The Diary of a Modern PR Campaign: How to Plan Your Game's Promotion

[Music] hello and welcome to the diary of a modern pr campaign today we're going to talk about how to plan your games promotion i'm thomas reisernaker and i'm also very happy that you're here thanks a lot for coming as for every gdc talk i've been asked to remind you to switch your phone to silent and also rate the session after it's over so before we dive into how we plan a cab campaign something a bit different a little thought experiment but i think it will help you understand the main point of this talk so we have here a blank space and we have you and that's you going to meet a friend at a coffee and suddenly you see someone coming up to you poking his head out he walks up comes closer puts his hand up has a cup of coffee there and says do you want to buy this cup of coffee for three dollars just made it it's really good what are you gonna say hell no like i don't know who you are

why should i buy a cup of coffee this is weird however this is i think one of the main two problems that a lot of games pr has this day that there's a lot of literature a lot of people are very good at getting the game out there and get some awareness once to being a website or a big youtuber right to the end but without the right context and without the right build up that's probably a weird situation and that's something a lot of games face these days and a second problem of course is just the sheer number of games which makes pr and marketing activities very necessary if you imagine the same situation but like with a million people that come up to you offering a coffee it's probably even weirder and you're gonna say a lot of hell no i don't want your coffee so within the first two minutes of the talk we already found out that selling coffees at the selling games is actually coffee and stick with me that might sound weird but like throughout the talk i'm gonna explain you more also how we can be that guy that sells a coffee but actually makes a sale and actually gets people on board with it so topics for today um the first half is

going to focus on what really sells a game and the second half is going to focus on the five phases on the pr campaign so that's a bit more practical bit and in the end there's going to be a short summary and obviously this is a very broad topic how you plan a whole pr campaign so i can't go into detail into every aspect of it however what i can do is try to show you the big picture and then refer at points where we have some good literature or some good links refer you there as you can look up details for the more detailed tasks within the pr planning a few words about me before we start properly i'm thomas reisniker i founded future friends games it's a small pr agency in brighton in the uk and through my career i've worked on over 40 games some bigger ones like league of legends and smite also some quite small ones indie titles like a normal lost phone or at the moment or will ignorance stream for what the golf within the talk you will not only see my opinions and my learnings throughout the years but also those from other people and most importantly i also did something called the indie game pr

survey where i asked studios about their pr experience and 128 of them took part and a couple of those experiences and statistics you're going to see in the talk however i couldn't fit all of it in so if you want to get all the data you can follow me on twitter and i'm going gonna post those after gdc and you can also write me a dm if you want and i can email them to you so chapter one what really sells games big question that was becoming more and more important important in my field of work where i saw games doing really well in terms of pr but suddenly they're not selling it obviously a big part of that is because there's just so many games now but even considering that there were quite a bit of a lot of games that did well in terms of getting their name out there but then actually didn't perform in terms of sales so it was a bit like my mission after a while just like trying to figure out why this happens so i just tried to do it and i started looking up if i can find out what really moves the needle for a game so the first thing was maybe the most obvious one just looking maybe it's just

the quality of the game maybe it's just about making a really really good game because whenever you give a pr talk i'm sure there's people coming up up to you afterwards and say like look i don't need pr just make the best game ever it's just fair if you can do that but just a very good game is this enough there's a really good gamma sutra article on the topic that try to find out how many steam games are there that have extremely good reviews but hardly any sales and the verdict of the article is a lot those hidden gems are like numerous so just making good game is definitely not a factor that just gets your game out there and definitely makes it a hit um moving on what maybe it's the brand maybe it's about having a good name but then there are lots of examples like this prison architect very successful game sold over 2 million copies follow-up title scanner sombra sold 6 000 copies in the first two months so you can see that even with a big name or a big brand it doesn't guarantee that you're gonna be successful maybe it's the media i thought maybe it's about being on a lot of websites

