The 5 Pillars & Pitfalls of Indie Games PR

[Music] hello and welcome to everyone can do PR um today I'm going to tell you five things you should get right to to again talk to PR better and get more headlines and five things you should avoid before I can tell you how you should do PR I have to tell you two other things one is please tell your C cell phone off and the other thing is please don't forget to evaluate the session by the end so I think it's safe to assume that most of the people here in the room either have launched again already or about to launch a game and whenever I have launched a game it felt a bit like that your game is just like one of those little stars in the Big gaming Cosmos and it's just so hard to get attention from anybody be it press be it streamers be it YouTubers be it players and that's not only a feeling I have that's actually the truth if you just look at some numbers in 2015 alone there were over 3,000 games released on Steam that makes eight games a day and if we go get go a bit more crazy and we look into mobile and it doesn't even

count Google Play we're just talking iOS last year there were over 160,000 games submitted they makes 450 games a day so that is your competition if you release a game of course some of those games are weird ripoffs some of them are not competitor of few but the point is there's a lot of other games out there and they also want attention from people the good thing is um that's why there I think there two solutions how you can still succeed and they're both quite easy at least technically number one is um how to make it but number one you're one of those people easy right you're just so ridiculously good in what you do you're just otes out of your generation you just move people whatever you did it's just so good that you don't really need PR if you're that good you cannot talk about your game at all and somebody will Discover it and it will go big or you can talk way too much about your game but still be successful

but the second path and that is what 90% of people of of other developers will encounter 99% I would say the solution to still be successful is you make a really good game and then you also make good PR and then get the word out there because just making a good game is just not enough anymore those days are gone I remember when I was little and I went into a GameStop there were every every week there were two or three new games that is that is the past so today we're going to look at five things you should get right five things you shouldn't get right five things you shouldn't do and five future Trends um and because one part of PR is also the set expectations right uh we're going to talk about a lot about the five things you need to get right so there will be like 80 to 90% of the presentation and then very shortly the other two topics some words about me before we start um my name is Thomas risener I'm from Austria currently I live in the UK in Brighton and I work for Io partners and we are Consulting n PR agency

uh I work on the pr side and we cover a right variety of games that might there are some really big games who worked for a long time League of Legends and with Smite but also a lot of smaller games like to dark a Meo dungeon of the endet or fragments of him before I went into PR uh I was a freelance video game journalist so I also know the other side of the game and my way from being pressed to being a PR person was actually just helping my friends out for the indie game which turned out quite successful so I also know how it is to work with very little knowledge in that sense and also very little um resources what I won't cover in this talk um is the basics of PR they also really important but today we're going to talk about the five things you should focus on there are also a lot of other Basics like how your website should look like what is a press kit what is a basic social media setup how to write a press relas properly how to build a mailing list if you're interested in those topics um you can find a presentation on that on my Twitter and also on the GDC World form last year's GDC

Europe so let's get right into it what are the five things you need to get right number one is positioning and that sounds really easy and I bet most people think they have figured it out but I think also most people are wrong positioning your game right is extremely really hard but if you do it that really pays off because otherwise you will have a lot of PR efforts that just go nowhere really because you don't have a goal you don't know what to focus on so what what you want to do is figure out one key message and one key artwork that represents a game that is the basic idea behind the game whenever you say the name of the game that people should see in their head so what I like to do is a test test to figure out if if I've got the positioning for a game right is just think about you're going to a dinner with your mom or with your friends and they're really not interested in the video games and then they're asking you so what game are you working on and then you have a really short attention window of about 3 to 10 seconds to explain what that game is about

and if you say oh it's rud like a random generator with cool chip tune and Mom would start playing on the phone and that's it youve lost our attention but if you say go simulator you'll be like go simulator what's that or if you say you're making a Space game with with ships that as big as the Titanic they probably be like okay that sounds interesting they can picture something they can connect and that is the basic thing you're not selling a game you're always selling a story be it to players but also mostly to press because similar to your friends that don't like video games they have a very short attention span because press just gets flooded with new games and also a bit controversial statement but if you figure out your positioning I think it's totally fine to go back to the drawing board we had that happening quite sometimes that you think You' figured out what the good positioning for a game is then you have a press release and then and then actually you see what what players respond to or what fans figure out and pick out what is actually interesting about the game you shouldn't change your positioning every 10 minutes or a week

