PR Success.gif: How to Get Your Game Across in 5 Seconds

[Music] to kick off the talk i would just like to ask the question why i even talk about this topic why i think it's worthy of your time and that comes from my day-to-day business i do run a pi marketing agency for games and we work with clients from and studios from all over the world and with really different experience levels and usually when they come to us they have quite good ideas of certain things they know that the trailer is important they know a store page is important they know they're going to need to press kit but when we go into more details and say we need to work about on gifs we need to have a good power plan about gifs what do you think about that they often look a bit like that because i do think gives still have a bit of a reputation that they're just memes and there's a lot of jokes and it's basically just something for babies and some of it is true that's definitely something gifts can be but that's not everything gifts are there's way more you can do with it so here's just a couple of scenes of different games that we either worked

with or i really like in gif form and i think what you can see in a couple of seconds is that those are really short clips but already you can probably see which games you like of those which you would want to find out more which one you maybe don't want to find out more but we just watched eight games looping through one and a half times and you probably already have quite good connection to some of them so i think that's the real power of gifts that's really what drives the format that you get so much information across really really quickly and that's really helpful in a lot of channels for example it's not uncommon for a tweet with a nice gift to do really well get thousands of retweets we're gonna talk about imager today if you reach the front page you can get hundreds of thousands of views if you happen to land on the reddit front page you can get million reviews um we do deal a lot with pr with sapr with journalists and influencers and our success rate of getting pitches through with them while having a nice gift is way higher than without them and you can also

gives on storefronts or steam for example on kickstart and that of course can mean more money more conversion and i think it's also at the moment that gifts are more relevant than they used to be there's a couple of factors for that one is that they're just way more games than they used to be there's always more games coming out and more and more and more so the attention span i think of a lot of parties be it publishers platform holders your players press and so on their attention spans are just really short so often you just have a couple of seconds to really convince them about your game or at least get them interested to find out more and if you watch a couple of other talks from this year gdc and read current blog posts i'm sure you're going to notice that something we call the grind is more important than ever it seems that for a lot of games the only the most secure way to have a successful launch and successful faints is to build your own community and to build a community you need to have a constant output and constantly get new people in from you generally constantly need to break out of your

little bubble and reach more people and that's what we call the grind and gives are really useful for that because if you work for trailers for example they're really expensive to make uh they lot of work a lot of effort if they don't work out that's that's a big problem if you make a couple of gifts and one of two don't work out that's fine so they're just easier to produce and this is helpful in that in the current environment and i think that the whole philosophy of that the grind is really important is also supported by steam because they make wish lists very important at the moment so really like working a couple of months hard to break out of your bubble to reach a lot of people get a lot of wish list it's just really important that right now so what we want to talk about today is three topics we want to talk what good gift looks like how to make a good gift and where to post it before we do that we have to get a bit of an awkward topic out of the way that is how to really pronounce give because some people say gif and some say give so i really wanted to know how to really pronounce gif so i went on how to really pronounce gif.com and they say you say gift

so like gift but without the tea so i'm gonna say gif and it looks like there's a lot of people that feel really strongly about this so strongly that you can buy t-shirts and stickers i don't feel strongly about this if you want to say jif that's pop totally fine by me but i'm going to go with git for today and what was the another thing it's more like a definition for the talk today i see give more philosophy than a file format and what i mean by that that is obviously give is a file format but sometimes you just take a short video and post that on twitter sometimes you use giphy sometimes you use some html format and for me that all counts as gif so when i say gift today i just mean like a short video clip of your game that he posts somewhere and before we start off a few things that might be helpful to know about me my name is thomas ryzendecker i really like having my name in flame fund i also founded a pr agency in brighton uk and worked in pr for years worked on over 70 titles in the beginning quite

big ones like league of legends and paladins and now we really focus on with their own agency focus on premium indie games like orwell on no heaven's world very middle of that kind of game which i think gives me it gets me in a quite good position to talk about a topic like that because we deal with a really big quantity of games and obviously if you work on so many different projects you also get a lot of different data and see how many how different campaigns work out and working with those small indies they really work on a budget often that's very tight so they really depend on really efficient communication methods so what does a good gift like a good gift look like if you just want to know what a gift needs to look like i guess on the front page of reddit if i would know that i would not be standing here i would be on an island having a cocktail um it's really hard to figure out what really connects in a gif um i've i've thought about it a lot there's not one universal template you can take i think it's really boils down to figure out what the core of your game is

