What does a PR Manager in the videogame industry do?

In this article, I would like to give an insight into the diverse daily tasks that a PR Manager in the videogame industry is confronted with.

My experiences are primarily based on my three years of employment at the PR agency ToLL Relations, where I was mainly responsible for Sony PlayStation in the German-speaking market, but also for other clients like Marvelous Europe, KONAMI as well as Square Enix and Crytek on a project-based level. However, I also got to know the perspective of a publisher and developer while I was working for Daedalic Entertainment.

Brief summary

For everyone who doesn’t want to read the full article, here is a brief summary: PR Managers in the videogame industry make sure that publishers, developers and their products are covered by press and influencers in a preferably positive way – be it news, previews, reviews, let’s plays, interviews or other contents. Important to note is that authenticity is the key of PR, even with paid partnerships. That means, that PR does not buy opinions or mere advertisement; the individuality of the media and influencers always remains because they are the ones producing the content. Only by this, the end consumers can make an informed and independent buying decision.

Subsequently, I go into deeper detail.

What is Public Relations?

Public Relations is a branch of Marketing. This means, PR is subjected to the main objective of increasing sales and value of a company or its brands, products and services.

At this, PR Managers, Communication Executives or Media Consultants (there are many titles meaning essentially the same) are mainly responsible for the reputation and the level of awareness. This goal is achieved by a broad (and positive) press coverage. But also the cooperation with influencers has become as important.

PR and Marketing

In contrast to the promotional marketing-side, the coverage generated by Public Relations is organic and authentic, i.e. without financial influence. The opinions and expectations of the consumer are to be based on independent sources.

This doesn’t mean that there are no paid partnerships in PR. Financial cooperations with journalists and influencers are also part of the daily business, but not in the sense of ready-made, pure advertisement. Central is interesting and authentic content created by the partners, for instance to feature certain aspects of a product, to present information in an entertaining way, or simply to increase awareness. Authenticity and honesty are the keys to success. “Buying” opinions is a no-go and only harms the credibility of all involved parties in the long run.

Range of tasks

In the following, I list a few typical tasks that PR Managers across industries are confronted with:

• plan, organise and conduct long- and short-term PR strategies
• create interesting content campaigns with media and influencers, partly also on owned channels
• organise, invite to and supervise local and international (press) events and fairs
• answer inquiries of journalists and influencers on a daily basis
• sample press and influencers with own products
• write and send press releases and news alerts
• organise and supervise interviews
• create information materials and take care of the press server
• create reportings, analyses and clippings
• depending on the size of a company, further tasks can be part of the PR department, e.g. Content, Social Media and Community Management or Social Responsibility

Videogame PR: From Announcement to Release

Now let’s go into detail about Public Relations in the videogame industry. I divide the launch of a game into different stages that usually merge into one another, but can also happen simultaneously – for example, when the announced game is postponed last-minute.

Note that the following explanations are not exclusively valid for games, but also apply to services like PlayStation Plus or PS Now, for new hardware and peripherals (e.g. new controller designs) or occasions like birthdays, events or sales.

1. The Announcement

The announcement of a game is preceded by a variety of strategic considerations. What is the best time to reach the broadest audience? In which state is the game at the point of announcement? How much content can and should be presented? How much in advance to the final release should the announcement happen? How is the game announced?

Regarding the time frame, there is no universal formula, since too many factors have to be considered. Is the game an (expected) sequel? Is there a strong competitor on the market that needs to be countered or pre-empted? When was the last big hit of the developer or publisher? How about the current stock exchange value? Which stakeholders have to be pleased? When is the deadline to sell the products to the retail partners? Is there a cooperation with other brands or celebrities that has to be timed?

Depending on all these questions it can be worthwhile to announce a game early, even if there is no gameplay yet, or wait until you can drop a bombshell with spectacular impressions.

Looking at the how of an announcement, everything is possible – be it a trailer, a teaser, as part of a physical or digital trade show, the release of the logo on Twitter, a mention in an interview or a planned “leak”. The creation and balancing of strategies in close collaboration with the developers is one of the most thrilling parts of working in PR for me. In big, international companies these tasks are primarily performed by the headquarter.

