The Death of Traditional PR: How SaaS Platforms Changed Video Game Public Relations
If you spent any time in the 2000s promoting video games, you knew the drill. Spreading the news about your game meant spending precious time on sourcing email lists, contacting strangers, and visiting websites to see if their audience was a fit. You dug through mastheads, scoured Twitter, and targeted editors from IGN or Polygon. And you probably used Games Press. It felt like manual labor. It was time consuming. And the success or failure of your game’s story seemed to entirely depend on the pitch in the subject line of an email.
Fast forward to today, and that entire process seems to be ancient history. Over the past few years, SaaS platforms have changed the way public relations and marketing professional do game-related press releases and news.
From Google Sheets to All-in-one Dashboards
I think the catalyst for this shift stems from the unrealiable and somewhat random nature of manually maintained media lists. People switch companies. People leave the gaming industry, or their media property is acquired by another company and their email address changes. Keeping those media lists up to date was a lot of work.
Enter media database paltforms like Muck Rack and Prowly. While these platforms have been around for some time, the massive transition to remote work in 2020 pushed them into mainstream use in the gaming industry. Instead of maintaining a spreadsheet yourself, you can now access a fully maintained database of journalists with ease.
Beyond these two platforms, PressEngine arrived at some point during the pandemic, and it is a PR platform built specifically for video games. These news platforms operate like a dual-sided market. PR professionals are of course drawn to these platforms for convenience, speed, and scale of reach. Gaming media professionals love to use them because they can filter for the exact type of stories they want to cover. An added bonus is these people probably get spammed a lot less, too.
Three Ways Video Game PR Has Changed
1. The Distinction Between Press and Creators
Before you had a media list. The journalists got the press releases and review codes. YouTubers and players are switch were separate (or sometimes completely ignored). Today, it can be argued that engaging with creators on social media is at least just as effective (or possibly more effective) for spreading the word about your game.
The platforms I mentioned above treat influencers and journalists almost in the same way. Your closed beta campaign now reaches an editor at IGN in the same way it will reach a streamer looking for a new game to play.
2. Automated Code Management
Do you remember when sending a review code meant copy and pasting a Steam key from Google Sheets? Did you ever accidentally paste the same code to two different people? That was embarassing.
These newer platforms automatically track creators to see if they actually used your key, and you can now grant access to these keys with a click or two.
3. Automated Discovery
Back in the day, you might send a press release and hope for the best. After that, you’d probably set up Google Alerts to see who’s starting to talk about your game.
These modern SaaS platforms can now do all the tracking for you. They track down the links, estimate reach and views, and report everything to you.
So is “Old School” Pitching Dead?
I would say the days of compiling email lists, tweaking subject lines for the pitch, and hoping for the best are long gone. Tech professionals are overwhelmed with emails of all kinds. Spam filters toss a lot of mail in the trash. And then there are the PR platforms I mentioned above.
I think most media professionals these days appreciate the ease with which they can select for the games or stories they want to cover. These platforms cut out the scraping and chasing, leaving more time for us to build better relationships with the specific writers and creators who actually want to cover our games.
There are some manual aspects of gaming that I miss. Prowling IRC channels for scrimmages or news. DM’ing fellow gamers on Xfire. Logging on vBulletin forums to talk trash. Setting up and configuring my very own Ventrilo or Teamspeak server. But for the business side of things, these newer platforms are definitely a welcomed change for me.
