Tag Archives: indie like a fox

Indie Game PR On A Shoestring

This isn’t a post of answers to “how do I get PR” or “how can I guarantee coverage of my game”. I don’t know, it’s your game, you’ll have a better idea than I do. It’s not a complete guide to indie marketing either. It’s some things that anyone, no matter how good/bad they think they are at PR can use to take the weight off themselves a tad.

So. Here’s 5 things you can do RIGHT NOW to help yourself promote your indie game.

1. Get yourself Promoter.

Not a promoter, Promoter. Promoter helps you keep track of any and all press mentions. Wait, what? You don’t have any? That’s ok, because Promoter has a handy database of sites and twitter handles also. And as a bonus, it also allows you to easily compile your own press quotes page. Fabulously useful.

Do not make a list or follow everyone on the Twitter list and proceed to spam them with a generic message to try your game though. If you think that’s a good plan, you should probably stop having plans.

When I was doing mailouts for the recent DRM trailer and initial announcement, I mailed out 3 sites and 3 sites alone. I only wanted to contact the sites I knew would be receptive to a slightly weirdy video, conveniently they’re the same sites that I truly love to read. At some point in the next few weeks, I’ll mail more and I’m sure there’ll be more press done for me once it’s out of my hands but still, target – don’t be scattershot and hope someone picks up your press

Related, courtesy of Anthony Carboni.

There’s an old hand at indie PR who has recently started sending me PR guff and it’s clearly stuff that even 30 seconds researching the site I contribute to or a cursory browse of my Twitter feed would reveal is not for me. I just put it straight in the recycle bin now. It’s obvious that he’s just got a list and he’s working through the list sending mail to everyone.

If you pay someone to do this, they are not better at PR than you. They’re really not. You are effectively paying for someone to have your announcement binned.

They’re the same sort of folks who’ll mail an iOS game to RockPaperShotgun, a PC games and only PC games blog.

You could save yourself that money. Promoter helps you make your start there.

2. Do PressKit.

Another easy tool for your arsenal. Presskit() lets you quickly and easily set up a port of call for the press. A one stop website to hold videos, screenshots, company history, contact details, pretty much everything you might want a member of the press to see.

Set aside an evening to do it right. It also integrates nicely with Promoter.

Do this and you have a port of call for all the information you’ll soon tire of repeating. It wastes less of your time and less time of the folks you’ll end up contacting.

3. Read Things.

Read this.
Read this.
Read this.
Read this.
Read this.
Read this.
Read this.

Ok. There’s a video in there too but shush. Point still stands.

Read things.

I’ve only chosen articles where anyone can get something from them. There’s so much advice on the internet and some of it is bad advice. You will find lots of it is useless advice. Sometimes you’ll find good advice.

I’ve tried to pick the pieces that have universal advice.

There’s a common thread running through most of these, that of having/being a story, having practical things that people will need and supplying those things.

Anyone who claims they have a definitive guide to how to market your game is wrong, each game is different. Every journalist wants certain things, prefers different things, likes their PR differently but there’s some common things you can learn, most of which are contained in the links above.

It’ll take a few hours to read and digest these articles. You can start that right now.

4. Take Pictures.

Take pictures.

When on Twitter and when it’s a Saturday, post pictures to Screenshot Saturday. If you’re not on Twitter, why are you not on Twitter? I’m on Twitter. Be on Twitter.

Screenshot Saturday is mainly dev to dev, that’s an inevitability but it’s not solely dev to dev either. Something intriguing will find its way out of its Twitter hole. Recently, John Polson has been running Screenshot Saturday round ups on indiegames.com. Interesting things escape.

It’s good practice in learning to take good screenshots too. I usually end up with a folder containing anything between 10 and 100 screenshots of whatever I’m screenshotting at any one time. I then work through them until I have the 2 or 3 best screenshots and I use them. This is the same method I’ve used for PR shots for a number of years now.

Unlike videos which can be tough to pace, cut or just put together in general, everyone can take screenshots.

Take screenshots.

PS. No-one cares about your menu screens. Don’t screenshot them and certainly don’t include them in “official” PR shots.

5. Don’t just rely on the internet.

Get yourself out there. Or out here. Or somewhere. Maybe there’s an event or some space local or somewhere you can set up camp. Find it.