there's an example i worked on it's called blackboard crossing it's a very nice narrative game it did extremely well in terms of pr it got nice reviews i got good coverage in the end however it didn't sell well it was um was selling according to steems by 5000 sales uh in the sec in the first six months you see that's that's not nothing but that that's not impressive um moving on maybe thought maybe it's youtubers and streamers this is something that came up quite a lot i think you wanted two years ago that people said like if one of the big ones covers you this is going to make it for you but then there are a lot of threads coming up like this then marshall made a game called kickman it was covered by a big youtuber has 7.3 million subscribers get 70 000 views which results in 15 copies of sales so you can see also a big youtube video doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna sell a lot of copies and then look further maybe it's different platforms and in all fairness the switch is doing quite well now but probably by the time that talk is over on youtube it's already harder to sell on twitch because it's such a gold rush now and

also the other platforms don't necessarily guarantee any sales numbers the same is for social media we also looked at loads of examples there even if games did well on there that doesn't mean that would necessarily sell well so what is the next step obviously professional you just panic because you don't know what you should actually do that makes the game sell but what you can do is next step was what i did is just turned to people that may be more clever than me and i just asked them and did the indie game pr survey and one of the questions was um what do you think hemp telling your game what helped a lot and the strongest answer was store features that was the thing that helped them a lot like 45 people out of 128 this is pretty good and all of them got features they said sales were really good followed by websites youtubers and social media and then a bunch of other stuff interestingly also newsletters is quite high up considering a lot of people had actual newsletters but those who had them said they were quite successful and pretty much in the end you can also see print magazines but this big caveat there that a lot of

people were like i just don't know if i even was covered in a prank magazine because i don't pay attention so i don't really know so as a follow-up question we also asked what what helped a bit this is the things you see in blue here and suddenly you get a different picture suddenly you see there's a lot of things that are quite strong the top five um nearly equal up in the terms of how long the bar is which is probably also related that a storm feature and for sale you can actually see if you convert into an actual sale whereas for pr things and youtube videos you can only guess if that would be a sale or not so if you look at the graph in the end of the day it doesn't tell you how low the touch tells you it's really different per game and there's a lot of factors to play together so my answer for myself was there is no magic bullet of a one thing that can sell your game really well however there is a couple of games where there is a magic bullet there's like pubg did it with twitch and carpet just looks really good and gets featured by microsoft but that's that's not that's not an average game if you talk about 99.9 of the other games they're gonna have to figure out something else so what is that

how can we figure that out um so instead the next step was instead of looking at the different the different media the different outlets you have was just maybe it's better to just look at games that did well and then figure out why they did well so here are four examples there's a game called northgard that did extremely well there's over 500 000 owners on steam wasn't any big discounts yet so that's probably also the pretty much the copies they sold so really really good um and there's the second king called open tourney which is regularly in the app charts it's doing extremely well it's also doing really well on switch within a week it was refinance the switch port so why were they so good the answer for them were quite easy they got store features northgard was doing really well in terms of steam it's a strategy game it got really well reviewed and steam just kept recommending it kept recommending it and then it became very successful and after they've been very successful they got more pr feedback and openings journey is a game that looks extremely beautiful on an iphone that's also what apple

knows they've been featuring this game a lot if you look at app any it got like over 4000 features over the last couple of months so that's that's i guess that's one way to go down the line is just make a game that plays really well in terms of restore feature but obviously this is not very secure because you're not controlling if you get a store feature or not so this is a risky option what are the other options looked at two other games that did extremely well one is called niche it had a kickstarter it had phenomenal uh community building campaign and in the end of the day it had over 80 000 owners on steam again without really big discounts or anything so did quite well in terms of how big the game was and another game called the first tree by a solo developer called david wheely did also extremely well and he did a really great postmortem that shows you how he did well and this is what i call a launch buildup this is the second route you can go down this is a longer pr campaign where you really work it but in the end of the day that usually especially in the climate of today's pr really tends to pay off

