作者：Rami Ismail

Leigh Alexander最近撰写了一篇关于独立开发者自己执行PR应该重视的内容，我决定在此补充5项独立开发者可能还没听说过的PR建议。

1.相信好游戏自己会说话

认为好游戏一定能够自我推销。许多成功的独立游戏开发者希望你相信，他们并没有在营销上投入多少精力——他们把全部精力用于制作一款好游戏，并且不告诉任何人这一情况。当他们的游戏可以发布时，他们也只是在没有营销投入的情况下轻松赢得惊人的销售额。

不要在网络上发布游戏资产——这只会让媒体忽视你。如果你在网上发布了游戏的视频截图、预告片和有关游戏的信息，那么媒体编辑就没有任何再联系你的必要了，而缺乏媒体联系则会严重影响你的游戏曝光度。

当然，假装投入营销精力也无妨。可以复制一些你在游戏第二个关卡中寻找崩溃漏洞的调试截图，将其发送给总缠着你要截图的媒体。尽量全面解释游戏情况，最好是附带上游戏团队阵容（游戏邦注：例如Double Fine、刺客信条团队的做法），或者游戏的故事（例如Rockstar Games、《天际》团队），但就是绝口不提游戏的实质内容——否则游戏理念就会招致模仿者跟风。

PR(from wix.com)

2.控制你的信息渠道

没有什么比为自己的游戏创造一个始终呈现积极面的报道更重要的了。如果有个网站编辑对你的游戏发布了消极评论，那么其他网站也有可能跟着煽风点火：媒体通常没有时间发表自己的观点，一般都是转载其他来源的热门消息。多数网站会跟随接受度最高的意见，但也有些会故意选择唱反调。

因此，一定要控制好你的信息渠道。有一个最佳的常见方法就是执行禁言——也就是在一定日期之前不得透露风声。另一种较不为人知但却更有效的措施包括声称要起诉仅凭新闻通稿的只言片语就走露消息，或者将通稿的内容运用于负面报道的记者。

如果有家网站报道关于你的负页消息，要考虑花些钱请一名律师来打点，起诉该网站侵犯版权或是诽谤。只要你的游戏中任意一项资产（视频截图、预告片或游戏内置文本/新闻通稿中的一句话）被发布，声称将诉诸法律手段的通常结果是庭外和解。

此外你还要知道，被泄露消息通常不会出现于大型游戏博客上，而是出现在早有预谋的网站。

3.创造附件的技巧

媒体人士也很其他人一样喜欢抢眼的东西，所以最好让你的新闻稿看起来更为夺目。要避免的一个普遍错误是发送纯文本一样的新闻稿。纯文本不但更易于扫描，被媒体所设定的非AAA游戏新闻过滤器视为垃圾邮件，而且它看起来也很无趣。

相反，要确保发送一封空白邮件，并将你的新闻通稿以PNG或PDF格式作为附件，从而绕过垃圾过滤器的拦截。也可以使用ODT等开放标准，毕竟有不少编辑为省事而安装OpenOffice或LibreOffice。要使用自定义字体和大型图片来传达你的信息，不要忘了在每页文件上添加背景图片。

在确保自己的游戏资产没有泄露到网上之后，就可以开始向媒体发送内容了。将高质量概念艺术以及预告片存档，并向媒体发送，最好设置密码，让媒体来联系你要密码。这样你就可以判断媒体对你的游戏究竟有多大兴趣了。

一般来说，如果附加文件足够大，媒体就会有兴趣去下载该文件，以便查看里头究竟有什么东西。超过250MB的文件给人感觉更好。

4.选择有偿新闻媒体

当然，编辑和记者都会对媒介及其发布的游戏消息保持一定的兴趣和关心，但要认识到这些人是媒体工作者，他们不得不在掌管琐碎的媒体工作时做出这种表现。实际上，媒体也和你一样，知道大家只是为了谋生而工作而已。

作为志存高远的市场专家，这对你来说是件好事，因为这相当于你为他们创造了工作机会。因此，你当然有理由要求他们按照你的需求撰写新闻稿。如果你觉得自己信心十足，就可以仅向一家媒体发送预告样本。这不但可以让你同这家媒体建立良好的关系，而且有助于为游戏创造更多销量。