2. Gentle Reminders

The game has been announced and press has covered it? Then the first step has been made! But what next? Now comes a stage I call “gentle reminders”. In this phase, usually not much is going on as the game is still in development. Sometimes one, two or even more years will pass until the game will be released. Now it is important that the game will not fade into oblivion.

Of course, important franchises won’t be affected by this fate. Brands like Final Fantasy or Zelda often let years pass until the next information about the announced game is made public. If the IP is rather unknown, however, small information snacks should remind the target group that the title still exists.

Are there new and polished screenshots of a segment that has been finished already? Great! Maybe there are characters, artworks or landscapes that can already be shown to whet everyone’s appetite? Even better! Is the logo final? Is there a part of the soundtrack that can be presented? Are there any popular voice-over artists? Has a milestone from the developers been reached?

All these small information nuggets are suitable to be shared to remind fans of the game. Note that not every detail has to be presented via a press release or news alert – tweets are also covered by press now and then.

Nevertheless, the announcement of a release date is one of the most important information pieces that can be shared in this stage. When the release date is set, it’s getting serious!

3. Hype, Hype, Hype

Approaching the release date, one of the main PR tasks is to build up hype.

3.1 Keeping calm can be advisable

Of course, hype is only an appropriate way to go, if the PR department is convinced of the success of a game. Expectation management is key, and sometimes it is better to publish a game with an understatement. Bad reviews from press and users are often routed in impossible expectations. Meanwhile, games that were released off the grid regularly get celebrated as underdogs a bit later, leading to a delayed, but maybe even bigger (financial) success.

And if you are about to publish a failure into your portfolio, it may be advisable to just not promote it to reduce the damage to your reputation and not to spend unnecessary money on the campaign. Of course, for bigger publishers this is easier than for smaller developers who need the monetary profits in order to survive.

One opportunity to assess the probability of success is to create mock reviews. For mock reviews, freelancer editors (mostly one per key-territory) are hired to play through the game in an early build to create a full-fledged review including a score. This will never be published, but used for internal analysis.

3.2 Increase the density of information and support locally

But let’s assume PR is convinced the game will be a hit. In this case, building up hype is the next step, possibly connected to KPIs like the number of pre-orders.

In my experience, this stage begins two to three months before the release. In a short period of time, several trailers are created, each concentrating on specific aspects like gameplay or the story. Additionally, further, more in-depth information are now being spread via news alerts, press releases, interviews with selected media or postings on owned channels. The density of details increases rapidly – especially in the last two weeks before release there is almost no day without presenting new information.

At internationally operating publishers, the headquarter will determine time and content of these news. The local teams will act as supporters on their market, localising and spreading the information to regional outlets. Simultaneously, now is also the time to realise the local, territory-based PR campaigns that have been created in national PR plans and approved by the headquarters before. Below, you will find a selection of possible PR activities on a local level:

• elaborated pitches to regional mainstream media who would not cover the game without an interesting hook or local interview partner (e.g. pitching a certain theme of the story or a cultural value of the game; for this, external experts may be involved and offered as interviewees by the PR team)
• paid articles in bigger gaming outlets to focus on certain aspects of the game
• entertaining cooperations with local influencers
• surprise influencers with cool merchandise which they proudly show on their channels and thus transfer their enthusiasm to their followers
• partnerships with other brands, celebrities or artists who are popular in the territory
• clever PR stunts in public with a disruptive character

Furthermore, Community Management now also gets into top gear, motivating the community to take part in conversations, contests and raffles.

3.3 Previews

A neutral press preview of the game is also a fundamental part of the PR work in this stage.

3.3.1 Preview events

Before Covid, we used to organise preview events where journalists and influencers had the chance to get their hands on the game for the first time. Often, there is one main event in each key-territory which is directed by the international team. This event is then supported with smaller events in other cities, so that journalists living across the market have the opportunity to come and play.

The gameplay demo most times covers two segments of the game (one at the beginning and one in the middle of the game) that together take about three hours of play time. In this way, the testers will get a valid impression of the key-elements of the game and its story. When influencers are invited, too, there should be enough opportunities to pose in front of a spectacular background, so that they can surprise their fans with great impressions on their channels, be it photographs, Instagram stories or VLOGs.

