The 5 Pillars & Pitfalls of Indie Games PR
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- Опубліковано 7 лис 2016
- In this GDC 2016 session, ICO Partners' Thomas Reisenegger shows the 5 PR pillars indie studios doing their own PR should prioritize in order to get their games in front of press, UA-camrs and Twitch streamers.
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Five things you need to get right (Pillars)
1. Positioning 4:03
2. News beats 8:01
3. Trailer (Most important!) 12:35
4. Guerrilla marketing 15:28
5. Events 21:47
Five common Pitfalls
1. Too little, too late 22:56
2. Playing the indie card 23:19
3. Poor technical trailer 23:40
4. Don't repackage enough 23:56
5. Push PR instead of Pull PR 24:58
Future trends: 26:13
Thanks!
As a gamer who watches trailers, I would like to make several more suggestions to indie studios.
1) Don't release your trailer too early. If too many months have passed, either my hype has died down or I have forgotten about your game altogether. In that time, I have probably seen trailers for other games that have piqued my interest.
2) Show gameplay. If you show a minute long CGI, I probably know very little about how your game plays. If you are afraid to show off your actual game, I'm afraid to buy it.
3) Unless it is a text heavy game, pleased don't make it a text heavy trailer. I watch a lot of game coverage on my phone and I can't read it half the time. When I am able to read it, especially if I see walls of text, I'm not interested in reading it half the time.
I hope that these pointers are of some help :)
^This.
When I'm watching trailers, the biggest thing I want from it is genuine gameplay.
On steam I see trailers for games and I have no clue what the game is about. Just nice cinematics. That doesn't get me excited for a game.
We need to see gameplay, and not after a minute of cinematics either. Set the tone, but dive in.
And I like to see up-to-date gameplay too. If a trailer is made in early development, then it won't be as appealing as what is currently in game.
Make hype trailers later in the development cycle.
So far I have watched multiple hours of talks on how to properly market your game as an indie-dev, how to handle the intricacies of crowd-funding and how to effectively maintain and please an audience in the modern-day games industry.
I've got it all down and basically nothing can go wrong. Now all I need to do is make a game.
You could always get a job as the marketing/PR supervisor in a company already working on one
"nothing can go wrong" Said no one ever.
AMVaddictionist lots of people say it all the time, they’re just generally proven wrong.
Did you end up making a game? Or joke?
@@Exsulator2 I do what most people do. I spend 3 months writing a huge engine/backend and get bored before I really start building anything with it. Happened at least twice since my original comment :)
Ah the good old days, when only 3000 games were released on Steam each year.
😂😅😐😬
Right? :D
This is a must see talk for everyone making a game to be presented to the public!
Keep in mind that while these pointers are spot on it's still up to you and your creative strategy to get your title off the ground.
It won't always be a win if you rush it. Really take out the best of your game and present it in a way you can be proud of and generate as much hype from.
Damn good talk this one!
Awesome talk, made me rethink half of my plans and to-do items...
Fantastic talk - clear, concise and entertaining, with some eminently actionable points.
Super sweet talk, I've watched it a few times just to make sure I've gotten everything out of it.
Excellent talk, extremely informative. Now I can't wait 'till I'll have a proper trailer to show. :)
Nice info! just started developing my indie game, will take in these pointers.
This is great stuff, thank you!
Great info!
Very good, practical talk.
Steam gets 8 "games" a day "released" because most of those are so shitty they can barely be called games and so incomplete that calling them releases is an insult. "8 malfunctioning pieces of code are shat out on the Steam marketplace every day" would be more accurate.
in 2019: 20/day is a quiet day
knowing pewdiepie, that email would probably be the most legit thing on the web
This is brilliant.
Some good points here!
I find this lecture very interesting. Maybe some points are obvious for me but still really good basis.
What books would you recommend that expand this subject?
Another great talk, thanks.
Very useful.
I am in love with this lectures!
I am looking for how to make good PR, and this worked just fine.
I think some smaller teams have done a bit of guerilla marketing by remaking famous games until the company that own the IP issue a cease and desist order, and then people already paying attention to the team will watch as that team turn their remake into a new game with most of the same assets. I think this may have happened with Invader Games's Resident Evil 2 remake, but there are others I remember wondering this about as well.
Mother 4 was another example of that (www.mother4game.com/about.html ). Those devs recently had to abandon the project due to some backlash from Nintendo, but they just took most of the unique assets they had generated, changed the story, and now they're essentially releasing the same game under a different title. I'm not sure if it was planned or not, but they certainly have my attention. haha
Great talk. Danke!
8 games a day on steam, 3000 games a day on app stores...