Why Game City? Here. Here’s why. Why somewhere near you? Because these are people who might not read your favourite games news blog and you might just catch their eye. All for the sake of some busfare.

For PR, don’t limit yourself to just the games press. Not unless you only want to sell to the games press.

If you want the public to see your game, show it to the public.

Often, it’s one heck of a way of finding out what people think of your game too. My experiences of watching other people just play unhindered, complete fresh eyes to the work has been a thousand times more valuable than a thousand play tests. So it’s a double bonus!

Hopefully, these tips will help you feel a bit more comfortable, a bit more bold and a bit more informed about what you can do to help yourself when it comes to plugging your games. Sometimes, PR and marketing seems like the devil, sometimes it feels like  a mystery. It’s neither. It’s just something that requires a bit of time and a bit of knowledge.

So, y’know, read then go forth and get plugging. I look forward to reading about your game soon.

Developers, don’t keep assets to yourself…

As some folks will be aware, I try and punt out the news of other people’s videogames I like wherever possible. I’m the EXTREME version of The Pickford’s noble Games We Like Project except I run a whole site dedicated to posting things I like these days*

So I get some emails, obviously. Some of these emails, I’m not so keen on getting in my inbox – they’re for other people not for me and it’s easy to moan about things I don’t like so I do. It’s probably also worthwhile mentioning the things I do like too, yeah?

There’s lots of sound advice out there for approaching the games press in general (and me ;) ), if you’re considering plugging your game and you don’t know where to start, if you haven’t read Gillen’s How To Use And Abuse The Gaming Press…, you’re probably off to a bad start. For more personal preferences, you can always gander over at Gamasutra or Indiegames.com’s “wot we like” things. You should not, however, follow this advice. That is very bad advice.

Pixel Prospector have been compiling a rather comprehensive amount of information on this very subject that should land soon, Craig Grannell’s “Press Tips For Devs” is worth your time and now, with things like presskit() existing, there’s other aids too. So that’s covered.

I’m just going to add this though. I like looking at pretty pictures. I like to post pretty pictures. If your game is pretty and you have pictures, there’s a good chance that if they catch my eye I’ll want to post them. But I don’t necessarily want to have to go trawling through something like #screenshotsaturday to do so. It’s fairly safe to say I won’t accidentally stumble upon them tucked away on your blog on your site thirty links deep either, y’know?

To put this bluntly then:

I LIKE LOOKING AT PRETTY PICTURES. IF THE PRETTY PICTURES ARE GOOD, I WILL POST THE PRETTY PICTURES.

Don’t wait until the day of release or a few days before to send me these things unless you’re in some sort of weird stealth mode. Because that’s weird if you want people to actually find out things about your game. Send them as soon as they look great. The worst case scenario is that I won’t think they’re up to much and won’t post them. The best case scenario is that someone is impressed and posts them and people start getting excited or intrigued (or horrified, whatever).

From the now defunct xnPlay, I was able to punt the word out incredibly fast about games like (the ill fated) Paws, Leave Home and the where-is-it-hurry-up of Grapple Buggy. That two of those games didn’t make it out the door isn’t important. What’s important is that good screenshots let me tell people about the game faster than having no good screenshots. There were other examples but for the sake of brevity and not trying to stress my brain out thinking of them, we’ll just move on. Oh ok, here’s one for today and with bonus points for letting me reference this.

Here’s Alexander Bruce of Antichamber with something for you to think about…

So, yeah. Don’t just release your game, send over a press release, a video and some screenshots (and certainly don’t release your game without providing all those things in some form), if you want people to be interested in it, help people with things that can interest people. Like, for example, pretty pictures. Moving pictures are great too but sometimes, sometimes I just like posting a post full of pretty pictures and wouldn’t you want that to be yours?

*since the downturn in actual real retro remakes made by people who aren’t giant corporations has declined to single figures a year anyway, it seemed a waste to let the site just die. Besides which, I enjoy it.

Some quick thoughts on Greenlight

Very quick, I need sleep. This Greenlight by the way, not the one with the little man that tells you when to cross the road.

Initial reaction: Good stuff. Very good stuff. Potential to be everything that XBLIG shat its pants over – a fairly open platform for indies to get under a very large audience with some degree of ease and, unlike with XBLIG and Microsoft’s failure to keep good on their XBLIG>XBLA promises,the intention of providing a ladder upwards onto Steam-proper.