um we look at davies wheelies post mode i'm just very short here he just basically shot a graph how much website wizard he gets and as you can see he has loads of different spikes from little activities that he says like his stats he had for launch is really good but he explains really well how he got there it was not one big thing it was a couple of gifts going well it was a couple of reddit posts going well a couple of imjo posts so it really worked it and with everything he did he got up more newsletter signups and really built a community that helped him along the way also in terms of media which i will explain in a bit so the area i want to focus on today is the launch build up not because amy first store feature is bad but you can build up for launch and still get a feature which is fine but you cannot just focus on the store feature that wouldn't give you the build up so it's a more risky way of the two so in the end of the day why did those two games sell well and i think this is base explained with this graph this is called a sales funnel and a lot of pr a lot of studios i think are very focused and very good at

the first stage getting awareness just getting the game in front of people this is something there's a lot of literature on this topic however if you only see the game once that's like the guy that just holds a coffee in front of you that probably doesn't convince you to buy it if you think about it which games you buy it's probably the ones you see in an advert in a couple of articles and a couple of youtube videos and they keep coming up and you're like oh there must be something about this one it keeps coming up so that's what we call the consideration phase that's what we wanted people to get in the next step and after that if they still keep seeing it or if you find the game is really cool they probably become your customer and that's your goal so it's not just getting the awareness because that's that's the first step is very helpful but without the necessary means you don't get them to become a customer in the end and if they like your game or you're very good at even talking to them later on you probably make them into fans so if you know about that one really important thing is if you have a smaller mid-sized game whatever you do you always have to think about how you can get your audience to become

a customer a fan and one way to do it would just be or be on website articles all the time be on pc gamer every day but this is really hard so what you want to do is you want to find a place where you talk to people this could be a discord this could be a newsletter this could be something where whatever you do you try to get people there because once you have signed them up once they've liked the twitter page you can directly talk to them and you don't depend on outside sources that maybe feature your game or maybe not so this is i think really important in the beginning to already figure out where do you want people to go a really good example was descenders by my growth what they did was they made a free beta but you could only get it if you sign up for the discord so then you if you sign up for a discord they can keep talking to you there was a really good kickstarter called nimbatus and if you want to play the demo of the game you have to sign up for the newsletter so again they already thought about how can we talk to people after they've seen this demo and another thing about the sales funnel which is a bit of fortunate is

it only looks really nice here because it adds up with the colors it actually looks a bit like that so it's it's way harder to transfer those people down those different ranks and through reminding them and through sending them different things and this was by the way made by a really good blog post by chris to crosstalk so next up we want to look at how we actually knowing that how we do that pr campaign we do that in five phases and this power timeline uh it's probably something you've seen before and i think the big two important things on that is the game reveal so it's not the announcement but the reveal what i understand it is the first time when you have a big trailer that you send out the first time you contact press about it so you can maybe talk about it before in a pub and you try to make it a couple of tweets or some friends but the reveal is that the time when you make it official and then there's the launch and as a pr person most people come to me here this is a couple of weeks or a month before the launch this is usually too late you can make a game a bit bigger there but you can't really make it blow up if it wasn't if it wasn't good

before that this is the equivalent of someone if you're the coffee guy that wants to sell the coffee and you just one day before you start selling it and you're just like oh take 50 flyers and just put them out somewhere this is not gonna this is not gonna do it so actually your whole pr campaign is just the whole thing game development is pr and it's marketing as soon as you start working it you actually make something you probably want to sell and every decision you make on the way is working on this goal to make that game sell and get it out there it doesn't matter if it's the name doesn't matter if it's a website all of those things so the first phase five phases in total we're going to talk about is the setup phase and this is i think by far the most important phase this is one a lot of people don't take as much time i think as they should and i think as advised if you can hire a pr professional if you get some consultant if you have a friend you can ask how they did their pr and they can help you a little bit this is the phase when you want to get them on board because what we actually do here is this

