When I was doing PR for Monster Face, I searched high and low for just a list of distributers to submit to, game review sites to pitch to, and youtubers to contact. I couldn't find one. I had to put my own list together out of bits and pieces floating around the web, and now I'm sharing it with you. This is everyone I submitted to and contacted. I hope you find it useful.
Distributers:
I've divided these into three categories. Easy to Submit distributors provide a link or email specifically for receiving game submissions. Catch Me If You Can distributors make you jump a hoop or two. Dead End distributors should be avoided
Easy to Submit
Humble Store: You can submit to the store or apply for their widget at here
gog.com Online Submission Form itch.io: No submission request. Just create an account and upload your game
GamersGate: submit by email
IndieGameStand: Sign in to an account and use the submission form
MacGameStore : submission form
GameStreamer: submission form
beamdog.com: Developer portal 404 for months now
desura.com: MIA and not paying devs
indieroyale.com: run by Desura
indiecity.com: no longer being maintained
Demos
It is worth adding that I also created a demo and submitted it to softonic. Here is a comprehensive submission guide. It's actually easy
Youtubers
Never underestimate the power of a good Let's Play or video review. Again, I've divided the list into youtubers who actually read my pitch and responded, those who went on to make a video, and those I never heard back from. I suggest just sending your pitch to everyone
When submitting your game(s), please include as much of the following information as possible:
Title
Short information about the game
Screenshots (URLS)
Video (ULRS)*
Genre
Price*
Release Date*
Name of Game Studio/Developer/Company
*If available/possible
Remember your Friends
Keep track of every reply, and especially every resulting review you got from a contact. When you make your next game, those contacts should be the first to get a crack at it, before you send it to anyone else. Let them know you appreciate their help, and show them loyalty.
I must say, I've learned a whole lot about marketing an indie game lately. Most of it doesn't work. What you really need above all is to be persistent and lucky. Persistent how, you say? Here are some things I've tried and how they've affected my views and sales:
Hashtags:
Oh my Gawd, how did I not know how important those are? USE THEM! I've been tweeting about my game for months, and it made absolutely no difference, whatsoever. Then again, I only had about 20 followers on Twitter. I looked up trending hashtags and tweeted a little something about Monster Face, with the hashtags #indiedev and #gamedev
Monster Face had never gotten so much attention. Within 10 minutes, the number of views on itch.io went from 58 to 81. That's one fourth of my total views in a tiny timespan, compared to the other three fourths that took weeks to get. There are bots on twitter that retweet those hashtags and get them to a much larger audience. I got a good amount of new followers in Twitter, and some of them have been favouriting and retweeting me occasionally since then. No sales have come out of this, yet, but I'm definitely getting a lot more attention. None of the marketing guides I read mentioned this, so I'm doing it now.
Use hashtags. I can't oversell this.
Pitch Emails:
Most marketing guides will tell you to write short personalised emails to journalists and youtubers. Have a catchy subject line like "Brainscar Games presents: Monster Face, an addictive casual time-killer". Introduce yourself briefly. Be clear what you want right away "I'd like to ask you to review my game". Describe your game in a single short paragraph, provide screenshots and a gameplay trailer and/or link to a one, and a copy of your game. Thank the reader for taking the time to read your mail, and remind them what you want "...and thank you for considering my game for review"
Also very important, and I made the mistake of forgetting this one. All the guides say, don't leave any questions open. If a contact has to write you back to ask for more information, they probably won't and just discard your mail. Aside from including a playable copy of your game, make sure to also provide a link to where the game can actually be purchased.
That is all good advice. It's how professional pitch emails should be written, and sending out enough of these will get you results sooner or later. I sent out about 60 in the first week. It took me a while, because every single journalist/youtuber got their own personally-written mail. I didn't copy/paste or mass send. The mails are similar, of course, but every person I pitch to got the courtesy of being treated as a person, not just a number on a list.
Every time I send out a block of these, my game views go up a bit for a day, and the press link is used to download Monster Face by about one third the amount of mails written. For example, on June 13-14 I sent out 30 pitch emails. That earned me 33 views and 8 downloads.
Gimmick Pitches:
This isn't just pitching for me, it's research. I want to know what works, and how well. I tried out a new approach. Against all sound advice, I have written a series of pitch emails in parody of the Nigerian Prince scam emails. I start with a subject like "Gamedev from Nigeria wants to give you Important Indie Game", and then claim to be a Nigerian gamedev prince, sending them the last existing copy of Monster Face, and charge them to guard it with their very lives, because the freedom and happiness of my people depends on it. I add that including the press link and gameplay trailer to the mail will surely get me executed if caught, and implore the reader to review the game as quickly as possible, for the sake of my country and gaming rights everywhere.
As it turns out, people didn't get it. I sent out 12 mails, which earned me 1 view and 2 downloads. Those aren't great results. I made up other stories. I sent mails claiming to have been abducted by space pirates who wanted to keep my game for their own planet. I claimed to be a hostage of ninjas who were forcing me to design games in a sweatshop somewhere. Nothing. I tried again by sending 10 pitch emails with the subject "Come With Me If You Want to Live!" in which I claimed to be the mail's recipient from the future, writing himself about the importance of playing my game. The review will be the pivoting point of history which causes video games to be embraced and integrated into all aspects of life. They must hurry, because a terminator has been sent back in time to stop them making the video. The first terminator was accidentally sent to 1984 where it became an actor, but the new one got it right and will be there soon. Two people responded very positively to those emails. I got replies like "This is promotion at it's finest! You really got my attention". That felt great, but even those two people didn't pursue the matter any further. Those 10 mails didn't get me a single view or download. Not one. The regular old pitch emails did better. Gimmick emails get you nowhere. I can't say this didn't disappoint me a little. I really wanted to be able to say creativity can give you an edge.