and then test a lot of different things to see what resonates i think that's a really important part so while we can put up a formula how you make the perfect gift we can go through different gifts that hopefully inspire you and show you different categories you can go down and experiment but it really comes down per game what is the ideal gift for what it is i think so gives can be really good to use for gameplay gifs this is the most simple form of a gif i think it's just recording like gameplay footage and it can be really useful for example to show really complex gameplay mechanics that's a game called east shade it looks really beautiful you walk around you take pictures of the landscape and they transport into paintings and you've described it in the sentence that probably sounds pretty boring but if you see it like that it's really great within one second you can really see how that game works another way a certain type of game that just works good in gifs if a game just looks really cool this is my friend petro that works excellent they have a really big social following it's definitely also made to look

cooling gifs and another way to work with gifs with the format and take the most out of it is i think funny gifs work quite well if you have a narrative game if you want to have a certain scene it can really help to just have one or two lines in the punch line it's it's really good to get that across there's of course bug gives i'm sure you've heard of them if you've seen them there's a game called water golf and while they just look funny they really can go big um we see some numbers here here's another one from a game called overland and all that happened is that dark got really big and like a i got a thousand retweets um and there's no formula or like no preset how you can create funny bug gifs i think the lesson to learn there is whoever works on the game and can encounter bugs i think they should be equipped with the program and then the programs and the knowledge how the record gives because when it happens that just takes a couple of seconds to record and they can really give you a big pr boost it's really a shame to not have just that setup to record those gifts there's of course also choke gifts

here's a really good one so uh sony santa monica they were really great we've got the four gifts um and there's also event related gif here's one for valentine's day and i think those are really funny those are really great those are great to entertain your community the only thing that's important there that i think people need to know what your game is already so those gifts work so i would always say those are more important for more established brands than completely new games another gift category that i think is often overlooked this asset gives that just means using assets like a little banner on a kickstarter page a little game description panels on a on a steam page like you see in the left or on the right just showing like more or less a menu of an emotion it can add a lot to just have that moving elements that makes it way less makes it look way less boring so i think that's a really great way to also use the give from it then there's something called main gifs and that's probably one of the most important slides of the talk

um i highly recommend making a main gif for every game you work on and what we see what the main gif is what my definition of that is it's just it's a mini trailer and we use that in loads of different ways we use it to pitch to investors to publishers again to press we show it to players for really important news that main trailer that main give is like a little trailer that shows off the most important aspects of your game and really have a good think what you want to show of your game on the top left with for example omno and for that game it was really important to show off the animation nicely that's why it has quite high frame rate and to show the different environments below we say game called hamsterdam and for that game the goal was clearly to show off the cute protagonist but then to show a lot of gameplay varieties we have a lot of really short shorts but you just see there's loads of different stuff in the games and those are quite visual games so those main gifs are easier to make but then let's have a look at a game that is maybe less visual it's called heaven's

votes it's adventure game it looks nice but there's no explosions in it there's a lot of walking a lot of reading and what we made here is that we a want to show a big game play a big variety in scenarios and sceneries that's why we have a lot of different scenes but the other thing we want to get across is that the game is developed from the developers of 80 days which was a very successful game so that's a big a big plus for the title and also it has a really interesting gameplay mechanic where you decipher where you translate a whole language and that's something that's really complicated to show in detail but we can spell it out in sentence and hinted it so the goal here really is not that people fully understand how the mechanic works but how to get the top level pitch like the one line what's really important about this game so within a couple of seconds you have that tiny trailer that explains really complex game similar here for a game called gladio bots which was a really big challenge to get that gif nice because in the in the game you have an ai editor where you program an ai and

for your robot and then you press play and your robots fight in the arena so that means half of the game is a menu it's just that ai editor so that's obviously visually not the most attractive thing so here was really helpful to work with text in between really explain how the game works have that split screen in the beginning um and again imagine getting that described that game described in text form versus that little gif i think it makes a really big difference to get across that core what's important about this game so what makes a good gif i think there are a couple of core rules that i try to follow um one is definitely it has to be eye-catching don't start with like a long black screen just like go right in have something have your best scene in the beginning because a lot of people just gonna scroll through it and if it doesn't have anything cool in the first second that's about it always assume that people don't know what your game is even if you've already had a couple of big tweets there's always new people seeing your stuff i think it a good gift has to work for newcomers as well it doesn't need to be complete as we saw with heaven's fault it just needs to