before launch but it doesn't hurt in the beginning to go back once or twice and now I've just uh three examples from games that are hard to position but they did it perfectly right one is this Warf mine and that game is absolute PR nightmare because from far it looks like that you cannot picture anything it looks a bit boring it doesn't have a real main character uh the war the word war in the title already paint something like Call of beauty and a lot of ego shooting and it's already a bit weird and and what they did to prevent all those things from happening your head when you just read the title or see the screenshot and from you getting bored they always using a sub headline and that sub headline is in war not everyone is Soldier and as soon as you see that that immediate that paints a picture in your head you know that that game is probably not pro war it's probably not really patriotic uh it doesn't have one strong protagonist but a lot of people and those people are not soldiers so with that little line which

was probably really hard to come up with they were doing a lot of positioning already a similar example or a different example a game called axium word and axium word is look at that title like that doesn't mean anything axium word is weird weird thing um and also the key cannot picture a lot what the game is about but if you know the game you know it's it's quite a bit like a modern version of Super Metroid and that's the whole thing it communicates really it has a really sci-fi title the thing that the visual sty is also like quite Super Metroid so they knew the target audience they they wanted to have Super Metroid fans and that exactly what they communicate so that's on spot and another game that was talked here about a lot is super hot and Superhead top technically is a bit complicated to explain but they just summed up their whole positioning in a straightforward sentence an FPS game where time moves only when you move and immediately to get what the game is about out so that's very well

done the second thing you need to get right is mastering new speeds um what I mean by that every game has a certain amount of PR ammunition and you have to really master that how how you position them and how you sum them up or not just imagine every game has certain PR beats they definitely going to happen you have the game announcement you have the first screenshots you have first trailer a Beta start the release date the release that's thing you can talk about with press but depending on how important are or how high your profile is or how cool your game looks you have to use those things very differently if you're half life free and you're going to announce me a game people are going to go insane the red load of Articles it's everywhere first screenshot people go crazy first trailer people go crazy if you're small Indie Dev making a jump and run that looks all rightish but not the best game ever you announce it no one will care first screenshots no one will care first trailer probably two people will care but if you sum all those fre the free things up you have a pretty pretty good announcement if game announce and brief

screenshots and a trailer and quite some info you have a much higher chance of getting covered but that of course also means you've already wasted the first three points on that list and that is really the art about knowing how much you have to use without wasting it to play to to come through to press and how you can master that is either by hiring an expert or becoming an expert and by becoming an expert I think key is just you read loads of websites each day and just figure out what they write about what is big enough for them to cover and what is not um but not also talking about which messages you give to press it's also important in which timing that happens and they can make quite a difference but it's not hard to do and the io we looked at data from thousands of Gaming website around the world and when they publish articles and as you can see they have really high output in tune because of e3 so that's probably a time you want to avoid if you're small inde Dev or you look at the Christmas period where there's loads of Articles coming up it

would be more clever for you to go for a summer for a big announcement or your launch the same goes for weekdays unsurprisingly press is not too happy about working on weekends which is why there are less articles on weekends also Mondays start a bit slow Fridays start a bit early because the weekend starts so if you have the option you want to choose a day between Tuesday and Thursday of course that doesn't guarantee you get covered but it gives you better chances and also on the day itself it depends um what time you want to pick or always go for office hours even for bigger games I can tell you it makes a huge differ if you're outside of office hours and keep the time zones in mind what we usually do if you want to cover us and European press we go for that timing which is 6 PST is two g&t so you get the US people in the morning and the European people early in the afternoon if you send out Communications and also keep local bank holidays in mind may sound a bit silly already happened quite a lot of times that you just forget that it's a big bang holiday in the UK or in the US and then you miss out a lot of press because

you didn't wait today and you didn't spend the time of Googling 10 seconds if there's bank holiday going on those were things mostly aimed at press just some words about YouTubers and streamers it would be an own talk but we don't have time for that so just some really important points I think are worth pointing out YouTubers and streamers they are not getting paid for headlines they're not interested in having cool stories they're interested in having games that look fun to play so when you write to them I would always advise you make it really short you have any an email you have one sentence you have a really nice gift where you get the game play and then you have a link to the trailer that's all they need and that's most of the things they would care about many of the YouTubers and streamers that cover a lot of lot of different games um that doesn't not so much apply like for mobas but for like really classic premium games they will only cover your game once and play it so you should think about if you want to do that if you want to get some hype before launch or if you rather wait till the game is actually out so people can buy it as well when they see it

