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[G-Factor]

Hi all

My mobile game has just passed iOS submission review so I'm all done in terms of dev work.
I have a list of press contacts that I will email about my game. I'm not sure when to do this? A week before? A day before, on launch day?

I've read different things on the internet.

• Emailing before (1-2 weeks). Obviously gives them more time to play the game and write a review, but they might post the review before release, and interested impulse readers have no way to purchase the game and will likely not bother/forget when the game is actually released.
• Embargo: Emailing before as above, but ask them nicely not to post the review until the game is launched. Since I'm unknown, they might just see it as an annoyance and not even bother with my game.
• Email at launch. Ensures that people reading the review can buy the game immediately, but the press might feel like a review will be largely irrelevant if the game is already released.

Anyone with experience can offer some insight?

My game is for mobile devices (iOS and Android). It's a fairly deep strategic/RPG, not a simple endless runner/match 3 if that makes any difference. I also work for a large Triple A company by day, and made the game in my spare time. I will also mention this in case it helps to pique their interest.

Cheers

[Grhyll]

Brace yourself, the "Just before you started your project" answers are coming 

But I think I get your point, and anyway now it's too late. (Although it seems that it would have been better if the press already heard about you long ago, not to mention the potential players.)

On my last small game (for which I didn't do any marketing before approaching the release either), I contacted the journalists the day before with a promo code, so that they could try the game before the players. I gathered... 0 review To be fair, my game wasn't especially great, I didn't expect a lot more. Back to your case, imo, you should email them before (1 week seems pretty good), ask them nicely if they can refrain from spreading about your game until the release date, and if they don't, well at least you still got an article (and that's a reason de celebrate on its own). I wouldn't wait until after the launch, and I wouldn't require a strict embargo, you're probably not famous enough to do things like this and still have journalists willing to cover your game.

[G-Factor]

Yeah, I understand general promotion should start as early as possible.

I guess I'm talking specifically about the "My game is done, here is a promo code." email.

Anyway thanks for your insight, I think I'll contact them 1 week ahead of release 

[Slapdash]

If it was my game I'd mail them at least a week ahead maybe more, then say. Here is my game it releases in DD/MM/YYYY. 
That way they will add it to the review and if potential players read the review they know when it's coming out. Don't worry about if they forget about it or not. They either will or they wont. I don't think you should worry about that.

[bateleur]

Early is better.

Here's the thing: reviews coming out too early before people can buy the game may seem like a big problem, but it really isn't. The problem you're much more likely to have is absolutely zero coverage of any kind. Anything you can do to reduce the chances of that is good.

[AdoreGames]

Your second point (that with embargo option) is the best choice. But you should start contacting press the month before your release date is set. Here's why: it may take a week or so, to get a reply from one journalist or blogger. With several follow up emails your "have a look at my game I'm gonna release on [date]' can last for several weeks to finally get the review. On the other hand some journalists will answer immediately, but you should be really lucky to get swift replies.

Even earlier you should already follow them on social networks, relevantly reply on their tweets, retweet them and so on. So to say, to get yourself noticed by them. They'll more likely to answer your email when your name sounds familiar to them.

From our exeprience, however, we got zero reviews before the launch, but got about 10 after the game went live on the App Store. What's more, those reviews drove little traffic to our game, so they're just great for giving you the idea of how other qualified fellows feel about your game and quote them in your app description or in your Twitter posts.

Our top advise would be not to avoid contacting less popular gaming review sites, cuz they're more likely to review your game then say gamezebo, toucharcade, or techcrunch.

[G-Factor]

Thanks for the replies.

I will contact them before release. My expectactions are low since I've heard many people say they reach out to 500 or more contacts and get virtually no responses.

We'll see 

[CesarD8]

I've heard many people say they reach out to 500 or more contacts and get virtually no responses.

Man, this kind of thing keeps me up at night. 

[WarpQueen]

Thanks for the replies.

I will contact them before release. My expectactions are low since I've heard many people say they reach out to 500 or more contacts and get virtually no responses.

We'll see 

Hope you get some reviews, maybe good reviews even!
Keep us posted? Would love to hear if it worked out for you.

[G-Factor]

Thought I'd give an update.

Sent out about 70 emails a few days ago, to a mix of youtubers / press.

Long story short, no replies. I did get a couple in the form of;

"Thanks for contacting us! We'll look at your game later in the week. In the meantime, would you like to advertise on our site?". I assume they won't really look at my game.