be enough that players understand what the core premise of the game is and really important for all the social media things of course is that people love that stuff versus just liking it so if you can pick between making one really really cool gif or 10 to 20 average gifts always go for the one that people love that has the potential to be shared on social media stuff that is just okay it's just not quite worth it so how do we make pretty gifts that's actually easier than i think that a lot of people would assume um step number one we want to record a gif the quick and easy way to do that is with an on-screen recording tool it's a little program for example like gift cam screen to give or for mac users lightscape and those are all free and basically they just give you like a little window on screen and then you can record whatever is under that window and then you have a gif and that's it so if you want to make a bug gif that takes a couple of seconds it's really great there's also programs like obs fraps or quicktime where you can

record video footage of those at that window and that is maybe more important if you want to have a really sophisticated gif and want to edit it later and the really bare bones thing to get a gif is if you have a youtube video or a youtube trailer and you just go to gifi.com and you put it in there and you literally set down the duration and the start time and then you have a gift like that's from the untitled goose game i just made that yesterday that took like 20 minutes to do uh 20 seconds sorry so it's extreme it's extremely easy to to if you have a already have a youtube link would give you to just make one small gif um pros if you want to make a really a really really quality gear for a quite challenging one because you maybe need to find a certain sci fi file size you're gonna have to cut it in a video editor there's loads of different video editors usually for the purpose of a gif it doesn't really matter which one you use as long as you're comfortable with it if you want to do mega hardcore photoshop can also edit frame by frame

next up is just some editing tips those are not very scientific but i've been just making hundreds of gif over the years so this is like my top tip collection of what i do when i edit them i really don't like having watermarks on gifs like little logos just in the corner because they often look a bit markety and it really doesn't help for a lot of social media stuff and pitching if you have a lot of really short scenes which happens in gifs i try to leave them at least on for one second because i think everything below that it's really hard for the eye to just get what's going on in the screen i really avoid having gameplay and text at the same time so i try to have either or because it's always it's just such a tiny window where i see most gifs if needed if you need more space or need to cramp up more content in a short gif i sometimes speed up gives by 10 percent obviously it really depends on your game if you make a super realistic golfing game maybe don't speed it up by 50 and the golfer goes like that but if you have a narrative game and the cursor moves a bit quicker that's

probably fine first frame is really really important never ever have a black screen as a first frame the reason for that is often when gifs don't load for some reason if there's preview windows you're always going to see the first screen so if there's any issue that first screen is a screenshot that shows up instead if you give and the next tip is start with something eye-catching we had that throttle in the beginning and i think that's also something hollywood does quite a lot if you look at trailer from really big plus blockbuster films now they often start with like a five second summary of the real trailer and then the trailer starts and that's i think is related with just getting the attention span of people immediately that's an example of a game we made in trailer form actually for omno which starts really slow and it tries to build up moods and we thought that's not going to cut it and that's why we cut in the third scene where the guy falls down and you just see animation really quickly well it's really important to get that mood across for the game we want to see we want to definitely show people the

animation straight away so i think just having a really strong scene just in the first one or two seconds really helps and that's a really practical gift i really like a trick i really like that recycle your trailer into multiple gifts if you can you finish your trailer first and then you take your trailer and cut out 30 seconds of that and make a teaser trailer after that and then you cut out 10 gifts out of that and the main gift so with that one big trailer asset that you need to do anyway you immediately have a whole bunch of small assets with no extra work step number two after recording and editing the gif is now we want to compress it and there's a website called easygift.com and it's so good i don't know why it's so good it's a bit criminal it's for free and you can just upload your gifs and move a couple of sliders around and see how it compresses how the image quality changes how big the gifs are it's so good for really like precisely compressing stuff i love it if you compress things if you want to get to certain selfies

it's really important to just figure out what is the what is the most visual aspect of your game and then go from there usually there's three things that fight with each other which is the frame rate the length of the gif and the resolution so if a game is like oh no the animation is really important you want to probably have a good frame rate if you want to tell a little story a little choke but it needs to be longer you won't have certain length um if you have a game like east shade that looks like a really nice painting then you probably want to have a nice resolution and there's a good chance you can't have all three of those so just make sure you know which one you want to have personally i'm usually aiming for 20 10 to 20 frames per second for gif sometimes 30 if it's really important about animation i try to make them 5 to 15 seconds long for emails i usually use 500 pixels in width and for social media usually 600. if you want a step if you don't want to do step 1 and 2 and go to step 0 and just let the community to the gifts that's also an

