The Minimalist Game PR Email: A GIF, A Link, & A Steam Key

Not everyone can hire a PR person, especially indie game devs often working as a one-person-team. That said, I often get a lot of…rough emails from devs.  As an example, here’s a barely edited sample directly from my inbox:

A game PR email containing nothing more than "new game, do you want keys"

The obvious issue here is…I know nothing about the game. Sure, I could click that link, but it’s just as easy to click the ‘archive message’ button, and with 50+ emails in my box, that’s probably my first reflex nine times out of ten if you don’t make an impression. I wish I could say this is rare, but I get a lot of these. A few very basic PR services even send out emails that are basically this with better formatting.

And I get it! Almost certainly you’re a gamedev first and a PR person second. Or third. Fifth. Sixteenth. That’s fine! But even solo or hobby game devs still need to do a little homemade PR too.  Let’s take a look at creating a Minimum Viable Product for game PR that gets people to actually look at your game even if we can’t pay someone to just do it for us.

Game PR as a Minimum Viable Product

You’ve probably heard of Minimum Viable Products before; it’s all about making the simplest, easiest, cheapest thing that (you think) will actually solve your/your client’s problem. And hey, there’s something to be said about minimalism in general for PR—I’m no big YouTuber, and even I get 10+ emails a day most days. I’m sure major review sites are getting many, many times more than that. You’re going to need to assume anyone looking at your email is getting dozens of similar pitches.

Here’s what helps me the most, as a gaming YouTuber with far, far more emails than time:

  • A GIF of the game
  • A link to the Steam/itch.io/etc page
  • A review key to actually play the game right now

That’s it. You can and probably should give me a little text snippet describing the game, but really, a good GIF can really sell that on it’s own. Show me just enough of the game to give me a sense of the gameplay, the setting, the mood. Something your target audience will see and think “yep, I want that!”.

Yes, GIFs are huge, but people know what GIF means. You should probably use a webM, an MP4, you can even use a YouTube video instead if you like; when I say “GIF” I mean something short, small, and punchy. Even if it’s a video, think Vine, not RedLetterMedia.

Editor’s Note: RIP Vine.

GIFs are Magic

What’s so great about a GIF? Let’s use an a (fake) copy example, pretending I’m pitching Assault Android Cactus.

Assault Android Cactus is a score-based Twin-Stick Shooter available on Steam featuring full controller support, multiple game modes, and 9 selectable characters with unique weapons.

If you got that in your email, would you be interested? Maybe you really like Twin Stick shooters, but there’s a lot of those. Let’s try a GIF that takes as about as long to watch as that took to read, this one from Alex Coccia’s review:

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This UI Change Could Have Prevented Patreon’s Fee Change Debacle

Patreon announced a new fee structure last week. It was intended to prevent the problem of “double charges” and allow them to roll out Charge Up Front to all users. People hated it. A lot. Today they canceled it, as I suspected/hoped they would.

How bad was it all? My campaign lost 10% of Patrons in under 24 hours, and I strongly suspect I won’t get all of them back. And from posts on Twitter, I was hardly the only one who lost a substantial amount of Patrons. That’s really not fun to experience, especially as someone who had nothing to do with the actual change at hand.

Patreon Screwed Up

I could actually write several articles on all the little problems with their proposed changes and their reasoning. But the biggest problems were such:

  1. Patreon moved the fees from Creators to Patrons, and added a 35 cent flat fee that drastically affected $1 pledges. This strongly discouraged Patrons from pledging the most common pledge amount of $1.
  2. Patreon did this because they came up with a brilliant new system that multiplied the amount of fees Patrons would have to pledge. This destroys the incentive to pledge to lots of creators.

That’s basically the coolest thing about Patreon gone: the ability to support lots of creators with small donations.

I’ll let Patreon’s own charts speak for how terrible the basic concept of their change was:

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Finer Points: Scripted Losses are Bad Game Design

I’ve ranted on Twitter a couple times about scripted losses in games, and a fair number of people still seem to think they’re pretty decent ideas, so I thought I’d get into the meat of what makes them poor design. The bottom line is they violate too many of player’s expectations in a lot of ways developers probably don’t even realize—like many issues in gaming, it’s really easy to overlook when you know what’s going on, but when you don’t, hoo boy.

Losing Sucks

So this isn’t news. But I think game devs underestimate just how a sudden loss can affect players. Allow me to tell you a story from my youth. From the ancient times, when all games were pixels, and “multiplayer” often meant taking turns in a single-character platformer or just plain ol’ watching a friend play a single player game all day.

I was playing Chrono Trigger with a friend on my Playstation, a bit late to the game. He had beaten the game on SNES before I had even played, but he didn’t want to spoil the game so I was going in fairly blind. The only RPG I had played before this was Super Mario RPG, at that same friend’s house. I never owned a copy.

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