Exilian
Game Design and Project Resources: The Workshops Quarter => Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley => Bigosaur => Topic started by: JeffNevington on April 10, 2019, 09:16:26 PM
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Hi Bigosaur,
I just wanted to thank you for sponsoring the RPS mixer. I had 3 pints of stout and a gin and tonic.
Were you there? After I saw Son of a Witch on the RPS poster I thought you might have a booth in the show.
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Hey Jeff,
I had 3 pints of stout and a gin and tonic.
Awesome! I'm so glad.
Were you there?
Unfortunately I could not make it. Still I decided to sponsor as I'm trying to get any attention from press regarding my game. YouTubers play it, Twitch streamers play it, but press is completely ignoring it. I thought this sponsoring might draw some attention, but it looks like they just don't care.
At least now I know that people had good time :)
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How've you been approaching the press/what else have you been doing thus far?
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Press seem almost impossible to attract by doing anything actively. I remember on our first kickstarter sending dozens of emails out, each specifically personalised to the writer, spent 30-60 minutes on each one spamming away. Complete waste of time in the end.
Smaller sites will write about it if you give them plenty of text, and good images so they don't have to do much, but I wonder if it really makes any difference.
Some articles came in appeared eventually without us contacting people. I think they happened via interest in the game on Youtube. Don't forget - if you get press attention it can go two ways too - A Serbian print magazine did a 2 page spread completely slating our game, it was horrific.
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I'd be interested to know if there are good figures on how indie game buyers get news nowadays in the first place - I bet that print magazines, and probably magazines generally, have significantly waned in importance compared to YouTubers etc.
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How've you been approaching the press/what else have you been doing thus far?
Well, mostly sending out e-mails. I admit I didn't go deep into it as much as I planned initially. For example, I know that Steamworld Dig got coverage because they made boxed sets with their game manual, stickers, a plushy, and some nice poster or something like that and sent them to game press. I wanted to do that for SoaW as well, but never got around to do it.
The problem with e-mail is that press is swamped with new games. I got zero replies and zero coverage for PC/Steam version. On the other hand, when I released to Nintendo Switch, all the news outlets I contacted covered the game.
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I'd love to get some press coverage for our upcoming update but I just can't bring myself to send out another set of emails not knowing if they be read or not.
- and we also don't have time to put a nice little gift press kit together and post it.. In fact, maybe I'm too paranoid about this sort of thing but I would be worried about it back firing and all the indie games press posting stories on how we tried to bribe a review out of them :-X
If only we were publishing on switch. I need to hire a porter. If I had someone to clean and keep my house in order, I'd have time to port the game.
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Yeah, the press game seems to be a weird and difficult one for indies :(