uh definitely try recording your own game before if it works if you have a mobile game sorry to tell you that streamers and YouTubers it's just not such a big deal and definitely watch out for scam if you get an email from PewDiePie 5000 spaceship to at outlook.com it's probably not a legit email and an easy way to look if if that email is real or not is most you YouTubers if you go at their about section they have actually their business email address and if that email address that sent you the request and one doesn't match you can just ask them and say hey can you write me from your official email address to confir confirm your real um the third thing you need to get right and that's the most important thing the most important is your trailer so if I would be small in the dev and I have a limited amount of money and I can only do one thing I would throw all my money on the trailer why is that um firstly that is the thing if you send an email that says reveal trailer or launch trailer those are those are the emails that get the most open rates from press and streamers and so on because

everybody just wants to see what the game looks like um so you have to make that one minute in Spotlight count that's the one minute where you definitely get some iPod from press and in that one or two minute trailer you have you want to sell credibility that comes back to the key message that means in a one small Spotlight what the trailer shows you have really you have to sell that one message you have in mind it could be your interesting story it could be your art style it could be your gameplay don't do all of it focus on on it and really sell that once but thing that makes your game special small not on trailers also in terms of timing we generation YouTube and Snapchat make the most first 15sec counts if they boring you're already losing a lot of people especially if you make your first or second game it doesn't make too much sense to put on your studio name and know it's nice and you want to get it out there but do it in the end of the trailer get right in the action and also keep it short and sweet so I would say like 1 minute to 1 minute 30 is Max if you if you're new studio and you make a first Trail

um two examples that I can't show you because of time reasons but I'm going to talk about them anyway for really good trailers is again this wolf mine again the game looks horrible if you just see it it doesn't look too interesting but what they did uh in their announcement trailer was really cool that's what it looks like you see some soldiers running it has really dramatic Hungarian music so it always gets the Eastern European taste which is the setting of The Game and by the end of it the camera keeps zooming in that war zone and then goes straight into the house just see people sitting and crying normal people and again it says in war not everyone is a soldier so that really sets the atmosphere of the game and the point is if if people are into the atmosphere and to see that they want to know more and they will be okay with the gameplay look not looking that great on first side but if they just see the game play they would just click your away and not even come to the point where they interact with the game and again super hot really different approach really away from the atmosphere what they did in their trailer they start with super hot which

is weird by itself so in the first two seconds people are really okay I might as well watch that then they explain the game play mechanic really shortly um so first they got your attention with the super hot then they get your interest because they show you the time mechanic which is cool and then and then they just bombard you with quotes that prove to you that that time mechanic does not only look cool that it's actually cool so they really sell it to you from a to c that's really brilliant um fourth point you should do something called Gorilla Marketing and that is low lowcost unconventional marketing tactics and that maybe sound a bit complicated but if we just look at one example um that I really like to give because it explains you perfectly what Gorilla Marketing does and it's just too good it's too good to be true but it actually happened when burnout 2 came out a claim said on the launch day they're going to pay all speeding tickets on the US which is absolutely insane it's like May let GTA just

everybody can drive how he wants and there's a lot of accidents a lot of people would die and obviously press found that's really cool and was writing about it gaming press general interest press all over the place and obviously the police was over reading that and we're saying Hell No that's not going to happen and they totally forbid it and of course gaming press and general interest press they picked up on that as well again and said Okay a g can't do that no way that's going to happen with this beating tickets and they claim knew that from the beginning so if you think about it they were right wrting one press saying we're doing that the same thing and then a second one saying we can't without ever having to pay anything and getting load of headlines in two big waves that's just brilliant so why would you care about things like Gorilla Marketing first of all it is an extra PR beat so we were talking about that PR immun mission in the beginning and that gorilla marketings uh things those PR stunts those are things you can just make up they're not given they're not set um you can just invent them they hard to do they're hard to pull off but they give