Sent out promo codes to all of them and none have been used (at least Android ones haven't, not sure how to check iOS on itunes connect). In fact, no-one even clicked on my youtube video link. I know because I keep count of the views.

I was expecting maybe 1-2 replies from the smaller sites/channels. Optimistically hoping for 3-4. So all in all 0 isn't really that far off par to be honest. I knew that it was a likely scenario 

This is my game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YosTGlQYxQ0&feature=youtu.be

The quality/presentation is probably just not good enough to warrant attention. Disappointing but such is life!

Anyway just thought I'd share my experiences
Peace 

[Grhyll]

That sucks :/ So disappointing to spend a lot of time sending those mails for 0 answers... Thanks for getting back, I wish you the best.

[juriel0000]

I did a simple experiment. I published unfinished game on google play store. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.comtor.games.castronaut. The game was functional.

Then I posted about it  in my personal facebook 1000 followers, personal twitter 1000 followers, game developers forums and groups on facebook.

Result: Less than 5 downloads. Only closer friends. Zero reviews.

Why?
My inference: People loves flamboyant images and videos. Your game could be wonderful or sucks. That's not important. You need a great promo video, impresive animated gifs.

Thought I'd give an update.

Sent out about 70 emails a few days ago, to a mix of youtubers / press.

Long story short, no replies. I did get a couple in the form of;

"Thanks for contacting us! We'll look at your game later in the week. In the meantime, would you like to advertise on our site?". I assume they won't really look at my game.

Sent out promo codes to all of them and none have been used (at least Android ones haven't, not sure how to check iOS on itunes connect). In fact, no-one even clicked on my youtube video link. I know because I keep count of the views.

I was expecting maybe 1-2 replies from the smaller sites/channels. Optimistically hoping for 3-4. So all in all 0 isn't really that far off par to be honest. I knew that it was a likely scenario 

This is my game
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YosTGlQYxQ0&feature=youtu.be

The quality/presentation is probably just not good enough to warrant attention. Disappointing but such is life!

Anyway just thought I'd share my experiences
Peace 

[WarpQueen]

Thought I'd give an update.

That is harsh, so sorry. :/
No views and no download, how would they even know if they'd like the game or not? The PR world is hard.

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

when i look at those two games here.
Arena Quest RPG &  Castronaut
I want to question the devs, like if it wasn't your game and you were just a random person trying to find a good game to play, would you really download these game if you happen to see the screenshots?

[DuskyPixel]

These types of post scare me. Right now I am leaning towards emailing about my mobile game on a Monday or Tuesday night then releasing the game the day after.

This article has a section on timing that I will probably follow.

[G-Factor]

when i look at those two games here.
Arena Quest RPG &  Castronaut
I want to question the devs, like if it wasn't your game and you were just a random person trying to find a good game to play, would you really download these game if you happen to see the screenshots?

That's why I mentioned I didn't think the presentation was good enough to warrant coverage. For what its worth, an early prototype version of the game (with worse art) I released a couple of years ago has been downloaded over 100,000 times on Google Play

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.badlogic.Arena&hl=en_GB

It also got featured/reviewed on http://jayisgames.com/review/arena-quest-rpg-demo.php (I never contacted him, he stumbled upon the game himself).

I did pretty much no promotion on that version. I didn't email anyone, and posted it to I think 2 forums? So people must have come across it via organic searches on Google Play. I think 4.4 out of 5.0 rating for a free game isn't bad, but obviously that's my opinion. Quite a few people also emailed me directly asking for info on the full version and that they'd pay for it. I'm not trying to justify the quality of my game, I'm just giving some data here for reference 

But your point is valid. I think if you want press to not overlook your game, it really needs to look a LOT better than mine. I didn't expect any of the larger sites to reply to me, but since I had so many free codes, why not take a shot? I hoped 1 or 2 small youtube channels might like the look of the gameplay and give it a shot. I did eventually get one reply from a small 10k channel saying they might take a look at it, since I mentioned it's similar to a game they covered in the past.

I really hope I don't sound entitled. I was in a weird position where I was thinking "People really liked the demo but I also understand graphically it doesn't look very good. Let's see what happens when I release a full version. It might get another 100,000 downloads (the updated free version) or times have changed and it might get 50". People asked for results so I'm giving them 

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

Googlestore a few years ago was pretty much different from what it is now, with how easily it is nowadays to create and publish game, the market is oversaturated right now. SO what had a chance a few years has even less chance to be featured.
From personal experience, in 2014 i was still spending some time, scrolling amongst games to find some little unknown gems, but i'm not doing it anymore as i'm being biased by the amount of available games.