when you learn to brew a coffee that people actually want to buy this is really important if you're good here if you make something that people want and you can also describe it all the other way along the line is quite easy but it's really hard if you make a really bad coffee even the best sales team can get it out there so the top five things you want to do in the setup phase the number one is you make a game that people care about and you learn to talk about it and what i mean by that is there's a lot of very similar games if i've seen so many people contacting me with really good pedal platformers and it's a shame because they're going to be good games have been going to be eight or nine out of tens but there are so many good personal platformers that that is not enough you need to have a 10 out of 10 if you want to have a good one there whereas on the other hand they worked on the surfing game called surf ulteriors and let's just say it was not game of the year it was all right but it was extremely easy to pr and the fact for that is just there wasn't any bigger surfing game in 10 years so it really your pr starts here just picking someone that's going to be

easy to promote that people have an interest in this is called the difference between push and pull here push pr means you make something that people don't necessarily want that much and you just push it on them which works you can get on websites if you're good pr people you can buy advertisement but you're always going to get stuck in the first phase of the sales funnel you're always going to get awareness but you never go into consideration because they're not actually that into that game whereas pool bi is something you make something quite exciting that people want and then it's quite easy to get it out there and that also plays along with press press usually covers things that they think are either bigger already are going to be big very soon and then they cover it and people click on it and press this excited they cover it more and people click on it more and this is the circle of this the live spiral that's what it's called in the blog post i found and again if you don't have that spiral that keeps kicking off you're going to have a really hard time further down the line so once you figure out what game you want to make and what should have an appeal you want to learn how to talk about it uh three things i usually do before i

start working on the game more openly is i make a friends test this is you go to a party you go to your friends this has to be really good friends like the honest friends the friends that will tell you that you have a bad haircut and you go up to them and you just pitch them to the game of one or two sentences they ideally should be in your target group so more hardcore game more more casual gamer and if you tell them hey i'm gonna make super mario but you don't play mario but you play a cow you gotta look at like that because this is a really bad pitch and they're gonna tell you and you're gonna tell in your face they have no reason to be polite they're just gonna be like all right this is that's a bit weird and once you figured out this short friends test those one or two lines that describe your game on a really high level i usually make something called the short text this is just like a couple of words that really describe your games really tight so people know immediately what it is and then i usually make one key a key artwork or a key gif that you can lose use throughout the campaign and once you got that nailed down you want to move on to a longer text where you just describe the game

and this is quite early to do those things this is still the preparation phase but if you nail that down here quite good all the other things all the press releases all the pitch emails all the social media updates you're gonna write they're gonna be extremely easy compared to when you do those things later you have to change things over time and adjust them all the time the second thing is you have to before we go into pr planning is picking your news speeds so news speeds are talking points that should be interesting for press i've just listed a couple here and just highlighted which one i think are good or not so good game announcement works pretty well what works way better is the game reveal which is usually the first trailer this is your your big chance to get your game in front of people it's usually the most covered thing the most talked about thing of your game you can make the first gameplay video because it's quite easy to do pr stunts can be really good if if you can pull them off also on the gdc world you can find the talk about guerrilla marketing for me if you're more interested in that ports are quite a big news especially like for switch or xbox sides depending where you make a port different feature videos that just describe features of

your game a release date is usually quite strong it's actually stronger than the release i think it also has to do with the seo of websites because gamers are going to google when is this game coming out so that's the news that their website won there's also a bunch of news feeds that are not as good they're not absolutely terrible like don't bend them but they are not they're not great they're usually you have to bundle them up with one of the other news beats or a couple of them to make them interesting for press just the demo alone today usually doesn't do it unless your game is really really good so you should figure out what talking points you have about your game what you want to do next is you pick the right channels if you want to talk to president influencers usually email is the best it's the easiest there's a couple of people who prefer social media but embark just use um emails and also if you get in touch with people if they ever talk to you make a nice list of what people are interested and keep emailing them and then you want to figure out how you talk to your players how you talk to your audience it can be again it can be a newsletter they can be twitter discord is very popular at the moment if

your game where there's more discussion involved also imager is great image hosting platform we just did that for what the golf had a post with over 200 000 views although i did really hard with press it was really working well there so i think it's worth doing some research in and again you have to pick your channels here and keep in mind which is the one channel that you want all people to go to which is like the end of the sales funnel should you all sign up to the newsletter should you all end up in the discord just agree on one and then try to get all the people there so you can keep them in the loop next one is we make a pr plan it's quite straightforward it looks like that usually we do it per week and then also per day a more detailed one the important thing is you won't have a topic you want to make sure you have all the assets in there so whoever makes the asset knows what is needed when and then we just usually stack them by different target groups so there was a pr plan for a switch game and there was a layer for gaming press that covers all games and they just get really important news but then the nintendo sites they got like smaller