So, that’s great. More opportunities for indies to get under folks noses can never be a bad thing and if it results in the increased sales that Steam provides, very good indeed. So I like that element of things.

Some causes for concern though. If, as I’ve read, it’s a replacement to submissions not an extension of, that makes me uncomfortable for a number of reasons:

1. The obvious one. Why do indie games have to be the ones that go through a crowd sourced submissions process yet games with certain publishers have no such issues? Obviously, I don’t expect Valve to accept everything but it seems a curious solution. At least prior, it felt like even though you could be rejected for whatever reason or ignored for weeks on end that a game was a game regardless of origins. This creates an awkward underclass mentality, the sort that’s rife with console submissions that you have to be judged differently from games with publishers because…erm, you don’t have a publisher? Yes. Awkward.

Not having a publisher (in 2012) shouldn’t be seen as a handicap or a reason to relegate to being judged in the same way one would judge user generated content like a hat or something.

2. Moving the major elements of building a community over to Steam. To use an existing example, ModDB is a great platform for getting the word out, it’s also a massive, massive job in keeping it up to date, uploading pictures, videos, news posts etc… it’s an incredibly time consuming process if you want to do it effectively and you want to do it right. That’s time out that could have been spent on creating your own community in your own space or time neglecting your own community in your own space.

It’s one thing to rely on a service as a storefront, another entirely to build everything around it and another to feel compelled to do so because acceptance to a store depends on it. (Even though Steam is non-exclusive, there’s only so many hours in the day…)

3. Building and maintaining a community is a massive job. That’s time that could probably be better spent working on a game for most people.

4. And then there’s the fact that there’s a lot of incredibly brilliant developers out there, a fair few who could and would benefit from something like this that just aren’t very good at the PR or community building side of things. I’ve lost count of the amount of great games I’ve played that had I relied on screenshots alone or a video, I’d have ignored them or cried myself to sleep in disgust at. It’s a lot, anyway. Which is why some people either partner up with someone who’s good at this sort of thing or just pay someone else for it. It’s a skill in and of itself and it’s a bigger ask than it might sound at first glance.

5. There’s some games with a massive built in fan base where for whatever reason Steam submissions haven’t thrown a greenlight at (I’m thinking Vic’s (Cryptic Comet) stuff, Project Zomboid and a few others) that would benefit from this approach with little effort, they’re in the minority. It’s a noise amplified by having a loving and vocal fan base rather than the norm. For most people, again, it comes back to this being massively more uphill and time consuming. I’m not sure how people like Jonas Kyratzes would fit into this for example, excellent games but a smaller (but dedicated) fanbase, stuff which eludes mainstream success and where there’s little chance of the games being based around zombies or space marines or what have you. Unless it’s a whimsical zombie or a whimsical space marine or something. With a cat.

6. If just one person sends me a fucking email asking me to thumb up their Steam submission, I’m going to swear like you’ll never fucking believe. Which they will. So I’m going to be swearing one fuck of a lot about this given how many mails I get about crowdfunded projects a week.

Ok, maybe that wasn’t so quick. So in short: Good idea with good intentions that if played right could be an absolutely amazing thing but also potentially very awkward.

Question

If there was somewhere that you could show off your games to people and it was free, what would stop you from doing so?

Having to turn up in person? Not feeling like your work is worth showing off? Feeling intimidated by other works? Some other reason? Not arsed? Having to lug gear around? Something more personal?

What would stop you or what is stopping you?

Either/or. Curious mainly, but it’d be super helpful to find out whatever the reason (no matter how random).

Just to clarify, this isn’t a value judgement, this isn’t a trap or anything like that and if you feel uncomfortable signing in, anonymous is fine.

Things that make me happy…

There’s a lot of very good things around and about indie games right now but it seems, at some point over the past couple of years, for whatever reason, the bigger sites stopped posting about the more obscure, small, experimental, myfirstgame stuff in favour of stuff that already looks tasty enough to eat or fell out of a press release, with maybe an exception for Ludum Dare entries or what have you.