The good thing is: most of those don't even deserve to be called games.
the sad thing is they still clutter the stores and hide actual decent games
164.000 games released every year. cant find anything nice to play
Dark Souls 3
14:24 Hungarian music? Last time I checked, This War of Mine used Polish music. Did I miss anything?
I know your comment is from 3 years ago, but the music he is referenced to is from the trailer. Music name is Gyöngyhajú lány from Omega
I can't help but wonder if Phil Fish was doing guerilla marketing to the extreme. I'm even wondering if there ever were real plans for Fez 2, all I could find was a trailer. Some might say if it is, he went too far, but the sale numbers for what is effectively a pixel retro puzzle platformer sure didn't seem to suffer for his loud mouth and supposed quitting.
Turns out I was also part of that crawl sales spike... bought it years ago when I watched steam train
But I'm watching on a cell phone... ?
Game releases on Steam per day
2012: 1
2013: 2
2014: 4
2015: 8
2016: 11
2017: 19
2018: 24
2019: 22
2020: 28
2021: 31 - 35 maybe
the # of quality games isnt increasing though. 90% of it is trash.
@@Kyle-ho4lj it was already 40~ in 2018, today must be 100
8 games released a day, 5 of those 8 games were fake games
I disagree with the statement that just making a good game isn't enough anymore, I hope to prove this wrong soon.
Making a good game is extremely helpful, but I think he's largely right with that statement. It's comes down to a numbers game. Too many games come out in a given day for more than a few not to be at least "good". That said, if 300 games come out on Steam a day, my gut feeling is probably only a dozen or so are actually good. That's still a lot of games, but not making those Minecraft clones in Unity with store bought assets will get you much, much further.
Regardless, I wish you much luck on your game. Ours is Greenlit on Steam at the moment, so we've done that part at least, but needless to say there's still much for us to worry about (as mentioned at length in the video).
Charles Ramos I agree with the other commenter. Yeah, you could be the one exception. Your game is so good, its story is unbelievably lucky in timing, mechanics or game type is first in a new soon-to-be popular genre. Or somehow you get just the right people seeing it and then Brad Pitt is seen playing it on a plane. But if you think your game is good, don't take the chance of it being lost in the sea of games being released. At least think about that some more. Maybe if it doesn't you can do what presenter said and rerelease it. Not just re-announce but rerelease.
reNINTENDO Congratulations on GreenLight, whats the name of your game? I agree the numbers are what pay the bills and that bad pr could kill your game completely - NoMansSky// my main point is that truly "good games" sell themselves, if you cant motivate the people to talk about your game just by playing it, maybe you're doing something wrong. SuperHot is a good game, cluster truck is a good game, TABS is a good game, half ass minecraft clones like NMS HAD THE BEST PR POSSIBLE, and fell through because of the lacking newfound gameplay promised, you want to run a sustainable dev company? make good games, or use "guerilla marketing" to swipe everyone's money.
But the point is how do you get people to even PLAY your good game if they don't know it exists? I have stumbled upon so many great games I never knew existed because the company didn't market their game at all.
botousai post a free demo on an active community board, as many as you can.
I have no idea of what PR stands for. PR is in the title of the talk. PR gets spoken like every 10 seconds. 2mn in the talk, I have read and heard PR something around 20 times, and it was not defined. Even in the short abstract under the video, PR is used twice, without telling what it is.
I don't care if you think you speak to elitists only or whatever, you're just shit at presentation if you're not able to define your acronyms at the beginning of your presentations. In my country, this is taught to children in school for their first presentation homework.
I don't care if other people here know what a PR is. If you don't define the acronyms you'll use over and over during your 30mn talk, you're just incompetent. Yes, I'm likely a very dumb person and I should go search the internet for everything this person is talking about. But it's the job of someone giving a talk to make sure his audience understands what he is talking about, not the job of the audience to make research work to understand what the host is trying to talk about.
If you read this comment, just remember it if you'll ever give a talk some day: anyone should be able to know what you're talking about. Maybe they don't have enough technical or theoretical ground to fully grasp the concepts, and that's okay, but they should have an idea of what you are talking about. It's YOUR job, not your audience's job.
But no one cares about Mobile, those aren't games -.-
they are golden geese to some though
Yeah, so is the national lottery!
Not a fan of mobile games. Bit dickish maybe, but proper games have suffered because of this devolution in gaming.
In fact, the vast majority cares about mobile games and nothing else. It's why its practices leak into other industries, not the other way around.
Sad. But it's the world we live in.
no one cares right. it is just 80% of the whole game market.
There is no point following this if you are a juvenile wannabe dev with a crap SURVIVAL with ZOMMMMBIE game! Whatever the amount of PR if your game is crap then gamer will avoid it!