news as well because they were just more interested in the game and then also the different social channels when we want to talk to them some tips if you want a pr plan because if you just sit in front of an empty excel sheet it can be a bit scary usually it's easiest to start at the release date and then work your way back i would always leave two to three weeks between those pr bits for especially for press because they need some time to recover during those pr beats there was an interesting study by big big games machine that found out that most press prefer to get their review kits three weeks ahead of launch and also just be sure to double check dates it's something i i think most pr people forget this can be easily overseen especially if you change things around but always just really look up bank holidays look up different game releases that you don't launch in the same day as destiny and also look up different events and there's a couple events that are absolute no-go don't do anything during those events unless your game is there obviously which for me would be gdc and e3 and gamescom

there's loads of other local events but i think they're not as dramatic however if those events take place that's the absolute no-go zone to do anything unless you're at the show and after we have the pr plan it's just a short thing to set up your monitoring there's a couple of good tools like you can set up alerts with google alerts tweetdeck is a really good twitter app where you can just like set up and alert for your game and promoter is a really cool tool it just costs a couple of euros per month but it basically sends you a little notification every time a gaming website writes about you so it's really easy to stay up to date with that i also like to use similar web it's a google google chrome plugin and it just shows you how much website traffic a certain website has really really helpful because imagine you're a gamer spain and eurogamer italy right about your game which one is the bigger one there's loads of those instances where a website seems really big but it's not so those are the type top five to do's in the setup phase also as i said before i think it's worth spending a lot of time on this phase and getting it right and then the other things will get way easier so

next up we have to pre-reveal before we show our first big trailer and this is like how you test and refine your coffee so you want to set up those channels also be sure to sign up to the giant bomb database so your game gets linked to the twitch database so streamers can take it in and this is the phase where you start community building very popular is using screenshot saturday so every saturday you post a little gif with this hashtag there's a lot of press writing about it it can get a couple of retweets and you can just like see what people like about your game also going to local events is quite nice in that phase to just get some extra feedback there's a good time to experiment we have a game here called overland and they had a bug with a dog that became very big and it was one of the most successful tweets so they keep making big dogs and this is not something you can predict or participate but this is something you can find out when you do regular things in this warm-up phase and then we come to the reveal trailer which i think i said before but i think it's one of the most important things you can do so you prepare that a lot and the indie games pr survey

actually there was a status bit shocking um we asked who made your launch trailer and 82 percent of people said someone in the team this is really not good i think your reveal trailer and your launch trailer should be something you should put a lot of effort a lot of attention and also money and if you can because if you think about it this is literally like if you make a coffee and you try to sell it in a little bag this is the first and only thing a lot of people are going to see so really take your time and make get those trailers right that's not a specific formula which trailers work great and which weren't there's always like guides like make it one minute or make it very short but then there's things like the goose game that makes a three minute gameplay video which goes absolutely viral and mental so i think the key role is just like it really has to take your game off really well and the last tip is like don't rush this phase only really finish it when your reveal trailer is ready because you can only reveal your game once and you want to make sure that that hits so then you ruin your game and then we

go into the pre-launch phase and actually if you if you do your cab pr campaign this is the launch build up and this is actually quite a long phase where you do a lot of things however in those lights it's quite short because it only means that you execute a lot of things that we planned already before what we want to do in the pre-launch phase is just keep pushing keep getting those new speeds out keep updating your community keep building all your channels sounds easy here is a lot of work to do so optimization is a thing you should at least look into here the latest here for a lot of curated stores it just means trying to contact the platform holders making a store page for steam it's a bit different steam is completely driven by algorithms and there's a really great talk on youtube um from matt trobian and lauren clinic called more than like strategies to success in steam definitely recommend watching it it really explains you how the algorithm works and what games steam pushes out they basically steam looks into how much money you make them per second so it's not so important how much money