With RR losing relevency, I’ve felt sort of guilty about that myself. With remakes shifting back to the commercial end of things and with those who used to write freeware remakes either giving up or moving on, RR sort of fell by the wayside. I used to mention the odd game here for a while but the past two years have been about life not about blogging and with a passion diminished by necessity, I never noticed the drift away from freeware elsewhere also. Even if I had noticed it, I’d have not been in a position to do anything about it because life and because time.

And a few weeks ago, I sat down and looked at the sites I open up when I wake up and I realised that had changed. Sites I used to be excited to open, I open occasionally. Maybe once a week. Others, I don’t visit at all. Some have no posts, some have no posts I’m interested in, things became dev orientated in so many ways and dev is boring – I should know, I do it. Sites moved on and that’s fine. That’s ok. But nothing had really sprung up to fill the void. No-one was looking for the (rough) gems anymore. No-one was going out there, rummaging through forums, twitters, blog posts and the like, grabbing a glut of games and seeing what lies at the end of the rainbow. Or at least, if they were, they weren’t posting about it.

This isn’t obscure for the sake of obscure or hipster hat time, fuck that. The fun was always in watching nobody become somebody or a no-game becoming some-game or an unplayed-game becoming a played-game, mainly and especially the latter. Unplayed to played. All the opportunities that I was afforded when I was just starting out, pretty much gone or filtered through a route that made it harder to be heard. Games come to the sites, not the other way round for the most part. It never used to be that way and not being that way helped everyone to thrive and indie as we know it to grow*.

So I had RR, I had RR pretty much mothballed and it was decision time, really. There’s no point in keeping it alive if the only thing I’ve got to look forward to is one freeware game every six months and some commercial tatware. No, that’s no good. That’s not what I got into this for. But also I was acutely aware that to keep my own interest in things, I’d need to loosen the chains on restrictions so I opted to post about videogames I cared about, videogames that might have just one thing I found interesting = that’s worth a post, weird videogames, videogames that no-one else had posted. Even if I just went on a trawl once a week, I’d be sure to turn up something. I can always turn up something, even if it’s just one game. And videogames in general. Because I like videogames. And some random magazine tat because random magazine tat is fun. And retro remakes, obviously. I like them.

So I birthed owVideogames from the ashes. It’s RR born anew-sort-of. Games for every generation, not just remakes. Games. We’re at the end of week 1 and I’m happy with what we’ve done so far. I’m happy that I decided to make it exist. I’m happy that I get to post about games that I think are worth looking at or stuff I think is interesting and I’m happy it’s not just from press releases, competitions and the tried and trusted. I’m happy that ortoslon asked could he post a few things he liked on there. I’m happy that it’s not just my voice throwing things *I* like out there. That feels important.

It’s vague-o-focus and scattershot. I like that. I’m vague-o-focus and scattershot so it suits. I’d like it if I could get more people to post about games in the future because the more voices, the more angles, the better, but that’s probably for the future. For now I’m happy with how things are shaping up.

I don’t expect to make anyone famous, I don’t expect that large an audience all told but I hope that a few games and the odd curio will find a playing, a reading or a home on a hard drive somewhere because of it.

I’m happy I started it in the same week Terry started his freeware blog because it makes me feel slightly less mental about feeling the way I have. I’m also happy Terry took a razor sharp focus to the freeware aspect because I know I couldn’t restrict myself like that right now so I’m happy that someone else can and will.

But most of all, I’ve been happier posting the stuff on ow! this week than I have been posting anything in a long time. It’s good to be back.

*not that I’m averse to people mailing me games, y’know? In fact, I welcome it but I don’t want that to be the main focus or reason something gets posted.

Sell direct, please.

The past month or so, I’ve realised that where I shop for PC games is now incredibly limited. I now only really buy from 4 places these days (where 1 of 4 is actually “many” but hang on…). It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the vast majority of people who now buy PC games shop at less than that.

I buy from Steam

I buy games from Steam. I’m aware it’s a DRM scheme la de da de blah, it’s also a fucking great storefront which whilst not perfect, certainly makes browsing comfortable, content discovery not that difficult and as an added bonus, has regular sales where I can get games for the cheaps.

Throw in my friends list, Steam Overlay which for someone who likes taking screenshots cuts out the need for a capture app running in the background, groups which make organising online stuff easy, the ability to download games only when I want to play them to save on HDD space and well, you get the idea. It may be a DRM subscription app where my entire account can have the rug pulled on it any second for a completely random reason but it’s got things I really like to use and use often also.

