How to get your indie game noticed

gamesindustry.biz:

Alan Wen

Monday 4th July 2022

With an endless sea of new games launching on Steam alone, it's no longer enough to simply make a good game, you have to make sure players know about it and are hyped for it. From its announcement, to the run-up to launch, and even after launch, getting a game noticed is the role of PR, whether in-house, via a publisher, or through agencies.

For GI Live, we assembled a panel of games PR professionals with a range of experience between them.

There's Emily Britt, head of communications at Diva Agency with 25 years of experience in PR including in-house, Caroline Miller, founder and managing director of Indigo Pearl and another industry veteran, Rachel Macpherson, PR manager at Neonhive with a journalist background, and Harry Mitchell, Blazing Griffin's in-house community manager who also used to work in games media.

For indie developers who haven't thought about PR before or are not sure how to use it effectively for their games, here's what we learned from this panel.

As the acronym stands for public relations, the first part of PR you might expect is when a game is announced to the public for the first time. In reality, there's a lot that needs to be prepared before getting to this stage.

"The first thing that you need to do is just get very, very organised," says Miller. "Make a plan and just have everything that you're going to need, ready to hand, because what happens when you start to do PR, you'll suddenly be asked to provide stuff like assets, comment, and when you're scrambling for stuff like that you can miss opportunities."

"Don't panic something out the door, just look at what you've got, look at what you want to achieve, and then make your plan"

Emily Britt, Diva Agency

In essence, getting