Finding people to pitch to:
The internet is ridiculously lacking in lists of you tubers that review games and game news sites. Google it all you want. You're only going to get a short list of the biggest ones. You can write all of them in a day. Then you're back to searching aimlessly for more.
Here's a little help:
Wikia has a very helpful list of let's players on youtube http://letsplay.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Let%27s_Players
There is also a list specifically for female let's player: http://letsplay.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Female_Let's_Players
Contacts with no email address:
Ridiculously, a lot of game news sites don't provide an email address anywhere on their website. Plenty of reviewers and let's players on youtube also don't provide a contact adress. It's like they don't want to be pitched to. So, do a little digging. Game news sites tend to have contact submission forms. If nothing else is available, then use those before you give up on the site entirely. For youtubers, there are usually links to Facebook, twitter and Google+, and with a little luck they listed an email address there, but I've found that this really isn't worth the trouble. If a youtube page does not have an email adress listed, skip that youtuber and invest time in the ones who actually make contacting them possible in this lifetime. I've tried putting in the effort, and have not gotten any responses from youtubers who's emails I eventually managed to unearth.. You can still either message them directly on youtube, which has not gotten me any results so far, or shout them a quick "Hi. I'm an indie dev and would love for you to have a look at my game. Do you have an email address I could send you a download link to?" on their youtube channel discussion panel. None of them have ever responded to my attempts at communicating this way, but if you have the extra time, I wouldn't discard trying this entirely. You might have more luck than I have.
Remember, you're the dev with the product that needs attention. You're the one with the need. But, you're not at the bottom of the food chain, here. You also have something to offer. You just need to get people to see that they need what you have. You worked hard, and now you have something others can benefit from. Don't sell yourself short. We're expected to be thorough in our pitches and leave no questions open, because our pitch will be discarded if the person we contact has to hunt for missing information. If they, on the other hand, aren't able or willing to provide you with easily-obtained contact information, then skip them. You're working hard to grease the PR machine, and you have much more important things to do than focus an hour on one single reviewer who is 80% likely to turn you down anyway. Your time is better spent reaching more people who aren't making it difficult for you. Chances are, your game is great, and anyone you can't even pitch to is missing out.
The results are in:
I've tried personalized, individually written pitch emails, gimmick emails, alternate contact options like youtube messenger and submission forms, and now mass emails. Here's what I discovered. Use mass emails! I spent weeks writing individual emails with next to no results. A few views and downloads, but no replies or exposure whatsoever. Gimmick mails were a total flop. And then, I wrote a single pitch email and sent it to 15 youtubers at once. I got 3 views within 10 minutes of sending. Within that day, I got 4 email responses confirming that they will play my game on their channel, and they were excited about doing so. After ages of failed attempts, my game is finally going to be seen in public.
Driven by the sudden updraft of responses, I took that same pitch email, and sent it to 22 more youtubers. I got even more hits, more downloads, and another video review out of it.
I couldn't be happier with this awesome review the mass mail approach got me:
Important note, whatever you do, only make 1 youtuber the mail's recipient, and put the rest in CC. Nobody likes emails with huge lists of other people right there at the top. Using CCs is cleaner and more considerate. I did it this way, and I got results.
Here's another good one:
Don't forget about Twitch. There are streamers with massive and/or loyal audiences, who might be willing to give your game a try and stream it to them. That's exposure. Don't discount it. Most game marketing guides don't mention Twitch, so I'm mentioning it now. Pitch on Twitch!
Small Audience trumps No Audience
Don't discard youtubers with small audiences. Contact everyone. Even if a channel has only 8 followers, that's 8 people who will have seen your game, and small channels may be more likely to welcome original contact and actually have the time to take you seriously. Getting turned down by a big channel gains you nothing. Getting reviewed on a tiny channel gains you something.
Sell Yourself
Before I was a gamedev, I wrote tabletop RPGs. Before that, I was a vacuum cleaner salesman. I learned a lot about selling, and read a lot on the subject to improve my vacuum cleaner game. One of the most important lessons I learned as a salesman: You're not really selling your product. You're selling YOU. When you're pitching a sale, it doesn't matter what you're selling. All that matters is that the person you are pitching to believes you are sincere. You have to sell your brand. It's no different in the games industry. If Bethesda released a game called World of Poop, and the cover had a turd holding a sword, millions would buy it. Because it's Bethesda. If Skyrim had been released by a company called SomeDevFromKentucky, it might have gotten a little attention as a game that was "incredibly well done considering it came from a small unknown studio", and that would have been the end of it. Sell your brand, then your game. If you're an indie dev, YOU ARE YOUR BRAND. Sell yourself!
One of the most memorable things Zig Ziglar said, most memorably to me, at least was that the net worth of a person is the average net worth of the sum of his closest associates. That can be applied in many ways, and this is one of them. Be active socially. Network. Talk to other devs. Make successful people your associates, and it will raise your own market value as a dev. Get to know people, get out there. Sell yourself!
This gets mentioned a lot, and I was going to leave it out, but it's important and can't be overstated. No matter how much marketing you do, now matter how many people you contact or show your game to, if your game isn't "finished", it will get you nowhere. Releasing a game with a lot of bugs or unfinished graphics you plan on upgrading in a patch later is a giant turn-off. The internet remembers everything! If you release an unpolished game, and release updates a month later that make it the greatest game in the world, people googling your game are always going to find those first crappy images and posts of people complaining about bugs, because shortly after release is when your game will receive the most media attention it's ever going to get. Do it right the first time, THEN start pitching. Otherwise you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
I hope my research into contacting the media can be of help to other new devs out there. Remember, don't give up. It took me almost 2 months to get a reply, but I stuck with it and things are starting to roll along now. Keep contacting people. Someone will listen!