option i think there's surprisingly little games that do that a really famous example i think is though is polybridge they have a really good gdc talk about that that is on the world and on youtube and in the game you build a little bridge and it's physics-based so there's a lot of funny stuff happening and with the built-in gift generator people were sharing crypts like crazy and there was a really good marketing tool for them um just from their slides that's their top 10 posts on reddit got 12 million views so that was definitely worth the extra work so in my opinion if you have a physics based game or a game where kid people can create stuff and funny thing happens really consider putting a gift generator in there there's also a good evolution from that idea from a game called nimbatus and they took the idea one step further so for the kickstarter we had a demo and the demo had a gift generator and if you generate a gif in there and then tweet about it you can win free copies of the game so they really get people in to play and share stuff while you can also win something so it's quite nice for the players i think but obviously also great from a pr point of view

so where and how do you use those gifs what is the best way to do that well there's a lot of there's a lot of channels where you can use gif and if we would go through them one by one in detail we would be here for a whole week um so for today i'm just gonna pick my top five channels that i think you can make the most out of your gifts and also for that i have to say it's a it's a road map and it gives you some tips per channels but it's definitely not a complete thing because there's just so much to to do per channel that i'm sure you're going to find way more detailed talks about each of those so my favorite one to use gives really good is twitter and the one really good thing about twitter is if you have a good gif you can really break out of your social media battle so if you get a lot of tweet if you get a lot of retweets if you get a lot of likes um your tweets start showing up on really timelines of new people you've never heard before so it really helps to just reach new players really good on twitter it's also that movements on timelines stand out quite a bit here's

an example from polygon treehouse the studio in cambridge and they just have if uh a tweet here with text versus the same with an image versus the same with and give and you can clearly see that the one with motion stands out the most in the timeline especially if you think how you use twitter you just probably scroll through like that so it really helps having that first second animation going um there's also like some stats like david wheely from the first three set when he shot a gif versus a screenshot people were sharing it 10 times as much so i think it's really worth having animated ifs even if just promoting a blog post or like a small menu or something even then i think having some kind of motion is really important i highly recommend just experiment with screenshot set today it's a really popular hashtag it helps you to break out of your social media bubble even more i would try to do that as often as you can and i think also engine techs that's ue4 for the unreal engine and hashtag made with unity for unity is a fantastic source to get more traction if you use that engine they

like your gif and they retweet you you get a lot of you know a lot of new eyes on your game and you can do that quite a lot and that i think is the beauty of twitter that you can basically post as much if you want like obviously 10 gifts per day but if you post one per week over a long period of time that's totally fine the people that follow your twitter they want to see your stuff so they won't be offended if you tweet regularly and it can really help to reach new people in terms of file format gifs on twitter are to play and the compression is quite predictable which is nice so autoplay is a big plus if you upload a mobile you have a five megabyte limit from desktop 15 and i usually go with a a pixel width of 600. um there's different preferences with people like some people also like to post more like uh square gifs so they look better on mobile i just prefer a youtube format but i think the important thing is 600 pix listen with also mind that if you post a gif on twitter off you would have that little logo in the corner that says give so if you don't put anything important there

otherwise you have to reformat your gif a bit you can also upload short videos on twitter if they are under 6.5 seconds they will autoloop which is great they also have sound and you don't struggle with file restrictions which is also great one thing however i will say that is twitter sometimes compresses video really weird so if you use video check if it looks good and if it doesn't maybe go for a gif instead facebook also added gift support a while back but i think it's way harder to reach new people with facebook so i've just mentioned here that give also work i usually cross post on both part phones but twitter is usually the one that gets way more traction i think a really underrated platform is img or imager um don't know how to pronounce it either i say intro now um if you hit the front page which is not too hard at the moment we have a quite good success rate because i think it's not so saturated as the other networks you get easily eighty thousand to two hundred thousand views what's really popular there is something that looks like on the right which is

blog posts that are quite personal and usually what we do is we have a nice headline we have a first gif and then we describe in a sentence what is the game and then we have another gif and then we describe in the sentence what happened in that gif and so on and they usually have like four or five gifs and then you say goodbye really important to nimja is that you have a really good headline in the first frame because that's the only thing that shows up in the preview window that's how people are going to find you and if they upload you enough then you go trending in terms of file sizes is really generous you can use up to 200 megabytes per image or per video up to 30 seconds long and intel converts gifs into videos anyway so you might as well just use videos because it's a bit better quality if you are not familiar with img yet and you want to start new account it's no problem at all um it's great for twitter and imgur that you can just go in fresh and if you have good content it just gets shared and you can really reach new people however they have really strict uh spam filters so in the beginning don't post any links you get a notification once you're

