What role does the games media play in the modern mobile era?

okay right okay so we're here to talk about uh two things why do we need the games media uh and how do you get through to them so that's uh two parts a bit of conceptual stuff in the beginning and then some uh hopefully practical advice uh three of us are journalists and we've got three three people who use journalists exploit journalists in their daily lives so um so first let's uh introduce ourselves as Chris said I'm Robert and I'm the managing editor of Steel media which publishes Pocket Gamer uh I'm Mark Brown I'm the editor of Pocket Gamer the CEO of a small Indie company called secret exit I'm meriator penen CEO of a PR agency called Saga social I'm on Faraday I run pocket tactics I'm CEO of playground okay thank you so um I thought to start it would be uh good to have a kind of contrasting set of views so um I was going to ask the journalist first on the panel um what what is it that you think that your job is and I'll start

with Owen what do you think the the the role of a journalist is within this kind of ecosystem I mean I think especially this is an interesting follow-on from the last talk uh I mean the journalist role is sort of to unearth um interesting content from the huge amount of stuff that's on the various app stores now there's so many games now um that you wouldn't be able to discover I think without helping friendly media like us yeah so Mark I mentioned you'll kind of share his opinion pretty much yeah yeah I mean the word I always come back to is curation there's just unlike in the the console era when we would talk about you know one PlayStation game a week now there's just hundreds of games to choose from and it's about finding people who can play as many games as possible and just pick out the stuff that's actually worth talking about and helping you know people find stuff in these these masses of games sure okay so that's uh by the way anybody if you want to chip in and just cut you know interrupt people

that's fine um so that's the journalists I view that's the journalist kind of perspective on what would uh what what their role is um how about you um how do you use journalists what do you feel like there are purposes in all of this well I think well as you both said there's like tons or millions of games in the marketplace so now more than never I think you need journalists because they they represent the industry and they give an objective image of the games and companies and for companies obviously for their like their company and product image and growth on that side okay uh um uh Wilhelm do you have any do you agree with that point of view yeah I I do I think that the challenge for for media overall in this space is that there's just such a big load of content coming out every day um I think there's still today there's about 200 IOS games launching every day and um I mean I don't think you cover

all of them not not probably even even close maybe maybe 10 percent or somewhere between five and ten percent of the games coming out and even so that's a that's a shitload technical term um and and and and and the challenge is that that from a from a PR perspective you fall below the fold very quickly uh as as a content provider so so I I think that pocketgamer does actually a really good job and and I think you you your selection is probably smaller than pocket Gamers the bucketgamer does it does a really good job in in in nurturing some of the some of the bigger games you stick with them for a while you you wrote If you write a few stories about them and and that's certainly very helpful to to to cater to a super fan of of mobile and tablet games what you also do is is tremendously important in this space is is you you inform the the oems and you inform the the channels about

very interesting upcoming games and it's been proven over and over again that that Apple at least Apple does follow quite closely what what what you guys write about so that's that's very important right okay so it seems like there's a unifying point of view which is that it is all about curation sorry carry on well you wanted contrast so I'll give you that I mean let's let's be honest that even game journalism is extremely struggling for relevance these days it's I mean you have expert opinions the problem is so and so has everyone else in their opinion and in in this current very socially networked environment people don't really follow so much on Experts as they do just the uh well social recommendations so in in terms of are is the media necessary for Discovery I mean I think the media itself is is

struggling for Discovery so it it doesn't help you as a developer in reaching a wide audience in that sense yes it does put you on the map but as a discovery tool for a small developer there are kind of better venues for for focusing on that part of the problem you know I I think what's interesting about that is that there are there is so much more games media today than it was even 10 years ago but there's also a lot more Niche media and I mean my site in particular has a certain sort of spectrum of games that that it covers and there's more sites I think like mine that are aren't interested in covering everything they're interested in covering one particular segment of the market be it certain genres or certain platforms and that's actually more helpful I think to developers because you have if you're making a game that's of interest to my readership my readership is smaller than