The PR department chooses the event venue (although bigger companies have an integrated event department for this) and is responsible for selecting, inviting and coordinating the media partners. During the events, the PR Managers brief the guests and make them accustomed with the game and its demo. If the demo is quite difficult and the tester inexperienced (this can happen with a Souls-like game such as Nioh and a mainstream press journalist), it’s also up to the PR specialists to intervene and help.

Events, and this include appearances at exhibitions like gamescom as well, are the highlights of the PR work for me. The face-to-face meeting of journalists, influencers and developers, which you usually only contact via e-mail or phone, underlines the “relations” part of the job that is also always about building up connections.

After the events, there is a preview embargo – a point of time from which previews are allowed to be published. However, not all invited media will publish a preview. Especially mainstream press who are not specialised in games often use preview events to verify if the game is worth a test.

3.3.2 Digital preview process

During Covid, events of course were not possible anymore. Previews during this time were handled differently by the publishers. One approach was to sample journalists and influencers with an early download voucher for the whole game. In these cases, a preview embargo determined which particular sections of the game were allowed to be shown and tested. Usually, the briefing informed the testers about upcoming patches that would polish the game before its release.

Another way was to present exclusive material to selected media – often connected to an interview with the developers, to a livestream, to a pre-recorded gameplay presentation or simply with longer b-roll material, i.e. uncommented gameplay footage.

Surely there are a lot of other ways to provide a first impression of a game that are suitable for a pandemic. This rather creative crisis management is also something that I like about working in Public Relations.

4. Release

The day of the release is a very special one and time to celebrate. However, this also includes the review embargo, which is often lifted a few days earlier.

4.1 Reviews

Managing reviews is one of the most important facets of PR in the videogame industry. Reviews are essential, since in the best case they fulfil several goals from a PR perspective:

1. Interested consumers are confirmed in their desire to buy the game by neutral sources.
2. Uninterested consumers may change their mind due to positive critiques and be persuaded to buy the game after all.
3. Consumers who had not heard of the game before now cannot help but getting into contact with it thanks to a broad coverage in all specialist media.
4. If the whole community and all media talk about a game, a certain “I want to be able to talk about this game, too” effect kicks in. Even if hesitant consumers won’t buy the game directly at release, they may do at a later occasion, e.g. at a sale.

How does a review process look like from a PR perspective? First, it’s all about creating lists. Which media should be sampled at which time? Before the release of the game, only the most professional, relevant and trustworthy media are sampled. The latter is especially important, as utmost secrecy has to be guaranteed and leaks avoided.

Contact persons for the PR Manager are the chief editors who divide the review within their team (or hire a freelancer to do it) and provide the necessary information about the testers. The testers then sign an NDA including embargo details that can be more or less extensive and sometimes require a separate briefing.

If the game is not very well-known, the chief editors first have to be convinced that a test of the game will be worthwhile. A blind distribution of codes or samples will result in a high spreading loss and often enough the games end up unplayed in the mailbox of the editorial. This is why media should always be asked in advance about their interest in the game.

Videogames that take quite a while to play through, and of whose success the publisher is certain, are distributed to media earlier – normally about two to three weeks before the review embargo is lifted. This way, the testers have enough time to look at every detail and create a high-quality review. Additionally, print outlets profit from sufficient time until their magazines are printed, while audio-visual media can record and cut videos, radio and TV articles.

During this time, it is advisable that at least one PR Manager has access to the game, too, and uses it to assist journalists in their review process. Note that during this testing stage there are no tips, manuals or walkthroughs whatsoever available on the internet. So the review support from the PR department is the only contact point for testers who got stuck or have essential questions.

The core of the review stage ends with the lift of the review embargo. This is a very exciting time for the PR department, since the keyboards are smoking then: Day 1 reportings are very common, which at the end of the embargo day should at least provide an executive summary, presenting the number of articles, the potential reach, a first local score, a sentiment (comprising positively and negatively rated aspects of the game) as well as a selection of highlights including quotes, screenshots and awards.

4.2 Streams and Let’s Plays

Even if the review process takes more time, and feuilletons and elaborated articles in huge mainstream newspapers are considered the supreme discipline of PR, another aspect has established itself as almost as important for a PR Manager: streams and let’s plays. Especially younger consumers base their buying decision on watching videos of their favourite streamers. Thus, to affect their opinion it is also important to get into contact with influencers in an early stage.