mature enough on the platforms you can post links but don't do the beginning also hashtags are really essential especially game dev and gaming this is how people find you nimja so what i would recommend is having a longer those longer blog posts for whenever you do a big update a big announcement and just post like small little gifts like on twitter if you have a good one in between reddit is a bit like the holy grail of posting a gift because you know on the right we saw one that has 1.6 million views the first tree got over 3.5 million views and 50 000 views on the store page of steam so that's really good um the downside of reddit however is like it's really hard to be successful on reddit but it is doable one of the most important things is obviously they have the self-promo rules so um only 10 of your posts can be about your work and your game so you have to just be part of the community talk to people post in other subreddits so you hit that quota that's why it's also advisable to start an account early and i think

the big one is each subreddit has different rules they all work a bit differently they all have different moderators if you really want to take it seriously on reddit i think you really have to work through those rules look at the community for a while start talking to them and just like don't go in and try to market your thing but really try to be part of the community but it really it really pays off um often really personal headlines work where people say oh i've been working on my game for five years for like two years i've been working with my wife for my game all that kind of stuff is usually good to just um get people's attention that really that i'm i'm a small indie dev or i'm a developer i'm passionate about that that's kind of stuff that usually works you can upload direct video or you can upload giveaway gifty cats the only thing that i would never do is uh put youtube links or store pages on reddit that's stuff that usually doesn't fly well in most subreddits and for reddit i would also say be part of the community but don't overthink it it's the same with twitter just post stuff and see what sticks

often you have a quite good idea what is popular about your game but i tell you there were so many times when we were super surprised what is actually the thing that people get really excited about your game the next one point number four um is emails and this is a pitch email we sent to press of a game called look lydian skies and it's in the right email it has like bullet points and it's bold writing and links so it's it's quite well formatted for what it is but now we look at the same um email where we change the game description with an actual gif and then you can see that that email isn't only way shorter it also looks way better because suddenly you can understand the game mechanic that is really complicated to explain so my definite top tip for gifts is like put them in emails right away we use that if you pitch to press publishers influencers to your fans newsletters all that kind of stuff i think whenever you promote your game putting that email straight that give right in is really really helpful one warning that not all email programs

support gives and really it is outlook that doesn't support it too well especially all the output versions the newest one does so depending on your target group you might need to think about that if for some reason you only made people without outlook maybe don't use gifs but if that's not the case go for this again mind the first frame if a gift doesn't load in email for some reason it will take the first frame as a screenshot and just show that i usually aim to have a gif between one and four megabytes in an email or up to eight megabytes if you want to push it for example if we email influencers youtubers and streamers we go up to eight megabytes because often they're gonna work on pcs anyway on desktop and they have good internet connection so it's not a problem but if you deal with mobile users that's maybe a bit much and the other dimensions if a post gives in emails usually try to aim between 350 and 600 px and the last point is store pages steam supports gifs officially for a while now which is great you can use them in banners or just to

show your game this is house flippers really great example and they show the game mechanics in a two-second gif and make it look really interesting i think you can also use gifs in community updates which is cool for updates and you can use them in the awards section the only thing is that the whole steam page shouldn't have more than 50 megabytes of combined as 15 megabytes of combined assets and the last point is kickstarter you can use gifs there as well for banners for game gifts for rewards and i think really important there is we here we have a kickstarter page and you're going to get a lot of traffic but only a very small friction of those people on your page will actually click the other video and watch it so what i would highly recommend is just having a gift quite on top that those people that don't click on the video or don't necessarily want to watch it still see your game in motion and they don't have any file size limits but of course keep in mind that you don't put up like five gigabytes of gears because then the site probably just breaks um so just a summary slide for the end plan your gif is step number one i think

really important to plan gifts properly in your pr plan and save time so you can actually make them prepare for main gifts remember the rules for the gifts that keep on giving um if you make if you go into gift making firstly you want to record your video with on-screen recording with the different tools we talked about then go to compression easygift.com highly highly recommend it and think about which aspect which visual aspect out of those three is the most important for your gif always keep in mind if you have a trailer recycle it make hundred gifs out of it really useful why not and whenever you do a give mind the first frame and make sure the first frame is really good to posting your gifs twitter is my favorite channel movement really stands out there and you can experiment and break out of your social bubble a lot imja is at the moment really good for games to reach people first frame is important headline is really important and never ever forget the hashtags because otherwise your your posts just disappear

on reddit there's no easy rule apart from try to really be part of the community and try to understand it live with it write comments and see how other people do stuff in emails always post gifts and then if you can but really mind the file sizes for the steam store page the same really great to use gives but wouldn't go over 50 megabytes and on kickstarter i would definitely focus on the top gif just under the trailer so people see a game in motion anyway even if you don't watch the video thanks a lot for listening