The amount of games that get released every week is staggering. There’s hundreds of new games appearing on Steam and consoles every week. And for every single one of those, their developers and handlers are trying to get the word out — via a press release.
Some of those releases make some lofty and bizarre claims. Some are dreary. Some are hilariously awful. And some don’t make any sense at all. Fortunately, there’s now a place for them all.
It’s a Tumblr called “Why I Deleted Your Game’s PR Email”. It’s the brainchild of an anonymous industry veteran, and it concentrates on all of the dour buzzwords, odd claims and cliches that result in writers and journalists hitting the delete button.
The page isn’t designed to be malicious, but more an exercise in highlighting the various leaps and bounds made in trying to promote a game. It’s difficult to stand out, and capturing the attention of average gamers, writers, bloggers, journalists and so on is difficult in such a competitive environment.
Here’s some lines from releases that failed:
No, you don’t.
Bit of a reach, there.
Pretty effective way to end up in the trash.
Silly costumes don’t really scream strategic depth.
Truly.
You can read the rest of the delete-worthy one liners over at Why I Deleted Your Game’s PR Email. If you’re in PR: try not to take it personally.
Comments
7 responses to “There’s A Tumblr For Terrible Video Game Press Releases”
Dude, those ‘in PR’ have already probably knocked off for Friday drinks 😀
The budding game developers who weren’t already scared to death already about how to effectively promote their stuff hopefully aren’t going to see this.
This is actually helpful to new game devs as surviorship bias often has us just looking at the success stories. Seeing how game releases have crashed and burned is a great way to avoid making the same mistakes.
Some of that is a bit harsh though…the silly costume thing was likely meant as more light hearted. Sure, taken seriously it sounds stupid but what was the tone of the game?
Edit: Also just had a look at the site. They quote “the story of what happens when two government scientists misinterpret a memo and create sentient corn.” which was the tag line of a game Kotaku highlighted yesterday and quoted that specific line as why they looked at it.
Obviously this stuff is very subjective, but that alone makes me view the page as overly negative.
I think this is probably only funny to journalists who maybe see the exact same thing, verbatim, on a daily basis?
On their own… all I see is a bunch of well-meaning, possibly desperate people earnestly trying to have their voice heard. I mean… the majority of the quotes on that site seem pretty inoffensive, even informative.
Hell, the blog doesn’t even live up to its title of explaining why the email was deleted, it just quotes the line as if the offense committed is somehow self-evident.
It’s not.
🙁
Yeah I’m not sure what the intention here is.
The sentient corn line is literally used on an article a few down the page from this one, and looks to be an interesting game, so I guess it worked on Kotaku at least?
You ever chat with an engineer or some other subject matter expert & have no idea what or why they just said a thing?
Happens to me all the time.
“a special gift dungeon, containing a rare Fat Chocobo”
I wonder if that’s from the new mobile Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius, which is currently undergoing an astoundingly ridiculous launch. It’s currently accepting pre-registrations, but is actually available on the Swedish iTunes/Google store, so the English twitter account is both tweeting “pre-register before release now!” and then “server up! log in now!” messages at the same time. Social media management at its most utterly absurd.
Not particularly funny or surprising. It’s PR. it’s all similar. Singling out some people trying to make it in the industry just comes off as elitist and sad. 1/10