than pgs but it's very devoted and they buy you know everything that that we talk about I think you have a better chance of getting featured on Niche media that cover your particular sort of corner of the market these days yeah is there an argument for using the media more for a particular um kind of game is would that be the case that there are certain kind of games that you might be releasing that are worth approaching the media about but others that it's just go around them and go straight to the App Stores a paid game on Steam yeah definitely paid games I mean I I talked to when I talk to developers that make paid titles you know two three five ten dollar titles they say that their Discovery tends to come from media and word of mouth because people get invested into the decision to buy a five dollar game in a way that they wouldn't ten years ago now now getting somebody

to part with two bucks uh is is like a Biblical Miracle but those games are the ones that people research and they turn to sites like ours to find out about I think it's probably fair to say that free to play games don't benefit as much for media coverage because people aren't invested in them they download them they try them for 30 seconds if the user isn't hooked in the first 30 seconds he uninstalls and downloads another one yeah well I have to say that it's not only about the discovery of games but for the companies as well I doubt that like well you need to find your investors and other stakeholders and kind of reach them through media so it's not only about game discoverability but also these aspects sure yes corporate from a corporate perspective yeah the product BR matters quite a bit also but I wanted to add something to to to or actually ask something taking over your panel um the the have you guys studied at all

the like the discovery funnel um what what precedes actually coming to Pocket game or pocket tactics um and and looking for a premium game is it is it Word of Mouth drives search drives users to your site drives user to App Store how what happened in there okay well prepare for some boring information but most uh most traffic tends to come to the home page but then you can see what particular kind of content people are coming to through what key keywords they use and what landing pages there are on the site so and it tends to be and then you know you can see their behavior within the site when they come from the homepage it tends to be the kind of regular readers come to that and you can see what kind of stories they click on but most people what we've found is the overwhelmingly people are searching for um uh kind of walk through content um like lists of games listicles you know they want to I mean it's as Mark said it's all about curation I think and

increasingly we find people just coming to the site to to look for information about what games to buy and how to play them the sort of content that does really well for us is people they have a genre they like maybe they've played them on on console and they want to find RPGs on their iPhone so we do it we get a lot of you know traffic through a list of that sort of thing yeah and by the way so um anybody in the audience if you have any questions about this that you'd like to ask anybody on the panel then just pop your hand up and we'll try to notice it doesn't look like they're any now okay so that's fine please oh and uh oh sure I mean I our funnel uh obviously we get a lot of direct traffic straight to the homepage but we also get a lot of we we publish a reviews index and um every time we put a review up we do about three or four reviews a week it goes automatically into that index and the index actually gets near as much traffic as our homepage does because we tend to focus on paid games and not free to play games uh people you know are searching for reviews before they make a

purchase and that's a pretty significant part of our funnel right okay um the the I'm looking here at recent data about about how users discover games and it's similar to what uh what the previous keynote was Word of Mouth sixty percent of consumers use that to to to to to to find games or it's a source of Discovery for sixty percent App Store top chart 50 App Store feature section 40 and then it drops in-game adverts 15 magazines media 12 percent do you see it do you like because I I'm wondering about this myself I'd I'd love for that to change um in some way what can we do well I wouldn't be too disheartened by that as media because I think a significant proportion of That Word of Mouth number which is so important starts with with media um admittedly I'm sure that the

proportion of people that read pocket tactics and Pocket Gamer as compared to the general game buying populace is infinitesimally small but the people that read our sites are very invested in games and those are the taste makers in their Social Circles those are the people who are influential and make recommendations about games because they're the ones that spend their Leisure Time reading about them on the Internet so most consumers are never going to read a review uh online before they buy something but they will talk to their friend that they know does yeah I think that's true I think if you if you were to analyze the word of mouth part of that which is the biggest sector and you follow the thread back in a lot of cases you'll end up with articles on magazines and and not even just that but things that journalists have said on Twitter who people follow you because these are the people who kind of start the little fires that that go off and I'll actually claim another segment of that too I know for a fact that the guys picking the App Store features read our sites

and we influence them and there's times that you know we've Unearthed games on my site that haven't been written about elsewhere and then a week later they're on the Apple featured section so this is kind of like asking the barber if you need a haircut ask the media if the media is useful right of course we're useful no I I totally tip my hat to that it's true um journalists do um validate the the quality of the game and and as I said as long as there's a someone who controls a large amount of visibility who then picks that up then yes you've you've managed to reach a large audience uh regarding the word of mouth and the percentage there I just wonder how much of that percentage is PewDiePie's mouth it's what it's the mouth of PewDiePie like basically is that a word of mouth or not I mean it is still 20 million mouths listening to his yeah so so I mean going to that the uh the Youtube celebrities and what are they I mean

