I've worked in video-games for over 20 years, Atari, Midway Games Meteor Entertainment and now Plan of Attack, a video games PR agency and its baffling to see that no one appears to helping the little guys much, the startup guys, the breakaway studio startups craving to unleash their pent up creativity with an app or game into the marketplace.
(Prepare for shameless self promotion in next sentence) That's where Front Towards Gamer : Videogames marketing & PR for Indie Startups and Kickstarters was born, more out of the fact that I see the same mistakes being made now that were being made by development teams at Atari and Midway Games several years ago. For the most part development teams don't need to be told what works and what doesn't work because invariably they are made up of people with lots of experience, they also learn quickly in a volatile marketplace like video games what doesn't fly so good because when you flop with something that doesn't work so well it costs $$$$$.
However, there are teams and individuals out there who clearly need some guidance, speaker conferences are good sharing platforms for hints and tips by educated and experienced industry speakers but what of the group of coders who are starting out with little or no backup from a publisher?
Most of the speaking panels at GDC, Develop, Pocket Connects and Nordic Game conferences promote the same tried and tested 'do's and don't' aspects of self publishing, marketing or PR, in fact you'll be hard pressed to see anything radically new offered up by speakers and what they found worked as a best practice way of working in the marketplace. And yet the same mistakes are being made because creative teams are not geared up for talking to the consumer because they are too busy working on the product. This is nobody's fault, developers are passionate about their product, and rightly so,this book is aimed at guiding bedroom coders,startups, and small dev teams through the myriad of issues and potential pitfalls of taking their product to market.
My very good friend and former boss Mark Long, bestselling author of The Silence of Our Friends provided me with a compelling foreword which was the much needed catalyst to self publish this book. Long has fingers in so many pies creatively with apps,books,graphic novels, games and start ups that it's wonder he finds time to sleep. Former CEO of Zombie Studios who developed Blacklight on PS4 and former CEO of Meteor Entertainment who published HAWKEN, the amazing FPS Free to Play Mech game Mark has produced many different forms of transmedia marketing in the course of his career which provides some great insight into spreading the PR and marketing voice of your product to a consumer.
Front Towards Gamer is available to buy on Amazon priced $9.99
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