you extra PR ammunition they reach really different Target groups they often reach general interest Media or different media that's not necessarily gaming they often happen on a small budget and they also go in a quite untapped field of course there also risks of Gorilla Marketing it often breaks breaks the Boost it is not always 100% leally And you have to look before if it's worth it and it doesn't always start in good PR and I know that saying that or PR is good PR but that is not true I don't think so because if you just want to have PR somehow I would advise you you take your phone make a video of how you punch your co- programmer in the face that will get you a lot of coverage or you just fire a pregnant coworker that will also get you a lot of Headlands but that's not good PR and that's not going to sell your game so it also has to fit the theme of your game what whatever you do with Gorilla Marketing um and what we have now uh I'm going to show you two examples of Gorilla Marketing for first of all what they did but then also what impact on

media and on what one what impact on sales that H St had so there's a game called crawl which looks really cool really cool pixel art style what they did they made a boss uh a boss called gab neural which looks quite familiar it's the boss of WF and because the gifts look so nice and it's a funny idea that putting putting that out alone got them loads of headlines in different media and then Gabe new also was writing them an email and saying oh I think that's funny um I'm fine with you putting me in the game so they were lucky as well they got two new speeds out of that how did that reflect the media coverage we look at Europe exclusively European media in that sense now um when they announced the game in August and they had the Early Access launch and some news and some previews they got about 20 articles then Gabe new came along and totally crushed that and get over 100 articles so in terms of media presence that was crazy compared to what they did before that really got them forward did did also reflect on sales here's the sales data from the same

period we have some SM small bumps and spikes with updates and then we have that the first uh line is where gab new where the gab new GI was released and the second one is where gab new said okay you can put me in the game and as you can see they have two small uh spikes from that which is quite nice they like little updates but they just had to make one boss uh but still it's not as impressive as the coverage numbers so in terms of immediate sales effect it was nice but it wasn't the best thing ever but then again PR is also about repeating the message getting the name out of you again over and over I just know it for myself when I saw undertale first on the website I was like that looks ugly I don't want to play that but if you see it 20 times in a row you're probably going to play it so it is also art form by itself keeping in the headlines and if you wonder what this uh sales bike is over there that was actually streamer so that had Direct more sales effect and then we have another example for a game called shooting stars I worked on um it's an iOS premium game

that was first released on iOS and then we made an Android version and it was obvious that the Android version is going to have a very high piracy rate and we're not going to earn a lot of money with it so what happened what we did we made a second we made two Android versions one was the normal one and one was the pirate version and in the pirate version there's a boss coming up that says to you we know you pirated our game so you can't beat that boss that's it like that game is over for you it can't progress anymore and we just released that illegal pirate version on illegal Android file sharing game platforms so only Pirates will play it and we found that's funny a lot of other people found that's funny it got really good mainstream and gaming media coverage and different things like Forbes kotak video gaming 247 touch aate and so on and that's like especially for mobile games that is Media that's really hard to reach so how did it reflect the number of Articles we've counted on the left all articles the game got before four which means the announcement

announcement trailer launch trailer previews reviews interviews with quite some PR and on the right just the pirate PR stunt and just a pirate PR stunt alone that one PR PR beat of making a little illegally second version and sending out a press release about that got more than half of the coverage than all the other coverage combined so really good for them in terms of sales uh we see on the left in in the blue with the iOS sales with the iOS launch going up going down quite normal the Android launch boosts iOS a bit Android starts to sell and then we have the Android PR St and then the Android PR uh sales really went up and I think it's also one of the few games that had the same nearly the same amount of IOS and Android sales because of that P number the number five of things you should get right I events and there's a lot to talk about events uh they're great absolutely fantastic for Network they're great for recruiting they're

good for getting inspiration they're good for feedback sometimes they're good for press but if you look solely at PR there's a very limited number of events that can that pay off for you we again have a graph um which events get covered by media how how many times uh what we don't see on the graph is efree because e free if if free would be on there you would still see games come and the other thing would just shrink down and you couldn't see them anymore but also for an indie if fre fight is quite hard to reach so we left it out for that graph and as you can see Gamescom gets a lot of Articles Tokyo game show gets a lot of Articles GDC as well but everything after that it really gets more quiet so I'm not saying going to events is bad I'm just saying as an indie probably don't go to every event if you don't have to show anything I know it's quite cool at the moment because of Ramy and it really works for him I'm not sure if it works for everyone um five common pitfalls

