content and data once the campaign wraps. On Dare Drop specifically, you get direct creator-level reporting live as the campaign runs.
Do they have a real disclosure and monitoring process?
Ask how they brief creators on disclosure, whether they actually verify those briefed disclosures happen, and what they do when a creator misses one. This covers execution quality, not just reach, because a campaign that reaches everyone but botches disclosure creates real risk for the creator and for you. Recently, breaking disclosure rules have cost up to $50k per post, and the fine hit the advertiser, the agency, and the creator. If you advertise in a region, its regulations apply to you. If the agency does not handle disclosure, you have to. Frankly, I'd be a bit suspicious of agencies that don’t do this for you.
For the specific case of evaluating a partner at indie scale, see Indie Game Marketing Agency: What to Look For (and How Dare Drop Is Different).
