Get Journalists to Cover Your Game: Lessons from Online Dating, Praying and No Man's Sky

[Music] thank you very much for coming to get journalist to cover your game um today we're going to talk about exactly that by lessons learned from online dating praying in no man's sky before we start off with that um three other things firstly please turn off your phones if you sit here around um secondly please evaluate the session after it's over and thirdly thank you so much for coming I know there's a sell talk going on in the other room so I really appreciate everybody that's here um in preparation of the talk I did something that I think most people do when they do a presentation or public speaking maybe you've done it as well you maybe Google what makes a good talk and what you always find is a good intro and what people say what makes a good intro is either you have something that's really emotionally touching maybe it's scary or really funny or the other thing is you have interesting stats and I thought why not do both why not stop with some super scary stats and that is a super scary stat that is the main problem why it's really hard to get journal to cover your game

that is the number of sheer games that's coming out at the moment you can see it goes from 2006 where it's quite low and until it goes to 2014 15 16 we're just skyrocketed so last year we had over 4,000 games that's 11 games per day that's really crazy we don't even know where that's going U maybe steam changes a bit but maybe it keeps the trend up and next year could look a bit like that or it could go even worse maybe it goes like that who knows anyway there's loads of games coming out and that's only Ste you also have consoles you have mobile games and so on so you see that is a big problem just this year a volume of games coming out but there's also another very big problem the second problem not like the of the hook yet there's even more super scary stats and that's related to that that is the landing page of Euro gamer on the day when no man's Sky launched so Euro gamer one of the most biggest influential gaming websites in the world on the day when no man's Sky came out and what we see in red here is all the articles that were about no man's sky on the day which means if if

you're not Norman's Sky you can share you can fight about those two little spots on the landing page with a few other hundred games and of course that doesn't mean Euro gamer is evil they're not they're not getting paid loads of money by son need to do that they simply write articles that their readers want to read and on that Daya was no man's Sky uh on a bigger scale and that is the scary stat we looked at the media coverage at IO we develop different tools and one of the tools basically measures the gaming media landscape so it tracks articles from 10 thousands of websites across the US and Europe and that's the Articles output of all of them um per month and you can see there's some spikes like June when it reh happens or when it goes to the Christmas period and what we highlight here in purple now is the coverage that the top 20 game get so that's your overwatches that's your Division and so on so those games get a good chunk of the total coverage of all gaming uh websites at the other few hundred games that are released constantly have to fight over that yellow bar are so it's

very hard for them to get traction again because press want to write things that the readers want to see and that is often top 20 games so far for the problems we have why it's hard to get good media coverage but we also want to talk about how we can get good media coverage before we do that a few words about me my name is Thomas risener I work for Io Partners at the pr and consultancy agency in Brighton UK and I worked a lot of different games from very big games like League of Legends of smite and endless endless base to to more Indie projects like doing the pr for indicate Europe working Ono in Europe or a normal Lo phone and I also worked as a video game freelance journalist for seven years so I also know the other side of the game what you're looking for as a journalist if you want to cover games but of course the real star of this talk is not the pr side it is the influencer and the Press side um so in preparation for the talk uh I talked to a lot of people um journalists from very high profile websites interviewed them sent them questions were on panels with them

watch talks from other conferences they gave talked a lot of peers to a lot of other PR people what are their experiences so that's kind of the source for this talk where the information comes from so a few famous websites that we talked for this talk that had strong influences for example Waypoint Kotaku the guardian kill screen rock paper shotgun and big European websites so what we're going to talk about today is free chapters first of all we're going to talk is PR even the right thing for you it's not always the case PR is a great tool but not for every game uh we're going to talk about five facts of from the media landscape um five key insights and then we talk uh in the end we're going to have like it's almost like a stepbystep guide how you can good get good media coverage so first chapter is PR even the right thing for you maybe I think there are in general free communication ways how you can read your players and important people you want to sell your game to and I would roughly uh categorize them into marketing which is everything that's

paid for that's Facebook ads that's paid YouTubers and so on everything you spend directly money on you have your community where you talk directly to your players and force their Community to sell your games and you have PR that is influencers that is press that cover your game but you don't pay them to do so you can more or less convince them or work with them so they produce coverage for you and all those things are important and all those things can work great for different games I think there's not one that's better than the other so that's a clim as PR person I think PR PR is good but it's not always the solution for your game and I think especially with that crowded media landscape that we have today is really about finding the right mix for you do you do all of those things do you do maybe two of one maybe just really good at one might as well work but I think it's really important to experiment and also figure out how those things work together for example marketing T tends to work very well for tripa games for casual games copycat games not meaning it a bad way but if you make a match free puzzle game that can work well if it's well made but it's not going to win

