Dealing with the Press: A Quick Guide

Source: Expocentric

You’ve done the hard yards, you are close to your goal, and you are ready for the next steps. In short, you have a game just about done, but you aren’t sure who to tell about it

Well, you tell me, or to be even more helpful, all the people like me. That is, you tell the video games media.

But I get it, that can be daunting. Where to start? Who to talk to? What to say? Well, that is why I am writing this.

The first thing I want to say is that the games media wants you to succeed. Seriously. We are all doing this for the love of the craft, and we love nothing more than helping a new studio, a small indie, or an exciting, undiscovered project. So stick with me while I go over the things that will help you get noticed by the games media, help you get in contact, and what to say when talking to them. 

I will be giving you all some inside baseball here, stuff that I think is not widely known outside of media circles, so I hope you can use it to really get your game in front of the eyes of thousands.

Part 1: Things you need before you start

This is your prep work, the things that you can get together before you reach out. This prep work can often mean the difference between getting noticed and being ignored, so I cannot stress how important it is. 

1. A Press Kit

You wouldn’t believe how many games PR emails come to me without a press kit or with a kit that is lacking some pretty important things. Without a press kit, the media cannot easily write or cover your game, so getting it right is a must.

In your kit, you must (seriously, must) have the following:

• 2 pieces of keyart, one with the game’s logo and one without, at 1920 x 1080 resolution as a minimum (a higher resolution is better)

• Transparent PNG versions of your game logo and studio logo

• At least 10 screenshots of your game, once again at a minimum of 1920 x 1080 resolution. These screenshots should be chosen to represent the things you want the media to talk about: the key features of the game and the things you think players will like. 

• A trailer, if you have one. If you don’t have a trailer, you should be looking to make one ASAP. 

• A fact sheet about the game featuring important links, including a Steam page and / or other store pages.

These are the basics of a media kit, but if you want to include more, feel free. This press kit will be your lifeblood to games media, so don’t forget to update it if things change. Swap out the screenshots if the look of the game has changed over development or if you have new features you want to show. Remember, if there is something in here that is old and you forget to remove it, it could accidentally end up in someone’s article and go out to the world. To best facilitate keeping this kit up-to-date, I suggest hosting it on a cloud service like Google Drive. That way, it is easily available to both the media and yourself, and can be updated on the fly.

2. Multiple Pitches

What I mean here is, you need to think of multiple ways to introduce your game to the press in an interesting and engaging way.

There is nothing worse than an email that says something along the lines of, “Hey, I made a game. It is like this other game.” It is an immediate turn-off. You need to think carefully about how you will show off your game’s differences and how it is unique.

This is doubly true if your game sits in an oversaturated genre. For example, just yesterday, I received five emails about new deckbuilding games, so making sure you point out why your game is different to the rest is essential.

3. Money

This is a hard one and obviously something that can often be out of your hands. Spending money on your game is always going to come down to budgeting and what you can afford, so make sure you think long and hard about what you are willing to spend on getting your game out there. Things you may consider in your budget are:

• Hiring a PR firm to help you (there are a host of specialist Indie games PR mobs out there) 

• Booking space at an industry event like PAX

• Getting a social media manager to develop a social media plan with you

• Advertising

This is something that will need long and hard thought. If this is your first game, I would be reaching out to other developers to learn from their experiences, what they spent money on, and what they found helpful.

Part 2: Contacting the press

This is where all that hard work you put in place in the prep stage comes to the fore. For obvious reasons, most of your contact with the press will be through email, but that comes with its own challenges. To put it in perspective, most days I receive well over 40 emails regarding games, all looking for my attention. It is impossible to cover every game that is looking for coverage, but there are some things you can do to at least make sure your game gets noticed.

1. Research the outlet: It helps to know the outlet you are contacting and slightly personalising your email towards what they do. If the site you are talking to is known for covering a certain type of game or for covering from a certain point of view, then adjusting your email to that niche is always going to help.  This will create a point of interest for the Editor or whoever is reading it, and it may be just the thing to get them to look further into your title.

2. Tell us you are an Aussie: We love nothing more than promoting Aussies, so make sure you lead with “Australian-developed”; it will work wonders. All members of the Australian press love nothing more than gloating to our overseas colleagues about how, as a country, we punch above our weight in quality. It is a very Aussie thing to do, right? Let us do that for your game, too!

3. Choose your moment: The time of day that your email goes out is another important factor. As I said previously, email overload is a real thing, and the vast majority of those emails come in overnight thanks to international time zones, so I wake up to a heaving inbox full of PR blasts and review requests. It is much, much easier for writers to take notice of emails that come in during the workday. We are expecting them, we are awake, and we can filter as they come in instead of in a huge pile in the morning before we have had our coffee. 

4. Format your emails: There are so many email clients out there and ways to read emails, and you need to make sure your email appears correctly on the vast majority of those. Simple formatting, no embedded GIFs, and simple, clean text are important here. I understand that a nice animation will show off your game, but it will also choke up everyone's inbox unnecessarily. Include the GIFs in a press kit and have a link to a trailer in the email instead.

5. Have a game key ready: Giving access to your game is obviously important. We can’t really report on an indie game without having played it, at least in any meaningful way. Include keys in the email if you can and, if not, make it as easy as possible for the media to request one. It is important to look at these keys not as lost sales but marketing opportunities, because I can tell you the reality is we have so many games come through that if you make it hard for us to play yours, it will be forgotten very quickly.

6. Use our name: Something as simple as personalising the name at the top of the email can help you get noticed. It is human nature to react to your own name in a more positive light than a simple “Hey, Guys” or other generic term. By using our names, it shows us you have gone a step further and have bothered to find out a little bit about us, so the least we can do is find a little bit about what you are making.

Part 3: Meeting the press

Should you get the opportunity—through an event like PAX, Melbourne Games Week or any other in-person event—to meet the press, you should grab that opportunity with both hands. We are always hanging about at these events, watching and taking it in, and I cannot over-emphasise just how much we love chatting to a friendly developer. So here are some things you should have ready, just in case.

• A QR code to both your press kit and your Steam page / other store pages

• A quick elevator pitch on your game and why it is interesting (know this by heart)

• Something small to give the press. A business card is all it needs to be. I cannot tell you how often a business card is all it took to remind me about a great game I saw at PAX.

Having these things ready for a public event is a must, and make sure that any friends, family, or minions helping you out know these things too.

Another important factor to remember is, if you are showing your game off in public, never, and I repeat never, leave your game unattended because you can be 100% sure that is when a member of the press will turn up to check out your title and, if you aren’t there, they will immediately move on to the next game. I get it, I really do, you need to take breaks, which is why it is super important you have enough people helping you on the day.

Remember, games like Hollow Knight, Cult of the Lamb, and Untitled Goose Game garnered a huge amount of pre-launch buzz because of the showings they put on at places like PAX, so don’t underestimate the importance of getting it right.

Another thing to consider is that building a relationship with members of the press can certainly be beneficial for your current and any future projects, so keep that in mind when talking to any press members.

It is also worth noting that the Australian games media is a very small group. We are almost certain to hear if anyone is treated badly or rudely, and we can be a bit of a prickly bunch. So be nice!

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There you have it, a quick cheat sheet for dealing with the Australian Games Media. Honestly, we are on the same page as you and want, with all of our hearts, for you to succeed, so make it as easy as possible for us to help you, and we almost certainly will.

One final thing I will say, don’t be afraid of us. We are all big old game nerds, just like you, and all of us are doing this for love (certainly not money), so come and say hi, have a chat, and join us for a coffee or a beer. We want to talk to you and hear about your game, so don’t be too shy to tell us.