Dev Diary: For immediate release! We are the Eeyores of the games industry.
Our head of marketing, Yuliya, used to be a games journalist. Every day, hundreds of press emails flooded her inbox, claiming time-sensitive information and trying to sell a game as the best thing to happen to videogames since the invention of opposable thumbs.
“FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Best game to ever be created now has two new screenshots. Rejoice!”
If we did the same, we would just get overlooked. So instead we did the opposite. Last week we sent out emails to media whose subject line read: “Preview available for some game you’ve never heard of!”
Yuliya says she’d have clicked that, back in the day. Would you?
We took the same mildly self-deprecating tack with the press release too. If you’ve never read a press release, it’s a dry bare-facts recount of the news, punctuated in the middle by some developer or founder gushing about how excited they are to release their ground-breaking game.
Or in some cases, the best news about single visit procedures for crowns you’ve ever heard.
Our quote, written by our developer Chris, read:
“I originally planned for DestinyQuest Infinite to be this quick 9 month game project. Four years later, I’m basically embarrassed that it took so long to make a book (I mean, it’s a book, how hard could a book be?). I’m excited that it’s finally coming out, once we sort through all the technical support requests we got because the latest version of Chrome broke our build. I’m also hoping we’ll get some press about how we’re mixing books and games but every time I try to write a quote about how cool it is I get this instead.”
Turns out game creation is just as much about marketing as actually making the game. If only we could find a way to get the media to come to us…
And by the way, if you want to write about DestinyQuest Infinite, or conduct an interview, podcast, livestream, whatever – we’re pretty friendly. Talk to us here.
November 7, 2014 Friday at 5:10 pm
Yuliya 