an innovation prize at an indie game conference um mobile games for example Community tends to work well with long running games with Niche games and with Early Access games where you build up your community MPR classically tends to work well with classic premium games with hardcore free-to-play games with critics games and for B2B topics and today we're going to focus on the third pillar we're going to focus on PR and influencers how we get coverage from them without paying them to do that best I think it's good to understand the media landscape how it works in general and for that we have some interesting stats that we got together from our tools and the first question is how much media coverage is good coverage it's often really hard to measure if you're doing a good job in P or if it's is this is it enough do you do good PR or bad PR so we looked at the launch coverage of games what we did we looked at the launch day and measured that and then 3 days before when there a bit of hype and the three days after so in general a trip play game tends to get

about 1,500 articles so that's your horizon zero Dawns that's your divisions that's the really really big games a triple ey game a premium indie game um tends to get around 231 articles those are the really the really high-profile me indie games so that would be a spank or um an old boy undertale so they're really really big names and what is really important there always keep your peers in mind a lot of people talk to me about how they want to have really good PR like other indie games like no man's sky but no man's sky was in terms of PR absolutely not an indie game maybe in terms of development but not in PR so we compared the coverage for launch from Norman Sky we can see in the right very high to two actual Indie Games inside and collateral cowboy and you can see it absolutely shrinks them so always pick your peers wisely when you measure if your PR is going well or not secondly we looked at who talks about which platforms especially in if you're working on a console title we

looked at the coverage over the last years from PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and you can see the PlayStation 4 in blue in general gets more coverage than the Xbox in fact on General Media tends to talk 35% more about PlayStation games how that can help you PR is of course that if you work on both platforms it may be wise to always push your PlayStation version First mention it first and see that you got more traction but because more media um just has an easier time talking about PlayStation because they more PlayStation players so they will get more clicks from PlayStation readers we also made the same stat on a country breakdown uh if you look at other European media uh markets sorry for example France um tends to cover PlayStation on an average level where they talk less about Xbox and less about Steam and more about Nintendo than other markets of course it doesn't know doesn't mean they to talk about Xbox at all but just in general less than other markets I think one of the most important graphs from today is looking at media in terms of what is mobile

games media and what is PC and um console media so the big games versus the small games and we looked at the launch coverage again from a very famous mobile game from Clash Royale and you can see when it launches it gets a nice Spike and news coverage but then we compare it to an indie game to We compare it to go simulator when it goes to the games for gold uh program on Xbox and that's not even a strong news speed for them game has been out for a while but you can already see it completely shrinks Clash Royale it makes it very small but then we compare compare it to the launch of an actual AAA game of DX and suddenly you see go simulator looks kind of small Clash Royale is hardly visible on the graph and that is not because Clash Royale did bad PR job and they got bad coverage that is simply because of the fact that there are way less mobile websites than there are console and PC websites so that's always important to keep in mind when you promote your game we also looked at what are the most talked about VR headsets and you can see in blue the PlayStation VR gets some really good bikes especially when it

launches what you can also see in general the Oculus in red gets more media coverage than the HTC V in green so again similar to the consoles uh I would recommend to put the Oculus first if you pitch games to press and then we took we looked at the F the key fact number five a really interesting phenomenon is sometimes you just see that news just start spreading out of nowhere and they get on all websites even in countries that you maybe not serve from a pair point of view but those news just go big and what we see often how that happens is that certain websites cover it your IGN PC Gamer Gamespot Rock Paper Shotgun polygon really high-profile websit that have one thing in common they are english- speaking websites and if two or three of those English websites I can promise you um talk about your news it's going to spread on loads of other English websites but it's also going to spread in loads of other countries that you not necessarily contact directly they definitely act as an opinion leader that uh other countries look at that doesn't mean that there's no value and also doing in the other countries you

will get better coverage if you have German translating material and you talk to German press directly but if you only have money to focus on one country or one market uh it may be advisable to go to the English media because if you win then over you're going to see spread to other countries and the third chapter um I think the junkiest pick of the talk is more or less a a step bystep guide on how you get press coverage in five golden rules so the first step is make your game Tinder ready I think that's really important I think we can learn loads of Tinder because if you're a journalist you get hundreds and hundreds of email of days and you only have a few seconds to check them and that is very similar on Tinder and often you just have that you have one screenshot maybe the title of the game and then you read one sentence so for example that's the game collectic chunk leag has a screenshot here and the text is build whatever ship you want to battle with your friends okay but it could also look like that that's a gift you see oh this we this Teddy B there's a hot dog there's some ship building