Influencer management has developed into an inherent part of Public Relations; however, standards still continue to be established. Working with influencers – synonymous also called “content creators” – is highly individual. Prominence, personality and presence of a management play a big role and make the handling of influencer cooperations diverse and interesting.

The initial task of a PR Manager is to identify fitting influencers who might be interested in the game and whose community is part of the target group. The selection of influencers is mainly based on experience, a big network (and its maintenance) and a lot of research. Also, a good relationship to the various influencer managements is of advantage that may save some of the PR work, since they can just ask their pool of influencers themselves about their interest.

The most basic requirement for a cooperation is, of course, a certain brand-compliance of the partners. Most important, they should not have attracted any negative attention before, for instance due to racist or sexist comments or criminal deeds.

Next to this, other aspects have to be considered when selecting influencers, of which I would like to name three specific ones:

• Which genre does the influencer prefer and what individual preferences do they have? This determines how big the probability is that they like the game.
• How is the quality of the influencer’s content? Currently, there is a requirement to label any form of advertisement, at least in Germany. This means, they have to tag that they got the game by the publisher. With this “official” form of cooperation it should be evaluated if their quality matches this of the product you are trying to sell.
• How active is their community? The number of followers alone is not very informative anymore; more important is the engagement of their fans, e.g. the likes, comments and interactions of a post. Additionally, a small but highly specialised reach can bring more success than a disperse mass of followers of which almost nobody is interested in the game – especially if it is a niche game.

In many cases, the more relevant influencers who have acquired a level of trust with the PR department due to positive experiences will be sampled with a game one or few days before the lift of the streaming embargo (which is in most cases also the review embargo). This gives them enough time to download and install the software so that they can start their stream directly when the embargo lifts. After all, the competitors are not only on a local, but also on an international level – whoever streams first has a clear advantage and the chance to win over new followers.

If a linear, not changeable story is the main focus of a game, it can however be advisable not to sample too many influencers, and motivate them through other activities to share content. Otherwise, it may be possible that fans have no appeal to buy and play the game by themselves after watching a let’s play, if there is no additional value to the game.

5. After the release

After the release of a game, the PR work is not done. For example, further media and influencers who couldn’t be considered before, would like to be sampled, too. That’s only possible depending on the contingent of samples or vouchers, but refusals are also part of the job. After all, there are thousands of private websites, blogs and micro-influencers who want to establish themselves and would like to trade a free game for a review or let’s play. Refusals are inevitable, because the benefits of a sampling have to be in line with the financial and temporal effort of the PR department, particularly with only a limited amount of samples. Next to the potential reach, the quality of an outlet has to be considered as well. If a private blog with at least a certain reach writes high-quality articles, it can be worth supporting it in its growth.

Moreover, even after a game’s release, local campaigns with media and influencers may not stop or even start to further increase the sale figures. Further PR tasks include the creation of news alerts, e.g. when patches and new contents are released; the selection and approving of media quotes for accolades trailers; the organisation of raffles to activate the communities of media and influencers; the announcement of sales; and last but not least the campaign report.

The latter usually takes quite a lot of time, because exact key figures have to be obtained, calculated and presented. Goal of a reporting is to summarise the whole campaign, evaluate its success and formulate a learning for the next campaigns.

Conclusion

Working in Public Relations is very diverse. Important traits for a PR Manager are creativity, social skills, a good feeling for communication, strategic thinking and knowledge about the product, its market, press and influencers. Very often, PR workers are additionally responsible for creating texts, so they should also be familiar with the basics of writing intelligible, interesting texts as well as orthography and grammar. This is not a matter of course, unfortunately, proven by press releases that contain various mistakes and are awful to read, even from big companies.

But most of all, a PR Manager cannot rest on their success and knowledge. The media landscape is subjected to constant change, influencers come and go, social media dynamics can transform all of a sudden and also the consumer behaviour is affected by this. This is why working in PR is also a perpetual learning and creative realignment, which makes it so exciting.

If you have questions, need consulting or want to become a PR Manager in the videogame industry yourself, please don’t hesitate to contact me any time at kontakt@gamernist.de.