While trying to get the press interested in Forever Lost we have learned some important lessons on how to go about doing it and in the spirit of giving and community we decided it would be nice if we shared the 5 most important tips that we have discovered.
1. Don’t waste time on a trailer
You know that old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words? Well that isn’t true for moving-pictures. Journalists really enjoy writing, why else would they become a journalist?, so to make their work life just that little bit easier simply don’t create a trailer. But if you absolutely must make one, make sure it is no shorter than 8 minutes.
2. Don’t make a press pack
One thing we’ve discovered is that journalists love, and I really mean love, scouring your hopefully poorly designed website to find screenshots and descriptions of your games. They enjoy nothing more than the feeling they get when, 7 pages deep, they finally stumble across what genre your game is and how much it costs.
Trust me, you will be remembered and rewarded, for they will appreciate the amount of effort that has gone in to producing such a poorly crafted website that allows them to spend many hours of their day searching for the most basic nuggets of information.
3. Think of journalists as anonymous people
Journalists don’t like being spoken to like normal people, they much prefer to be treated like anonymous people in large multi-national companies.
The absolute best thing you can do is mass-mail them all at once with a nice generic email while making sure to put all their addresses in the To or CC fields. This shows just how much you care and gives them the email nice personal touch.
Also, don’t even bother typing “Hi”, and definitely not “Hey” then their name, just jump straight to the point and keep it really terse.
4. Don’t provide details
Along the same track as tip #3, when contacting journalists and reviewers by email do not under any circumstances provide links to any trailiers, which you shouldn’t have made anyway, screenshots or your website in general, and whatever you do; don’t include any contact details for contacting you if they wish to find out more information. They really hate this.
If you really want to go the extra mile, don’t even contact them in the first place. They will find you.
5. Don’t be interesting
No one likes stories at the best of times ( or the worst of times ), and this is especially true for journalists, so make sure that when you are talking to them that you don’t let slip any of the no doubt fascinating things that have happened through the development of your game. They simply don’t want to know and by informing them of any of these stories you will simply be insulting them so please don’t do it.
6. Bonus Tip – Make a bad game
Would you look at that? One extra bonus tip just for you, and this is probably the most important one.
There is no point in performing any of the previous steps if you haven’t got a bad game in the first place. You must ensure that your game is complicated, unpolished, bug-ridden and most importantly; it can’t be fun. I really can’t stress this final point enough, if your game is fun people won’t want to play it and thus journalists won’t want to write about it.