going on that looks kind of cool all right there's also fighting okay and then you see the title screen and suddenly you know a lot about the game and then you could describe it as Galactic babies and battle ready space toilet build and battle your ships in any shape and you can see we pitch the we pitch the completely same game just with a more creative wording and with a little gift that shows a lot of the games and suddenly we understand a lot more we understand there's humor we understand you can build lot of different ships with the ship creat because you can already see it and you can also see there's battle going on so as you can see if if you manage to convey your message I think that's the important one how to get the game Tinder ready within 10 seconds you can have a really big Advantage about a lot of other pictures when we talked about media one of the main complaint they get from developers is they get really long email that are hard to read it's not that they don't want do not want to read them but if you get 300 emails a day you can only read so much before you just bleed out of your eyes so really make a game Tinder

ready that's the new elevator pitch um convey your message within 10 seconds really break it down to the most interested element to the most interesting story and a good thing said it before that helps set of gifts big fan of gifts um they can convey a lot of messages that's just some examples of games we've worked on and it can be great to show game some quotes from press if the game is maybe visually not as exciting they can be great to show some cut scenes and gameplay uh in the right corner down just show a gameplay element element or in the left upper corner that is a narrative game a normal Lo phone and it doesn't look as visually exciting if it just seen on the screenshot however in a little gift you can always make like a film trailer that conveys the concept and the theme of the game so the journalist is already intrigued and prepared and then when they look at the screenshots and see it's a text Adventure they're okay with it because they already know what the game is about if you don't know how to make gifts no worries we did put a guide together you can find it at IOP partners.com guide where we just describe how we make gifts how we make

them from trailers uh how which tools we use to record them what are the upload sizes uh what are good ways to use them and we really like to use them um as well in social media as in emails it's a really good tool um if it's not too big to just put it directly into an email and the second thing we can learn from Tinder is it is way better also in terms of PR to be amazing for a few people than okay for many it's one of the most common mistakes I think I saw a statistic on that on online dating that people if they start online dating they put their profile online and they say I like good films I like my friends uh and I like music but who doesn't that's not the point you want to be exciting for a small group that actually wants to talk to you instead of being okay for a lot of people they maybe like your game on Facebook but they're not actually going to buy it in the end so if you go back to the Tinder analogy it is probably way more successful that if you're example if you're a cosplayer your Tinder profile first thing shows a full on cosplay outfit 90% of people will not

like that they will be maybe confused they don't like cosplaying or whatever but the 10% that actually going to like it they will want to talk to you they will want to meet up to you and this the same for games if you pinpoint what your game is um and be brutal with it it might be that you scare off a lot of people but those people that actually care about your game and will spend money on it and want to read articles about it they need to have that information why your game is good and why it is important for them which leads us to the second problem I call it the division problem that is actually a thing that happened that I pitched a cool indie game to a journalist I know and he said I love that game but no way I'm going to cover it because today I have to write four other news about the division first because that's what that gets them load of clicks um so what one way to work with that is I think that's the most important learning from today always try to think in headlines if you pitch games if you're pitch stories try to think if they could make a good headline you could use because if you make a good head that brings clicks that brings the

journalist money they live of that that is their business that's important for them so you help them helping promote your game of course that doesn't mean that all journalists just are money grabbing evil people of course not uh it is bit a driver for them but there are also other ways how you get game coverage um often it's personal reasons personal relationships maybe there's a marketing spending behind it but in general um it is a very good approach to think if your pitch makes a good headline one game that was so good at it is no man's Sky I know it's very controversial but just in terms of PR no man's Sky campaign was an absolute Masterpiece um and it's just in the way how they talked about certain things you would maybe pitch no man's sky in that way you would say no man's Sky we have a new trailer and it show a massive universe that's an okay pitch but how they pitched it they said a Norman Sky trailer invites you to explore the game's 18 quintilian planets I don't know what 18 quintilian planets are I think nobody knows you can't even comprehend it but it doesn't matter because it sounds very exciting it