[G-Factor]

Googlestore a few years ago was pretty much different from what it is now, with how easily it is nowadays to create and publish game, the market is oversaturated right now. SO what had a chance a few years has even less chance to be featured.
From personal experience, in 2014 i was still spending some time, scrolling amongst games to find some little unknown gems, but i'm not doing it anymore as i'm being biased by the amount of available games.

Yeah you're probably right! In any case, getting my game onto the appstore was no small task. I still don't really understand the whole certificates thing and somehow managed to get it working through trial and error. And if nothing else, I took a game from concept to completion so it was a good learning experience. I did sell about 20 copies over the first 2 days so hopefully I'll make enough money for a nice dinner at least  

EDIT: Noticed my game's info is up on Toucharcade.

http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?s=e9dec90fc144fd935e89371efb8cee25&p=3929562

It's not a review, it's just a copy of my game's description from the appstore. Not sure if that's a moderator who posted or just some random person. I guess that's probably how I got a few sales.

[Slapdash]

Thanks for the updates. Game looks quite cool!
Good luck!

[GlennSSong]

After reading all these posts I wanted to share my experience.

We finished our game Toodle's Toboggan on October 4th, which is the second game we did -- it was built on the endless runner engine we did for our first game. The end result was we got about 700 downloads on iOS and 170 downloads on Google Play since it's release on October 4th, and that's pretty much it. I still see 1 download a day via AppAnnie so it's pretty demoralizing. In terms of money we earned from it, it wasn't much. Here's the PR stuff I did:

While Toodle's Toboggan was in development I was doing Instagram stuff almost daily. I posted videos or images and hastagged the hell out of it. The stuff got likes, but ultimately I don't think it converted to any kind of download or IAP purchase, or anything.

I used GamePress to send out a press release and Gamasutra picked it up. I did this a week before our game released and I think it helped. Our press release showed up on a bunch of sites.

Ultimately, though all of our press was backwards. We got a trailer put together but it wasn't until after the game was released. We wanted to get the game out there thinking we had done enough, but maybe we could have sat on it for a few weeks while the trailer was still being made so we could make a proper media push, but yeah, our media strategy should have been to start months ago, but I'm not a media person. I'm a software engineer. So it's a new hat I'm learning.

I also went to various indie game portals and listed my site. I chat with other devs, journalists, and youtubers on #IndieDevHour and that lead to our game getting a Youtube video and some RTs.

I tried promo codes. You can dump promo codes on TouchArcade's forum. They have a board for that. I did 10 codes for iOS and Android. All 10 iOS codes were used I believe. 3 of the 10 android codes were used. That forum post also got 0 replies which was really odd. Nobody said anything about the game but folks sniped the codes. We got a bunch of collateral downloads from it though. I tried promo codes on Twitter but when more bots follow you than actual people that's a no-go. Same with instagram.

I tried pinging sites for reviews after we launched which I'm kicking myself for. It's dumb. Once you launch it feels that each day diminishes the return on your game's value, especially if it's a mobile game. There's a giant list of review sites for mobile/indie games and I started going through them in order, but I found some sites seemed dead or other sites wanted to do a "pay for review" deal. I attribute this to too many people wanting the same thing so now there's a glut of games but not enough people to review them, but hey, makes a great cottage industry. I also targeted just the major sites, okay well, PocketGamer UK but their editor is out and who knows if they will cover it.

A random Chinese site covered our game and gave it a 6.7/10 rating. We google translated the text. That was cool. It's nice to see something original written about your game. Likewise watching the Youtube players enjoying our game was really cool too.

At this point though, I'm pretty much out of ideas. My outside the box ideas now are to learn how to twitch stream and do creative #gamedev streams to try and build an audience for Prisma Wave, but that will take time. I'm also wondering if I shouldn't do a new game. Maybe try to turn around a simple game and stream it's development.

I've also thought that really the only kind of discovery/SEO that works is on the appstore(s) itself. All of this other stuff is oversaturated. It seems like for mobile the holy grail is to have that seemingly random luck-of-the-draw chance for Apple or Google to feature your game and then you're an instahit. Otherwise, my cynical take is just to develop quick and cheap games and dump them onto the Apple Store and see if something gets featured or by virtue of having more stuff in the store with SEO tags our company name is more visible.