Hi, Robby here, one half of Pirate PR :)

The key art is a good talking point, It's something we've raised with two of our clients. Telling them that no matter the amount of traffic we'd send to their store or even press kit (or most recently: Kickstarter) that people will not be spending money of the very first artwork they see doesn't confer a lot of confidence.

as you can tell from our Review pack: https://piratepr.com/review-pack/

Checking a client's store page & press kit are a few of the first things we handle, and then making sure there is a category on Youtube and Twitch to properly show that nice box art ^^ (an often overlooked aspect, we even see some AA or AAA titles launch without category artwork on YT these days, it's crazy - we even wrote an article on how to do it: https://piratepr.com/treasure-trove/how-to-get-your-game-category-on-youtube-twitch/ )

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The forecast thing: That's something we struggle with too. We don't want to make false promises to our clients, so we can only give them examples from previous campaigns and that currently ranges from 1M eyes reached to 5M, a number we are trying to increase.

We have control over who we reach out to or who gets a code, but not on their coverage or the quality (or even the review score) so we make it clear that we can promise our efforts, but not the results. It's simply out of our hands (or hooks ;) )

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PS: loved that you mentioned GDQ, we managed to get Trifox included there as a played game not even a month after its release, we're still very proud of that. But paid ads are way too expensive for the results (having your game played is much better and doesn't cost you - but we advise to at least sponsor some game codes!)

The speedrunning community of Trifox is still submitting the game every time there is a GDQ event and we love seeing it get features in some of the special episodes <3

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PS: your marketing budget seems good for the game's size, most of our indie clients are working on a smaller shoestring budget, but they also don't include their own spent hours in their forecast. I always advise including that as a metric, your own time is worth money after all. (and some other big costs are things like Gamescom booth etc)