sounds very scientific and you want to see a video with 18 quintilian planets so they're very much talking about the same thing here but just in a very exciting way another thing they did they were very good at painting mental Ines that get your IM imagination going for example a classic pitch would be we have a new video of Norman's sky and it shows off the procedural generation where everything is unique okay I get that well okay what they pitched was no man's sky is a game in which even the developers haven't seen all of the game and sadly that sounds very exciting you just start to imagine that someone goes up in the morning plays the game and suddenly there a planet with a new weird AI that takes over planets and he discovers things for the first time and post this on the internet and it's really cool so again by describing the same game with interesting language that you can use in headlines they managed to convey a me a message in a really good way um what follows now a few other examples of how

you can think in headlines of course there's no easy template how you can make up those headlines but I think the easiest way is to get some inspiration see what other people are doing and um just get in the mindset of how you can craft good headlines a question I get asked a lot is if you're piture game is it okay to say it is like Minecraft in space or it is like GTA in the desert is it okay to refer to other games I would say yes sometimes it really depends on your point of reference for example we have a game here called northard and that we just recently had a very successful PR campaign with the reason northcut worked well is it looks very similar to a game called banished and it also looks similar to a game called settlers which was massive in Germany but over the last couple of years there were not a lot of games like that meaning there's a high demand for it in that case suddenly referring to other game becomes very interesting for press because if you pitch that game and say I new satas like game northard is

announced they go like okay if you write that in the headline all the satas fans are going to click on it the name of my game is not even that important they just want to serve the SAS fan so if you know you have a good point of reference where there's a high demand I think there's no harm in referencing to other games or even referencing to other art forms we have a game here that's uh called memoranda and there was it's in point of click adventure it looks pretty but by no means it would get the massive amount of coverage it would usually get but the way they pitched it they said it is a game that is inspired by the Japanese author hakuri murakami who is very famous and who has massive following and also a big overlap I think in The Gaming Community um that like his books but there's just no games in that direction so again you have a very strong lead and what you see in the headline which is also interesting it's taken from Kotaku it doesn't even mention the game title because it's not important to the readers because the game title is not known but is important that it's inspired about it offer and by the way

all those examples that I'm showing they all got a massive amount of coverage all those pictures and work headlines they got like all the big media on their board there's also another way to get headlines which is a bit more experimental um it's called Gorilla Marketing and we see an example here from polygot and it's a cool game and by no means I want to offend the developers but it's not it's not the previous game on earth they get massive coverage and how they did it they said the game is free for for everyone that get a certain really hard Binding of Isaac achievement and again why is that great for media because suddenly they can have a headline that first of all mentions binding of ISAC that will get them loads of clicks and it mentions free stuff as well for certain players you you want to find out if you get that game for free that is a great headline that's why they got so much coverage and so much traction with that if you're interested in more insights on Gorilla Marketing and that how that works that's also a talk for me on the GDC World from last year and I know what you could say now you

could say like oh there were good examples but it's really hard to come up with headlines because everything is taken already but it's just not true there's always new angles there's always new ways you can go so just some further examples for example hyperight Drifter was promoted with being that every second in the game looks like a stunning wallpaper that it sounds more interesting than saying it's a pretty game oh boy obviously had a really good hook because it was in development for over 10 years that was that for great headline it's very relatable with the death Focus or a really hard game called devil daggers where there's an achievement that only one person on Earth unlocked again it's not so much about the game as for really interesting story that got them plenty of coverage in loads of countries so now that we figured out our cool Tinder pitch that we can convey in 10 seconds and we figured out um the good headline we want to get now we want to all put that into an email that actually press wants to read that's a really important thing I think the next slide is quite Hands-On and I hope you can use it that's how we write emails at the moment it's called the perfect email

pitch that's our a template and the way it works is first we want to get the attention of the journalists so we write a really catchy subject line in that case it's not just so we we don't say the game title we say it is a mystery game dealing with hobia and self-discovery and suddenly you already have a good hook there you already have an interesting story there and just in instead of just G saying that game is launched today now that we got the interest of the uh journalist the attention of the journalist we want to get the interest so we write a really short game text or pitch text and that's just really straightforward two or three lines what is the story we want to tell you today and why you should care about it and with that we put it directly into the email a nice little animated GI and the trailer underneath or if you don't have a give at least a nice screenshot that may be links to a trailer or at least a nice screenshot some kind of visual element and after that there's little text that we had to do for that game uh sometimes that's extra information you have to put in if you can avoid it skip