you make it's about it's important how much money steam makes uh a couple of notes just on that what is really good for seems to optimization is also always keep in mind you don't want to get as many people into your game to buy you want to get the right people in because they should not leave bad reviews they should like your game a really good example is superfly a small indie game from berlin and what they said in the short description is this is a great game to relax for half an hour and chase the latest high score this is not something usually a pr person would recommend you to say because that doesn't sound great that doesn't suggest anything major but it just really tells you what the game is and people loved it they bought it it got recommended more more people bought it so it's quite good being really descriptive and really honest here um in this phase it's all a good time to attend shows and do different previews there's a really good blog post series on the website of ikepartners.com that goes through different blog different events and explains you what is what and how what to do there's a really great tdc talk about how you should build a booth

at an event so you get attention from people and the one tip i can definitely give you if you attend an event make your press appointments beforehand a couple of weeks if you can you won't catch them on the show floor it's really important to set it up before also if you send out your news speeds if you contact press try to think in headlines help them write easy headlines about your game i did a gdc talk about the topic last year so if you want to look that up that's on the gtc world and also youtube and surprise just a couple of little extra tips on the pre-launch phase never never never announce you release that before you pass certification i did it for a couple of games it doesn't always work out great and then you have to postpone your release date and this is really bad you can also use your community to get on board with streamers and youtubers is something you see in the tweet that mike rose did it was just like saying to his fans do you have any youtubers you like just ping them and i can send them a key and actually that tends to work quite well if they get a lot of pings from people that say you should play that game they will pick it up afterward and two really good links to find

contacts hunter dot io is a free website where you can look up press emails is really helpful and twitch is really hard to find out which twitch streamers could cover your game at a site called twitch metrics which is great because it shows you different streamers per country and you can filter them by game is really helpful so then we come to the launch phase and this like sounds like a big thing but if you've done all that quite well actually launch day is not that crazy it's more like a launch party obviously you have to have a launch trailer you should launch your game send out a press communication reach out to youtubers and streamers and blow your audio social horns but again if you've set up everything right and if you've worked on that game for a long time this is not actually the busiest day ever in terms of pr marketing obviously in terms of development something different but not in terms of marketing uh one important thing is i would definitely encourage day one reviews especially on steam it's really important to get reviews there's a newsletter from michael partners that shows how many games came out each week on steam and how many didn't get any reviews and there's loads of them so if you have a community definitely

try to get them to review your game or get their friends to view the game so the last phase is the post launch phase um this is about staying relevant there's a game called amelo and it actually had his second biggest saves after two and a half years it's out but then in the indie game pr survey we actually saw that most developers 60 stop promoting the game two months after release so why does this happen it probably has to do with how successful the game is there's a really interesting blog post that tries to figure out if you can predict steam sales from your week one sales and basically the formula found out is that whatever you're gonna sell in week one if you multiply that by five this is what you're going to sell in the first year and it seems to be obviously not super accurate but quite accurate obviously try to manage review scores encourage players to review them and also talk to them if something goes wrong follow up with price and influencers build and keep your fan base for next games and the last point is plenty updates right if you make an

update and you can bundle it with a big village pr stunt like you see here or with move or die you had a little rick and morty crossover and bundling for 60 sale then you can actually make update updates after your game is already out still a little press story so that's the five points thing for the post launch things and now really quick summary is just if you plan your car campaign keep in mind pick if you want to do a launch build up or focus on the store feature keep the sales funnel in mind for whatever you do keep collecting those people to places where you can reach them again and the summary of the pr timeline is first phase make sure you have a game that's interesting that people actually want to buy and to learn to talk about it preview real phase test a bit really focus on getting the trailer right reveal that game then keep pushing it in the pre-launch phase keep getting it out make those new speeds make those updates build your audience launch a game and in the end obviously the post launch phase where you should probably have a look if how long and if you want to support your game after thanks a lot for

listening you