Hey Brother, Can You Spare An Article?

Media relations is sales. Full Stop. I’ve been doing it for 25 years. You have to know your customer, their audience and why your game will get the journalist excited, the site some views or how it can be the start of some bigger conversation.

Here’s the challenge: Your time is your currency, so do you spend it trying to get some person you don’t know to provide uncontrolled critique of your game, or do you reach out directly to players on social platforms or do you reach out to influencers, who may critique but it’ll be while they are actively playing the game for they audience?

The answer is YES and….

The truth to game marketing is that it has to be well rounded for players to believe the game is worth their time. This means you need these assets and these channels to cover the basics:

Assets:

Channels:

It all begins with writing a pitch. Dont just ChatGPT this shit because it removes any sense of passion for information oganization. Also dont write more than one paragraph. Write a persuasive paragraph on who you are, your developer story, why you think your game would be a good fit for their audience and what the game it (Elevator Pitch) and its USP.

A USP is a Unique Selling Proposition; aka What makes your game unique?

Dont attach a huge deck or screen shot files, just include one link to your store page and a link to your website. These two places should do the heavy lifting of selling your game.

No answer is a polite pass, dont follow up more than twice. A pass is a hard no and rarely is about your game, its about the kind of articles they need to write to create clicks. A YES is always framed as “tell me more” which means you have more to prove but you are very close. The final bit of advice is that no matter what, never be rude even if they ghost you, flame you in the article or are mean/stupid in their email correspondence to you. People who have deeply burned me in the past, have turned out to be some of my strongest allies in the future. Dont take things personal not hold grudges. Every PR person learns to deal with rejection - and we always forget people’s beats so we get the occasional “Remove me from your list.” Shit happens, like everyone else in the games industry layoffs are hard to keep up with.

How to find email and such?

Goof Luck and Have Fun.

Erik Reynolds

p.s. I’ve linked my Linkedin in case you want to reach out and ask questions or ask me to help. If you are a solo dev or indie, and a follower of this newsletter then I’m happy to offer advice and affordable consulting prices and offer press release distribution for affordable prices as well. Dont ask me for emails as that’ll lead to me being blacklisted.

Kotaku Story: Peak Dev Explains The Completely Bonkers Psychology Behind Game Prices

Sometimes 1+1 does equal 3 in the minds of Steam users.

Game pricing is more all over the place than it’s ever been as developers explore the top and low ends of the spectrum, as well as everywhere in-between. And that’s before seasonal sales, subscription services, and monthly giveaways. Indie games in particular used to have to fight to prove they were worth the price of admission in the eyes of gamers used to big blockbuster spectacles produced on AAA budgets. But the psychology underlying those perceptions isn’t as clearcut as some might think, according to one of the developers of 2025’s top-selling “friendslop” climbing sim Peak.

The game launched last June at a discounted sale price of $5. That was $3 below what would be it’s “normal” price of $8. Co-creator Nick Kaman recently explained the logic behind the maneuver to Game File. “We had this joke of, like, how much is a game really?” he said. “In a player’s mind, what does it mean to spend five bucks? Well, that’s five bucks. But six bucks? Well, that’s still five bucks. Four bucks is also kind of five bucks.”

Read the full story on Kotaku.

Festivals, showcases, influencer and media showcases and their submission windows. This will be an unwieldy list and I won’t be able to find everything, so please let me know if you see something worth posting about.

One podcast episode worth your time this week about development, tools, tech, audience building, business, or culture plus why it’s relevant to the realities of making and marketing games today.

Shawn Crahan is better known as Clown from the band Slipknot but in this interview he talks about his early days of modding and building the largest server (in block) in Minecraft. Deeply passionate about developing and how making this game helped him manage the grief of losing a child.

All the best links that usually disappear into the Reddit ether only to be reposted by the most diligent Redditors. All Links will be archived on the ALL THE LINKS!!! article.

From @CognitoTab on the Unreal Forums

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