Why novice gaming companies should not engage in aggressive B2B PR, and it is desirable for market experts to do this, – App2Top.ru Sergey Babaev, Director of Business Development at Nekki and mentor of the Games Market section at Zuckerberg Will Call, told the audience.

To begin with, I will note 3 points that should be understood:

• Not everyone needs PR.
• PR alone will not make your company successful.
• PR cannot be an end in itself, because aimless activity is a waste of time.

When Sasha Semenov (editor of App2Top) asked me to share my thoughts on PR, public relations and openness to the market, I immediately warned that there would be no moral article. This topic is too individual, tied to people, and complicated in the right, constructive execution.

I will try to share rather a number of observations when the public is useful. Surely there will be readers who know and understand this more than me, but I hope they will find the material entertaining too.

When is PR harmful?

If you just came to game dev without having any experience or releases behind your back, stay away from the public. The temptation is great. Novice developers take the wrapper in the form of a mover and a tus for the industry itself, but this is not the case. You can’t fly into a game dev, being just a “good guy”, you still need to represent something, have a clear background. It will not work to become a “visionary of the industry” from scratch. It will take a long time before you can collapse in a chair on a round table and drop grains of wisdom into the hall. If you are invited to expert roles, think about it – perhaps this does not characterize you from the best side, but the event from the worst.

Does this mean that you need to bury yourself in work and keep your head down? Partly, yes. Your choice is a soft policy of promoting the project and yourself for the company. In this perspective, you become part of the “selling” idea, form an impression about yourself and the team, but with one goal – to find a suitable partner or investor.

Below are some tips for “soft promotion”:

• Focus on the project. Present the game at various events (DevGAMM, WN, GamesJam, Casual Connect, Next Castle Party), stand in line with indie developers, deploy a laptop and communicate. Earn the reputation of the project. This is the only way you will find partners, get feedback and, if it is important, remember yourself;
• Select experienced specialists in the team. Cool art is easy to evaluate before release – the artist is either cool or not… but everyone is interested in listening to the cool one. Was there a serious tech guy in the team who did more than one project? His opinion is also valuable. But if you want to talk about the loads on the server side with synchronous PvP, and the young “expert” was making business card sites yesterday, do not expect a positive response, even if the test server withstood the load of “a million bots”. Most likely, in fact, he will not survive thousands of live players, and the server will still get precious combat experience;
• Write development diaries. Share your progress, make posts in the Kanobu pub, write technical articles on Habr, tell interesting stories on App2Top, Apptractor and even Siliconrus. This volume is enough to start with;
• Moderate your ambitions. If you are doing your first project as a producer, game designer, or have just entered the gaming industry – stay quiet. With your unbridled activity, you will only cast a shadow on the collective. Do not invent catchy descriptions like “the frontman of the team”, “the face of the studio” and other things. No one in the public field is interested in the “face” of newcomers. This is a luxury for established companies.

But enough caveats – it’s a long topic. And if you delve into the analysis of live examples from the market, when an intelligent team spoiled its reputation by ill-considered behavior, then there is enough material for a separate article. So far, basic recommendations are enough. Let’s move smoothly to the positive side of the issue.

Why is PR useful?

It is easier to recruit personnel

Changing jobs is always stressful – a new place, new people. For some it is easier, for others it is harder, and still others are used to changing jobs like gloves (and here it is worth straining). A person needs to morally decide on this step or choose from several proposals. If he feels a risk, he subconsciously reaches for an obvious solution – to a company whose positive mention in the media he constantly observed, to people he saw at conferences or whose columns he read. It becomes clear to the applicant in advance – what kind of people they are, what to expect, what their train of thought is.

A studio that has become familiar in the market in a good way – by participating in conferences or by being present in the media – anyway, it is much easier to collect personnel.