the next paragraph and you go to desire because now that we got the chn list we got his attention we also got his interest now he wants to find out more because he's up to for covering that story so here's the desire to get more information that's exactly what we give him what we give him here is a link to our press page with the assets and then we say if you want more information here's a link to the blog post here's a link to an onine press release or here's a link or you can find the full press release copied below and the last step it's not always something you have to do but if it's just a simple news story you want to get coverage on the email list over pretty much then but sometimes you have something you want to have from the journalist and there would be the call to action that could be if you're interested in interview let me know if you want a review a review key just let me know do you read do you want to maybe meet at GDC or certain event just let me know so that's pretty much the way you write emails now and as you can see it's very very short and and compressed in information it's hard to craft one of those emails but once you have it they

tend to get a quite High open and return rates and of course as it always is for email pictures if you can make it personal even better if you know the journalist or what they're talking about add a little sentence in the beginning and say uh High Kate I I really think you really like story driven game maybe you want to check that out and then you run out that pitch so now that we got our perfect pitch email we also want a pitch it to the right people because there's just no point in sending it to people that don't care about it and I can stress is enough and don't know it is really tempting to just get a massive email list and just spread your news out there but it's definitely worth doing your homework losing your of a lot of Google and a lot of Twitter to just find out which journalist at which Outlet cares about your game and will cover it if you have done that if you find out the journalist that will should be interested into your game and you can't find the email address email Hunter is a very good uh website that often helps to find email addresses and you can use it for free it's also very good to look into Freelancers sometimes you find them uh

because they just write certain articles on different websites and they are often especially for smaller games easier to pitch to because they work in a different way than and are often more focused on feature pieces than normal websites are another God you can pray to which is very helpful is official blogs especially if you work on consoles the Playstation blog and the Xbox wire are really great Outlets they will often feature your game but the thing is often they don't ask you so you have to go to them and say we have a release date can we announce it on your blog and they will write you letter a blog post and those things get great coverage so definitely if you do console game try to get in touch with them a lot of the rules we just discuss today also work with streamers and YouTubers however there are a few things that work quite differently first of all they don't care so much about having a good headline instead you want to convince them why that game is really fun to watch so you have to think your headline in that direction and again it really helps to show an animated gift that just shows why the game is funny and why his or of viewers will probably care about it

also uh it's like a press kit you want to give the the streamers and YouTubers something that's easy to work with so you want to do some things like have a little space for your window in your game where you can put your little selfie window in you want to have a window mode and be able to switch off usernames so that it's easier for them to record and stream your games also again in the direction of Gorilla Marketing some companies are really good at creating little special features that makes it more fun to stream your game for example we had dungeon which is famous for having a really good narrator and they made little voice pads that says new subscriber and things like that makes it more fun to watch so we have cluster truck where the developers implemented something that if they saw a big streamer they could just press a few buttons and suddenly they could control something in their game and suddenly it would say speedrun mode baby and the game goes up in 50 times in speed and the streamer doesn't know what's going on the chat goes crazy really good stuff if you make the game more fun to watch and the last rule is make something pull work wory because all we talked about now is how we craft a

really nice pitch and how we get it to the journalists or the influencers that we want to reach but in the end of the day you have to make something that's po worthy because otherwise it doesn't stick what I mean by that is there is push PR where you push something out with marketing muscle where there's maybe not a lot of demand and the opposite of that is PP we have something really really great and people just want to he all of it but you don't actually do something for it you don't do a crazy P you just wait you tweet a bit and they just come for it and of course pool PR is the ideal scenario because it's easier from a PR point of view but to do that you have to make a masterpiece game and that's not always easy so I think the way to go and play it safe is you try to make something as pull if you can but then you also push it because otherwise again you run the risk that people just don't find it even if it's really great so make something pull worth and push it the two last slides from today is just a summary um first of all we talked about the five key facts from the media landscape which is

English media as opinion leader PlayStation gets more coverage than Xbox the average loue numbers um the coverage you can get for AAA game is around 1,500 and for triple I indie game 230 um Mobile Media is way smaller than the media of PC and console games and if you look at Via headsets Oculus gets more coverage in the H to survive and the five golden rules of how you get the games covered make it Tinder ready which means the 10sec rules also use gifts whenever you can try to get loves not likes thinking headlines like a lot of headlines and good headlines you see are either pit um email template that we discussed before really um make the effort and find out the gods you're praying to because there's no point in trying to sell some things to people they just don't want or can't use and the last point is try to make something po worthy

and then push it out thanks a lot for listening um and I will be in wrap up room after if you have questions