Getting press attention

I have a number of google alerts setup (if you are considering selling your game and don’t know what google alerts are, I suggest finding out immediately). One of which, unsurprisingly is for “British indie”. Aside from the occasional reference to the British indie music scene, I usually get new hits for when someone blogs about BritishIndie.com or announces that they are in some way an indie developer. But recently I started getting a LOT of hits for a particular press release by my old pal, the soon-to-be-inteviewed Dan Marshall of Zombie Cow Studios.

You can view the press release here, here, here and here, I think you get the picture.

I asked Dan why his press release had been so well recieved and what he had done to get such good coverage. He explained that he had written the press release and then gotten some feedback from a professional writer. He also mentioned going through metacritic and finding sites that might run a piece on his game and emailing them directly. He also used a site called GamesPress.com http://gamespress.com/ to get the release in front of as large an audience as possible.

I think the key to the relatively large volume of people picking up the release though, is the actual content of it. Consider the title “British Indie Game will be the Highest-Rated Adventure of All Time, at this rate”. It immediately suggests that there is something worth looking at for this release. At the very least you might think to verify why is will be the “Highest Rated”. You might also wonder how an indie game can be rated the highest “of all time”. Following on from the impactful title, the first thing that is mentioned is the company name and the product name. A very good move to at least get the company/product in when news posts are relegated to a more cut down version (its not unusual for a busy website to have a large number of articles, with the text on the frontpage reduced to the first few lines of text in the article to entice the reader to click through into the main body of the article). Then we come to the information within the release itself. Here lies the meat of the release and very quickly we can gather that it has had good reviews (your eye is drawn to the 9/10 numbers in the text). It refers to a number of reviews which are positive, using to its advantage the fact that people like to think positively about things that other people think positively about. It also associates itself with humour, indie-ness and British-ness, which for the actual product style are good mental associations to make. Finally it gets in a plug for the game and the studio again.

The important thing to note here, is that the release itself is pretty much copied verbatim from the original release to all of these different sites and that is a key factor. Frankly, the majority of game press sites just use press releases for filler content so that they can print “news”. Being able to quickly and easily incorporate that press release into your news channel means that it need to be reliably formatted, not require a huge amount of rewording and generally be applicable to your audience. Dan has done a great job on all these fronts.

What you might have noticed, is that the press release is basically a lie. Its the sort of interesting little white lie that Introversion used when they called themselves “The last of the bedroom programmers”. Clearly Introversion are not the last of the bedroom programmers and I find it hard to believe that anyone could think that TGP was the highest rated adventure game of all time. Given that I am not aware of any global adventure game rating system and that all time is a very broad category. But thats not the point, the point is that Dan told a good story with that release. It was basically saying that a little indie developer had produced a game that was standing up there with the best of them, that it was unique and had value because other people had said so.

Essentially a masterful press release that clearly hit the mark in terms of press coverage.

I think that many indies struggle with this kind of thing, mainly because they think that they don’t have something unique to say in a press release. Often that may actually be the case, it is very unlikely that a clone of an existing game is going to have anything useful to say about it as a product, but it could be that the way it was developed, or who it was developed by has something interesting about it. Imagine a case where you were writing a press release for a tower defence game. There are so many that it would be hard to get any press interest at all. But what if the developer were blind? What if it had been developed underwater or in space? The point is that even what would be regarded as mundane news can take on an interesting angle and would be far more interesting to the press. Of course an easier route, is to have a product worth talking about in the first place. In that way, you might not even need to try and convince press people to accept your press release, it could be that they were already aware of you and your game and would be more inclined to print it because of that.

Think of it all as a game. You are trying to optimise your press coverage while the press are trying to minimize the effort involved in finding interesting stories for thier readers. If you play the game right and satisfy thier goals whilst trying to satisfy your own, you will end up a winner.

So next time you have something interesting to say about your game, take a look at Dan’s press release and see if you can learn something from it. Also, don’t forget to send it along to:

Thanks for reading.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.