what you shouldn't do in Indie Games PR first of all biggest of all is just doing too little too late I know it's really hard to make a game I know it like takes a lot of time and effort but also if you spend one or two or three years making a game and then don't take the extra few month to get a PR campaign off the off the ground that's a shame and it happens quite a lot playing D andd cards doesn't work anymore it was cool a few years back saying we're just one developer we're working in a basement that doesn't work anymore nobody cares um if you tell that to press it's just not impressive there are few examples where somebody is alone and pulls up something insane but in general I think that's not a good angle for press to talk to them number three is again I can't stress it enough a poor technical trailer that's the one time people are going to look at your game for sure and if you just put it together somehow and you show how many shaders and features you have that's something people care about you have to transport your one key message I think also a lot of this don't repackage enough what I mean by that is

if you announce your game and it doesn't get press coverage just announce it again it a bit sley but it does work quite some time um and if it's not announced and if it's not out there it just doesn't officially exist so just don't care and try it again don't be too annoying don't announ it announce it like 50 times but it doesn't hurt to give it a second or third try um I think where we did that is a game called two do where we had uh reveal teaser which was nice and it worked nice it got a few thousand views it got media pickup all that but we thought from the material what we have it could be better so after quite some time we went back to the drawing board took the trailer again recycled it let it cut by a professional company um also added a story in the trailer that was more appealing like a concept and send it out again to press and what happened in the end was the second trailer got 40,000 extra views on top to the first one and it got over 60 articles more and a lot of press were thinking we just announced the game with the second trailer

and number five is um I would definitely recommend you to do po PR instead of push PR what I mean by that I know it's tempting you have something you want to share it with the world and just go out there and rub it in all the journalist face all the time and you want to get covered everywhere which can work sometimes but usually it doesn't it makes much more sense to properly find out which websites usually cover that kind of games you're talking about and also find out what editor what with editor likes so really going in depth listening to their podcasts reading their articles getting familiar with the sites that are important for you and then just serving them something interesting you already like kind of writing up the story for them you sent them a very detailed um Pitch of what they could write about but that is really even as a small game how you can get on board with a kako or a polygon because you really know that that is an angle that that edit likes and I think if I give them that assets in that story it could work so I think sending out a big release campaign to a few hundred people definitely doesn't hurt and is

always a good second plan but to really get this spicy really good coverage it is really good to have some pool PR and have something interesting that the editor actually wants instead of forcing him to write it and now we're going to talk quickly about few five future Trends in Indie Games PR one is I think it will be even in the future even more than now um it will be more focus on high compact quality info that's just with more games coming out but not more press coming out you will have to use more of those news speeds we talked about and bundle them up even more in the future and waste more of your PR munition to even cut throughs press I think visual content will be more important again because of YouTube Snapchat all that attention spans just go down so I think having nice gifts is kind of essential now having a really nice short trailer gets more and more and more important PR marketing will get even closer um that has to do with a few different things one of is that streamer and YouTubers they just get more

commercialized and they often won't have a revenue share or some money to cover your game and also that a lot of editorial houses and Publishing houses um having a tougher time now and start buying each other and marketing deals just get more important to get also your stories off of the ground um I think credibility through platform will vanish uh a few years back it was a big deal if you were on Steam if you were on Steam you've pretty much made it and everybody knew you were proper good game um that is gone if you're on Steam that's cool but there are so many games on Steam that just doesn't work anymore if you come on Console now it still gives you some credibility but it always gets less also with like programs like with ID at Xbox that just more games are coming out so just um pretending or like saying you're on a platform now doesn't give you as much boost as it did back in the day and one last thing that I think will take off even more is clever in-game social sharing what I mean by that one example is again super hot if I would heare what it is it would be a spoiler

but we have one example um from a game called alphab bear which is a puzzle game where you puzzle with words by the end of each level they have certain templates with sentences and depending on which words you created different words are fill in incident template and a lot of times that thing that comes out in the end doesn't make any sense sometimes things like that come out and people really like that and people think that's funny and they share it on the social media and they don't do it because they get an in-game bonus they don't do it because they get an extra they get it because they want to and that's just brilliant I tell you when alphab be came out I didn't pay attention but my timeline was flooded for days and it came back and again and finally I was like okay I want to check out Alpha and downloaded it and played it so I think that's a really a way to give forward for a way to go forward and to also fight against the things like that it's getting more difficult to get as streamers impressed to listen to you that's it from my side thanks a lot for listening

[Music] hey I think we're pretty much on time or out of time but if anyone have questions I will be around here and also in the WRA Up Room later