they are basically game reviewers except they don't review games they just play them and people review their enjoyment so it's kind of interesting what that means that I mean people are if a YouTube celebrity enjoys your game then it really doesn't matter if it has a seven in graphics and six in gameplay it's just simple fact of fun yes no and and yeah let's download that and you've seen that Viral thing happen like Backflip Madness and well Flappy Bird as well yeah those in your game I wish they were but but yeah Turbo Dismount also um featured by YouTube stars and and definitely helped the discovery of that game tremendously on through Steam green lights and then uh through its Early Access well I think it uh depends on the type of game as you're saying there's your game to have a Dismount is something that's very much you know visual game and it's funny and

it works on YouTube something like a very sort of obscure tax adventure maybe it's not going to work through the audience so it's not gonna work for everything yeah okay so now that we've established that journalists are in fact really really important just to quickly go through some kind of bits of advice on how best to get in touch with the media I think that would be useful um so uh why don't you uh start us off um merger what what is your view about the best way to approach the media in the first place about how to make the connection well obviously kind of take care of the relationship meet the media representatives and conferences such as this for instance and uh well personally well I do I'm I am in touch with Pocket Gamer journalists quite a bit so I have relationships with the media and I I pitch stories to them to my client story so I think well by email calling them

getting in touch other in other means but yeah does anybody else have any uh insight into I mean I can offer some super practical advice about that send me screenshots that don't have your marketing copy on them yeah yeah because I get screenshots a lot that have they're like tilted 45 degrees and it's got the marketing copy it says 20 customizable Heroes I'm never going to use that but they're so I'm never yeah I'm never ever going to use that screenshot send me screenshots without that stuff on it please do you like trailers I love trailers always gameplay trailers yeah yeah those are the materials kind of screenshots screenshots Gameplay trailer gameplay trailers yeah so cut the straight to the yeah cut the actually the jet for Blackberry mentioned flambeer's press kit that thing is great it's just nice white page who your company is what you made before here's the screenshots here's the trailer I downloaded it's beautiful I

think to the point everything to the point yeah and I doubt many people will be very sympathetic about our jobs but it is very hard to get hundreds of emails a day and have to read them and but we do get a hell of a lot of emails so it is really about yeah cutting cutting to the chase you know picking our interest right there in the headline putting the screenshots directly in the email so we can just see it visually and go yeah that looks like something we'd like to write about yeah look I tried to I've tried to read all of them uh maybe it's just like the headline and you know a skim read but we do try to read as many as possible we can't get back to everybody unfortunately um but you know only a small percentage of them actually go on to do anything on pocketgamer but uh yeah we do we do try to read as much as possible how about you Owen um I got demiked um I read I read a hundred percent of the emails that start with dear Owen um I get a lot of emails that seem to just be sent uh to a a giant

nameless list by a robot I tend to delete those straight away it cuts my my inbox reading time significantly every morning um but yeah that's that's my Approach I'd like to point out that when I send emails to all the journalists I I work as a Mindless drone but I just replace the first like dude dear Mark dear Charles okay that's great so if it's shortened to the point then there's really no to be replaced anywhere like not that the name itself is but yeah no that's right except sometimes we like Pocket Gamer has a different email addresses like news at Pokemon reviews that Pokemon quite often will get the same email twice to to and you know we'll receive the same email to us so then you're exposed but it's fine um yeah I'm sorry we're running out of time I'm afraid so oh sorry doing questions yes that's why I was getting their mic oh very clever okay these questions all right don't worry we have questions I'm going to pass the mic now

