For a first-time indie developer with a few thousand dollars of marketing budget and no track record to lean on, a 190,000-subscriber YouTube channel offering to feature your game can look like the single best use of that money. According to reporting from Kotaku, a growing number of developers say that bet didn’t pay off — and that the channel behind it, Best Indie Games, has been selling paid packages without clearly disclosing they’re ads.

What developers say they paid for

Best Indie Games, run by a creator known as Clemmy, offers tiered paid promotion packages to indie studios. Kotaku reported that the entry-level package runs $2,228 and bundles a YouTube Short, a roughly one-minute feature inside a longer video, a post on X, and a mention in a newsletter; a standalone tweet costs $380 on its own. Developers described paying less and still coming away with little to show for it. BitQuest Studios told Kotaku it paid $177 for a placement that generated just 1,622 impressions and no measurable increase in wishlists. Bag Track Games said it paid around $217 including tax, only to have its trailer buried among hundreds of others inside a two-to-three-hour showcase compilation — a format where individual games get seconds of attention at best.

The consultant fielding the complaints

The complaints have been landing with Joe Henson, a marketing consultant who runs the channel and business Indie Game Joe and has spent over a decade advising indie studios, including work on Hypercharge: Unboxed, which peaked at number two on Steam’s top sellers list. Henson told Kotaku that 20 to 30 developers have messaged him in recent months describing similar experiences with Best Indie Games’ paid packages — striking volume for what would otherwise look like a handful of isolated disputes. Henson has positioned his own coverage of games as free, unpaid promotion, which is part of why frustrated developers have been routing their complaints to him instead of the channel itself.

A disclosure problem, not just a results problem

Beyond the question of whether the packages deliver value, Kotaku’s reporting points to a disclosure gap: some of Best Indie Games’ posts on X include a “#ad” tag, but it’s reportedly buried in the replies rather than the post itself, and none of the channel’s YouTube Shorts appear to carry explicit sponsorship disclosure. That matters beyond simple transparency — undisclosed paid placements blur the line between a creator’s genuine recommendation and an ad a developer paid to run, which is exactly the distinction cash-strapped indie studios are trying to use when they decide where to spend a limited marketing budget. Kotaku’s report doesn’t include a response from Clemmy or Best Indie Games.

Why it matters beyond one channel

Paid coverage isn’t inherently a problem — plenty of legitimate marketing channels in games run on sponsored placements. What’s landing this story with under-covered but real staying power is the pattern it describes: newer developers, often without the experience to benchmark what a “good” placement looks like, paying real money based on a subscriber count rather than a track record of driving outcomes. It’s the kind of story that fits into a broader trend we’ve covered before — an indie market that’s more crowded and harder to break into than ever, where the pressure to buy visibility is highest precisely for the developers who can least afford a bad bet. Whether Best Indie Games changes its disclosure practices or pricing in response remains to be seen, but the volume of complaints reaching a single third-party consultant suggests this isn’t an isolated dispute.

For more on the pressures facing smaller studios right now, see our coverage of the indie game boom and its winner-take-all dynamics and Heart Machine’s near-collapse.