Video Game Marketing Advice

I've been reading this article on video game marketing. Here are some passages that we should be thinking about later on:

Send out press releases
This is the most basic form of marketing. To get attention, you need press to write about your game. A press release is simply an email with some news about your game, usually including links to screenshots and maybe a trailer. If the news is interesting enough, press will write about it. You can send your press release to hundreds of gaming websites and magazines, and hopefully enough will pick up on it.

Find your own voice
If you have never written a press release before, you will probably look for some examples online, and are likely to see what kinds of texts most big companies send out. Don't copy their style: they suck. Big company press releases are often incredibly boring and contain a combination of marketing buzzwords and corporate language. There really is no need to do anything like that! When we saw an early press release about Super Meat Boy (might have been this one), we realised that you can do anything you want in a press release, and there is absolutely no requirement for boring stuff! Figure out what fits your studio and your game. And if you and your game are boring, then feel free to go for boring press releases after all... Find your own voice!

Create a press list
To send out press releases, you need to know who to send them to. So start collecting the email-addresses of as many websites and magazines that write about games as you can. Many websites show their email-address for news somewhere, or you might even be able to find the email-address of the journalist who writes about your type of game.

Find big foreign sites
Every game developer knows about big websites like IGN, Gamespot, Eurogamer, Kotaku, Joystiq and Destructoid. Finding such international websites is not very difficult, while it is easy to overlook local, non-English websites. Some of these are really big, though, and could get a lot of eyeballs on your game! One way to find such sites is to look which have a high Alexa rating. Alexa rates how many visitors a site gets, and although the precision of their estimates might be in dispute, Alexa is still a good way to get a quick overview of what gaming sites are big in, say, Italy.

Reveal - we should keep the dubstep level secret and release it to our fans!

A great example is the reveal of the Chinese faction in Swords & Soldiers. In our first trailers, screenshots and press releases, we always showed two factions, plus a big question mark in the spot of the third faction. By continuously telling people that we were not telling them what the third faction was, we spiked their curiosity, making it a serious press moment when we finally revealed the Chinese. Had we shown the Chinese in the first trailer, this would not have been news!