另一项值得一提的是，有时候你也会遇到不收费的媒体编辑。要经常问问你的目标媒体中是否属于有偿新闻工作者，如果不是，那就不要在他们身上花时间了：这些自称为“热情”而工作的编辑不太可能遵从你的思路，他们也不会受到主导撰稿质量的有关部门的掌控。要这样想：如果他们真的文笔出众，就不会无偿写作了。

5.“欲擒故纵”的策略

waldo-y-u-play-hard-to-get(from vunzooke.com)

没有什么比故弄玄虚更吊人胃口了。在独立游戏领域，这方面的典型包括《Sword & Sworcery》（销量超过40万份），以及最近发布的《Ridiculous Fishing》、Team Meat游戏《Mewgenics》。除此之外，还可以参考Thomas Bangalter和Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo合著的《Daft Punk》，你会发现其中的策略在营销领域就和瑞士军刀一样管用。

成功营销活动常用的一个伎俩就是在游戏真正发布前几天才透露消息。此时要注意未经你同意和批准而流出的任何一点消息——媒体已经习惯于接受快速而简短的回复。你想与众不同，就要一直避免正面回答。这不但可以让你看起来更神秘，还可以让你同媒体之间建立一种单边式的关系。媒体惯于为引进读者兴趣而根据你所回复的只言片语来推测一些关于游戏的不实消息，所以在此期间不要回复媒体，或者在Twitter、Facebook等大众媒介上过于活跃，以便保证这种神秘策略的效能。

当你需要发布一则消息的时候，就向自己锁定的媒体发送一则简短的邮件，除了该消息内容之外，还要附带你的一个联系电话。要确保你已经将邮件接受人的电话保存在自己手机中，看到对方来电时坚决不接听。就算真的接电话，也只能再重复一遍邮件中的内容，以免向其透露关于游戏的重要信息（例如可能在营销活动中出现的关键内容）。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Five PR Tips Indies Really Shouldn’t Read

by Rami Ismail

The following blog was, unless otherwise noted, independently written by a member of Gamasutra’s game development community. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Gamasutra or its parent company.

Want to write your own blog post on Gamasutra? It’s easy! Click here to get started. Your post could be featured on Gamasutra’s home page, right alongside our award-winning articles and news stories.

The indie scene has matured to a point where Leigh Alexander writes an excellent list of tips for any indie looking to do their own PR. Upset at the lack of tips indies really shouldn’t read, I’ve decided to take it upon me to create a list of the five most horrible misunderstandings in PR.

1.      A good game sells itself

More than anything, realize that a good game sells itself. Contrary to what many successful indie developer want you to believe, they’re not actually spending effort on marketing – they spent their full efforts on making a good game and not telling anybody about it. When their game was finally ready to release, they released it without further marketing effort and earned ridiculous amounts of money.

Don’t have assets available online – that just stops press from having to reach out to you. If you have screenshots, trailers and information about your game online, there’s no reason for any writer to get in touch with you and that lack of interaction will without a doubt damage your exposure.

Of course, the pretense of a marketing effort is optional. Copy some of those debug screenshots from when you were hunting for that crash bug in the second level and hand those to press that do bother you, asking for screenshots. Explain the game as thoroughly as possible, preferably with a full exposition of the game’s team (see Double Fine, Assassins Creed) or the game’s fiction (see Rockstar Games, Skyrim for good examples of this) but never make the mistake of going in-depth as to what the game actually is: cloners may be abound to steal your ideas. Nobody would in good conscience claim that the press is above accidentally revealing key information about your game.

2.      Control your messaging

There’s nothing as important as to create a consistently positive narrative for your game. If a single website writes negatively about your game, it’s more likely that other websites will be influenced by that: the press often doesn’t have time to come up with opinions of their own and will refer to one another to find out what opinion is popular to have. Most websites will follow the more accepted opinion while some are known to intentionally chose an opposing statement.

As such, it is important to control your messaging. One of the best commonly known ways to achieve this is by imposing embargoes – dates before which certain news cannot be published. Embargoes are commonly implemented by superimposing a big, red stamp over each individual page diagonally. Less known but more effective measures include a threat to sue the journalist for only using part of the press release or using it in context of a negative article.

