Pitching on Twitter

It's not an easy subject. There were elements of Peter's video that put me off as well. Some sounded like, dare I use the word, entitlement? :) Like "tailoring the pitch" per journalist. I mean, isn't that the video game journalist's ACTUAL JOB to actively pursue interesting video game things? But Peter says that not only the dev should chase after the journalist, but they have to "tailor" the message too? It blows. Yes, EA PR knows which journo likes chocolate and which does not cover strategy games, but not small indie devs! Do journalists - who should WANT to be given news - understand what it means to try to "tailor" a message to a 100+ outlets?

And the fragment about "easily finding e-mail"? Oh hell no. A lot of websites just offer a contact form, and some of them not even that. I made my PRESS.XLS for a year, with the help of fellow indie devs, and I still don't have all the contacts. And of course almost each month shit changes and suddenly the e-mail you got after Indiana Jonesing the intertrons and begging everybody you knew is no longer valid, because the guy went freelance or whatever.

However, there's a lot of good in that video too. For example, Twitter is INDEED a weird limbo between private and professional. Getting pitches on Twitter DOES produce automatic "oh ffs" response and I get it. And yes, it is actually quite probable that if you act like you don't know what you're doing, PR-wise, then your game is incompetent too. And if journalists had to treat all pitches seriously, they'd have no time to scratch their ass. Have you seen how many games make it to Steam lately?! :)

And so on, and so forth. I think the problem is that we have a lot of tutorials from devs and journalists themselves on how to deal with the journalists, e.g. see http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-indie-game-marketing/ -- but we have nothing from the other direction. I might write "How Journalists Could Make Game Developers Lives Easier" one day :)