I open Steam when I start my computer, I only close it on reboots. It sits there and gets regular use.

I buy from Indie Royale and I buy from Hundle

I buy games in bundles. Invariably, I’ll have most of the games and end up buying the bundles for just one game and give the codes away for the rest or something but still, both Indie Royale and Hundle are places I pick up games from. If not for me, for someone else.

I buy direct from the developers

And I buy direct. I’m that weird kind of person who will buy direct from the developer to support them but also buy a back up copy from Steam that I can have tucked away for spares. I don’t mind paying more to buy direct either although even I have obvious mental limits on what I’m willing to spend (and to be frank, what I can afford to spend)

I like buying direct from devs. I dislike the fact that payment providers often sit there and ask for masses of information before I can even get to the “yeah, come on, just give me the fucking download”, I’m never keen that some developers take this as approval that I’m somehow signed up for their mailing list because I bought from them either but still. Given the choice, I will always buy direct first and Steam later if I really want your game.

If your game isn’t available at any of the above, I will not buy it.

And that’s pretty much it now because everywhere else falls into one of three categories.

1. The site is hideous and difficult to browse.

2. The site requires that I install a site specific client in order to download the games.

3. The site is hideous and difficult to browse and requires a site specific client.

GoG is the honourable exception here but I can’t buy new games on there, right?

I don’t want to go somewhere where it takes me an age to meander around the store, where my eyes can’t focus properly because the layout is like someone shitting in my eyehole or where the Special Offers link leads to 2 bundles and not to the actual special offers or where links in general don’t lead where they should or where I have to do 5 clicks to find what I’m looking for or any of that.

I don’t want another client. I’m happy with Steam. It does what I want and more. There is literally no benefit for me having another client, no matter how much you try and sell it so. I don’t want demos or recommendations or trade ins or another friends list to manage or any of that. I have Steam for all that. Anything else is clogging me up with shit. I don’t want clogging up with shit. Stop trying to clog me up with shit. I won’t thank you for it.

I don’t want to download download managers for my games. It’s not 1999 anymore, I’ve got WHOPPINGMEG broadband internet and a browser that manages these things for me. Offering me a download manager instead of a direct link is insulting. Offering me a download manager as well as a direct link is at least forgivable and quite possibly considerate.

And I definitely don’t want Games For Windows Live (a total aside, admittedly, but it never hurts to mention it as often as possible just in case)

I don’t want any of that. So I ignore it. All of it. And probably your game with it, right?

Right.

Yeah, yeah, I’ve bought stuff from other stores in the past but now, now I can’t be arsed. Not even if the game is less than a quid. If it requires me to download a client, it doesn’t exist for me anymore. If a site requires me to download a download manager, I won’t shop there again.

And as sites disappear into other sites or get taken over by others who can’t guarantee the same level of service, I’m especially wary of purchasing from “other” stores in bulk. I imagine post Stardock-is-Impulse and post Direct2Drive, there are a number of people also wary of the same.

Yup, there is a reason Steam has the stranglehold on the PC games sales market. Aside from being great and cheap, obviously. The reason is, everywhere else is shit.

The shit service that most other sites offer means that now I will only buy Steam codes from them if I do shop there thanks to unmissablycheapbargain7 or something.

Yet not everyone can get on Steam, I know this, it’s a curated store. There’s no guarantees that just because you’ve made a game you can or will get on Steam. And I understand the massive drop off between SALES ON STEAM and SALES NOT ON STEAM. See also bundles.

But if you can’t get on Steam (and hey, even if you *can* get on Steam), the best level of service you can provide for me will come from selling direct. The absolutely-tied-in-first-place best thing you can do is just let me get the game I want to download.

That way I don’t have to jump through store hoops, I don’t have to run 300 clients and try and remember what games I bought on what service and from where. I can get a clean and straightforward purchase and always know where I got it from.

Because I got it from you.

And as a bonus, you get to keep most of the money I throw your way too. So we both win, right?

Sell direct. Please. Even if it’s just a 99p-paypal-me-do link, I don’t care. Just let me buy your game from you so I don’t have to put up with any of the bullshit that other stores throw in my face.