quick one on timing I think of people are obsessed with as you launch a game saying great I've got a window I need to maximize my press around that actual hard launch whereas I think I I've grown up with the old school that you try and reach out to somebody eight weeks before and you try and get an interview with um you know the guys who are developing game and then maybe there's a little bit about around a preview and then fantastic day you ship there's a review just wonder if you could comment on you know what what works for you guys what do you like to do and how do we maximize our press using that that basic method thanks so I mean I'll I'll start off this one I think that's the that's been the difference between old PR and UPR that as Mark was saying before it used to be built around far fewer releases and now there's just a kind of torrent and I don't think personally that those the old rules work anymore I think the earlier we can see stuff the better just the more the more we can see stuff the more we can get hold of the games as early as possible the better um yeah sometimes we'll a lot of time we'll see games early and we might not write about it you know this early stage we might not interview a developer a long time but just sort of

seeing it and having in the back of my mind seeing it and conferences over and over again by the time it comes out we're so used to it that you know we want to you know evangelize sort of about keeping on our minds if you have content that is able to evangelize itself and let's say that you're using a cross-platform development environment like Unity then put your game up on a website if it's feasible to for people to get the get to know the game early play it on a website then it works for your to your advantage tremendously you can you can have conversion banners in there so that people can download it when it comes out and yes you can be certain that your unity game will be pirated to a dozen uh slash game sites but as long as it works as an advertisement for your game then that's good I mean you can probably never go wrong by appealing to a journalist ego and if

you uh if you send stuff early if you send stuff you know weeks in advance uh like Mark said maybe we're not going to write about it then but the fact that you're thinking about us that early pre-launch we'll we'll think about you probably so on the subject of appealing to a journalist's ego do you think that there's any value to um exclusives these days I mean I I like an exclusive uh I love an exclusive but I'm also sympathetic to the fact that maybe an exclusive is not great for you um as the developer just because you know how do you define an explosive uh you send me a trailer and I'll put it on my YouTube channel and I'm the only outlet that gets it for the first week um and and you know on my end of it I'll hype the hell out of it and I'll write about it several times and I'll tweet links to it and I'll generate as much because you know it's something of value to me I'm the only place that has this

and I'll I'll I'll push it as much as I can but at the same time I'm not sure how much benefit you're getting from it because if you sent it to everybody maybe you'd get more value out of it I'm not sure I didn't say like Phil Hellmuth is it something you've ever used uh with journalists before and yeah during history I haven't in the past year or so not really but I've been in the industry for over 10 years so yeah that's I have yeah so I know Mark's got some views on this um well I think it's worth doing only if you've got a a good relationship with the journalist already so you can because sometimes we get people who we've never met before or send us an email saying you can have the exclusive on this and then if we ignore that email then they've only said it to one person and it's not going to go gamer so you know they haven't got any other websites uh backup so I think it's you know I I think obviously like like Owen said it's great for us exclusives but I'm I'm not sure it is a worthwhile thing for for all Developers

and not necessarily for a very long period of time but like for for 24 hours you can give us a story or something specifically exclusively somewhat but not for maybe not for a week I love a week but like Mark said if I have a relationship with you yeah absolutely but if I've never if I don't know you from Adam it's probably not the best approach again in terms of like preview versions of the game exclusive don't harm there like if we were making a tactics game for that audience and we know that you have the Enthusiast crowd with you then exclusive coverage for the niche who has already reached that particular audience is no-brainer okay so I think that we're out of time now that's great okay I'm sorry give me quick question quick answer yeah all right

now internally and something that we're trying to figure out is what constitutes from a media's perspective uh something that is worthy of a sort of a relaunch type of drastically different six months from now that's something that we're very excited about and we would want to almost have the the Fanfare and the attention of a launch but we don't know what is too much or what is too little or what I guess you were meaning that might look so I think in order to attract the interest of an editorial person who might go for the story just on Purely editorial grounds then I suppose either it would have to already be a really interesting or popular game like Angry Birds for example uh Whenever there were relaunches of that especially in the early days then they would naturally be

covered and it still happens we'll publish walkthroughs every time they publish a new update and stuff um if you didn't already have the press and you wanted to create it uh it would just be the best thing you could do is just get again get your game in front of the press just try and get them in a room and get them personally excited about it and and if they are then they'll talk about it I would say I don't know if you if anybody has a different perspective on that I'll just say if you didn't get a lot of media coverage the first time around I'm not sure to be honest uh just treat it like a launch nobody will mind cool okay can we have a big round woman Applause round woman a war man of Applause twice so