If a website posts negatively about your work, consider spending some money on a lawyer to sue the website for copyright infringement or slander. As soon as a single asset from your game is used, whether it is a screenshot, a trailer or a sentence from either the in-game text or your press release, threatening with legal action will often result in settling out of court.

Knowing about this common practice should also tell you everything you need to know about leaks: if they were truly leaks, they wouldn’t be on the large gaming blogs but on conspiracy websites instead.

3.      Attachments create attachment

The people of the press likes eye-candy as much as any other person, so making your press-release look good is important. A common mistake to avoid is to send your release as plain text. Plain text is not only easier scanned and disposed of by the spam filters that the press uses to filter out any news that isn’t AAA news from established PR companies, it’s also plain boring to look at.

Instead, always make sure to send a blank e-mail to avoid the filters and attach your full press release as a PNG or PDF. Open standards like ODT are also recommended, since it’s a small effort for writers to install OpenOffice or LibreOffice. Make gratuitous use of custom fonts and large images to convey your message and don’t forget to add a background image to each individual page of the file.

Since you’ve taken care that no assets are available online, you can now leverage that to send these over. Archive high-quality concept art and the high-quality trailer and send those over, ideally protected by a password the press needs to requires from you. That way you can gauge interest at all times.

As a general rule of thumb, if the attached file is sufficiently large, press will automatically be interested in downloading said file to check out what’s in there. File sizes of over 250MB tend to do remarkably better.

4.      It’s just a job and you’re the salary

Of course writers and journalists maintain a persona of genuine interest and sincere care about the state of the medium and the games released in it. It is important to realize that these people are the media and portraying such an image while controlling the media is a painfully trivial task. In reality, the press knows just as well as you do that it’s just a job they have to do to pay the rent.

That’s a good thing for you as aspiring marketing expert, because that basically turned you into their ability to pay for food. As such, it’s definitely acceptable to feel entitled to your article being written the way you want it. In fact, it’s one of those situations in which the sort of confidence many pickup artists can tell you about will do you a lot of good. If you feel sufficiently confident, one trick that always work is to not send (p)review builds to any website but one. Not only will this establish to the press that you feel your game is worth paying for, it will also net you some extra sales.

Another thing to note is that occasionally, you’ll run into writers that do write for free. Always ask whether someone from the press is getting paid for their job. If they’re not getting paid, they’re not worth your time: these self-proclaimed ‘passion’ writers are unpredictable and less likely to follow your intentions, as they’re not being held responsible by the economies that govern quality writing. Think of it this way: if they were any good at writing, they’d have a paid job.

5.        Play ‘Hard to Get’

Nothing is as enticing as a good mystery. In the indie scene the use of mystery is well-documented with games like Sword & Sworcery (400,000+ units sold), more recent releases like Ridiculous Fishing and the current hype of titles like Team Meat’s Mewgenics. Outside of it, one just has to look at the likes of Thomas Bangalter’s and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s Daft Punk to see how these strategies are truly the Swiss utility knives of marketing.

The main trick behind successful campaigns is to remain unreachable until a few days before the actual release. Any piece of information that gets out without your full and conscious consent is a problem – and the press are accustomed to receiving quick and succinct replies. You want to stand out, and as such always avoid responding in a direct fashion. Not only will this make you seem more mysterious, it also establishes the relation between you and the press as being unilateral. The press are trained to take quotes or single lines from your responses and use them out of context to infer untruths about your game for the sake of reader hits, so avoid replying or being active on public media like Twitter or Facebook to keep the ruse of mystery intact.

When you do want a piece of information published, send a quick e-mail with said information and confirm that the e-mail was sent by placing a phone-call to the recipient. Keep in mind that you should already have their phone number programmed into your phone to be able to avoid answering a call from the press in the first place. Use the phone-call to reiterate the message of the e-mail in exactly the same wording to avoid slipping up and revealing key information about your game that could be used when your marketing campaign really kicks off in the final days before and after release.

If you made it to this point in the article without realizing all the above is absolutely terrible advice, please read Leigh’s post linked at the top, read everything here and read this post again while continuously wondering ‘why is this bad advice?’. Feel free to send me a tweet if you get stuck.（source：gamasutra）