It seems that there are enough successful projects for this? Alas, not enough, not everyone is closely watching the industry. A beginner may not know mobile or social hits, do not understand the “authorities” and do not know the pillars of game development in person. It is ok. Working with the public, you show the openness of the company and thereby attract the right people. Well, or you push them away, behaving rashly and contradictory. Although this is also PR and it carries a certain message, of course.

Contact with the media is being established

You can’t wake up one morning and want to share your thoughts with Forbes. Unless, of course, you are Yuri Milner. But people of such a flight are working on a public image more than others, of course, with the help of an army of intelligent employees and agencies, but this does not change the essence.

What are you worse for (other than missing a few billion)?

Form a public image. Formulate “your topics”, i.e. areas in which your expertise is indisputable and confirmed by work experience. Choose one or two resources covering these topics, find editors and try to talk, understand how you can be useful to the publication and in what role. It may be possible to discuss ideas for future materials.

Give comments, discuss news, share expert columns. If the soul asks you to write a detailed thought on FB, take a look at the result – probably, after some gloss, it will turn out to be a sensible profile column …. Publications like App2Top, Kanobu and Siliconrus will gladly accept such materials.

Such work will not require serious efforts, but it will provide an established channel of communication with the target media. In turn, this channel gives a certain control of the information field. You have the opportunity to highlight the problem, debunk a rumor or ignite a scandal. They will be more willing to go to a meeting and give you the floor, knowing that you are a sensible, intelligent and proven person. In other words, you won’t say anything stupid. Quick access to the media is not to be underestimated.

Interesting cases appear

We are talking about joint cases with platforms and major players in their segment (Google, Microsoft, Beeline, etc). A cool case requires no less cool projects in your repertoire. But there are a lot of successful games on the global market and your task is to stand out, offer something interesting, be able to highlight it competently and set an example for the industry. The partner is only glad if you know how to “work out” the information guide, attract the attention of industry media and colleagues to it. I think you have noticed that small and, as they say, “poorly promoted” studios rarely flash in interesting promo cases.

The consciousness of beginners increases

There will always be people in the public who share their experience, influence the minds of newcomers and deliver a message. Game Dev simply cannot be in an information vacuum – it is interesting as a business, as a cultural phenomenon, as a growing market. Another conversation is who will be the mouthpiece of the industry communicating with the “outside world”. If it’s not you (you don’t have time), not that second one (he has nothing to say), and not another third one (he doesn’t want to stick out), then who remains? That’s right, there are just those characters whose oratory is an end in itself, for them the less they need to prove, the better. If there is no reputable expert in the neighborhood, then it’s not even an hour that this scoundrel will pass for the light of the industry. Do you want the younger cadres reading self-made blogs (not all, there are also sensible ones), having gained enough dope, to get settled with you and undergo painful re-education for both sides?

To make matters worse, professional “mouth talkers” have a dangerous skill of leaking everywhere and everywhere. Today you dismiss a stupid column on a profile resource, and tomorrow its author already represents the industry at a meeting of the government committee and shares his thoughts about the market with respected gentlemen in fine wool suits.

This item is about “self-awareness” and the role of each individual representative of the game developer in the growth and development of the market. Even abstract thoughts, life lessons are useful for beginners, because they adjust the course of thoughts in the right way.

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Below are some tips for competent promotion:

• Define a set of your topics and get in touch with the editors of suitable publications.
• Don’t expect an instant effect. The main thing is not to expect that after the first comment or a small column you have become known and public – no. It takes time, a lot of time, coverage of diverse media and events.
• Don’t flicker. Avoid too frequent appearance “on the pages” of publications. Rather than publish 3 materials per day, it is better to give out one material per week, unobtrusively supporting the information field. Otherwise, you risk becoming familiar, and even writing: there are not so many interesting reasons for comments and ideas for columns.
• Communicate. After the publication, come to the comments and communicate with everyone, even with critics. They are also your audience, they are worth working with.

It is unlikely that the material will convince non-public persons of the benefits of publicity. There was no such goal. But perhaps undecided colleagues who have been thinking about this for a long time will make this or that decision and take advantage of some of my advice.