What is a Press Release?📰

Image: Bank Phrom via Unsplash

When we think about journalists and bloggers and news creators, it’s easy to imagine that they gather information for their work like old-school reporters in the movies: running to the scene of a story with their trenchcoat, notepad and camera, ready to figure out the facts for themselves.

Many journalists still do that, of course. But when these professionals need quick access to information, especially about a particular company, product, or event, they will first look for the relevant press release. 

A press release is a document published by organisations (such as game developers) directly to the press (such as games writers and reviewers). It’s generally written like a news article, but it’s not really written for public consumption, like a well-crafted review or feature article is. The purpose of a press release is to front-load as much information as possible so that journalists (who tend to work on very tight deadlines) can quickly digest all the facts that they need to write their story.

Why Write a Press Release?

We live in an information age of decentralised short-form content creation; institutions like newspapers and journalism and even the great titans of the games media world such as Polygon and IGN seem to be (at least to some) part of a dying sector. It’s no wonder, therefore, that many new independent game developers view press releases and the broader press circuit as a vestigial waste of time. But this isn’t true!

Public relations, especially in the hyper-competitive video game industry, has to be holistic. You must get your game and your brand out into the world by any and all means possible. We can argue all day about whether or not Kotaku will still have games journalists authoring reviews in 10 years, but right now in 2025, there are absolutely gamers who read Kotaku and writers who write for Kotaku. And those journalists absolutely get the bulk of their information from press releases. 

So if you want to close off a whole potential avenue for your game’s PR and marketing strategy, then by all means, skip the press outreach. But if you want to learn how to write an effective press release that will grab the attention of journalists, communicate your facts clearly, and maximise your chances of getting picked up by the elusive and wide-reaching games media, then read on for some expert advice from Player Two Consulting.

A Sample Press Release Layout

A sample (fictional and very brief) press release.

The layout of a press release is very standard by design. Industry veterans expect a highly standardised layout in press releases, so it is generally wise to keep to the tried-and-tested press release layout. Here are the components your release should include:

• Headline: the title of your release. It should be clear and unambiguous. This is not the place for clickbait; journalists will not waste time on a headline like “Big New Announcement from XYZ Games” or “Something Exciting is Coming This Christmas”. 

• Release/Embargo Time: Most of the time, by the time anyone sees your press release you want the information to be out as fast as possible. In that case, you should include “For Immediate Release” before the body. If the information needs to be kept a secret until a certain time, like for a product launch, they you should include an “embargo” telling journalists not to publish any information from the release until a certain date and time.

• Dateline: The date that the press release’s information is officially published. Traditionally you would also include the city of publication in the dateline, but for something like a video game company with a global audience, this is optional.

• Main point: You should explain the most important things clearly in the first paragraph. Again, the press release is not the place to tease conclusions and entice the reader to read on. It is okay to add a bit of thematic fluff to hook the reader, but if you don’t quickly get to the point, your audience (i.e. reviewers and journalists) will move on quickly.

• Supporting information: The following paragraphs should include more context and details: talk about your game, about your development history, about your progress.

• Quotes: Include quotes from members of your team. It is OK if they sound generic and corporate; while some journalists will quote your team members directly from the press release, including quotes from named people in your studio will tell journalists who to get in touch with if they have more questions or would like to interview you.

• Call to action: It is good practice to finish a press release by directing the reader to future action. For a game dev, this is easy: you can just link your Steam page, Kickstarter, or X profile here.

• Company information: This is also good practice. Because the bulk of your press release is focused on your announcement or product, you typically don’t have much reason to get into the details of your company, when you were founded, and your past titles. Journalists generally appreciate this context.

• Contact information: Just a quick note is fine here. Direct all the journalist’s follow-up questions to one point of contact: a name, a title, and an email address.

When Should You Write a Press Release?

Your website’s newsroom (the page where your releases are available to the public; read below for more on that) is not like an X feed. Unless you are a very large video game publisher with lots of different profit centers and production units and such, you will not be writing press releases every day, every week, or possibly not even every month. Remember that press releases are not direct promotional instruments: the point of a press release is to efficiently get information into the hands of the media, without them having to wade through the guff.

Do not write a press release simply for the sake of having written one. Do not write an insubstantial press release just to scream “we exist!” into the void. That is a waste of time at best and at worst it will cause writers and publications and wire agencies to remove you from their radar entirely— and when you finally do have something important to announce, you’ll find absolutely zero engagement from the press.

That being said, here are some times when a video game developer should publish a press release. These are special occasions; events in the development process and product life cycle when you will really want the media to cover you:

• Game announcements when you formally declare your plans to release a product. Your press release should include early images (even if it’s just concept art), estimated development and release timelines, and links to social media or a distributor page such as Steam if possible.

• Game releases, including Early Access releases, demo releases, and of course your main launch day. Time this press release exactly with the release or the day before the release if at all possible, using an embargo (see above) to ensure the material only goes out when your game is actually available.

• Game updates— don’t publish a release for every single hotfix and bug patch, but substantial named content updates are newsworthy if they significantly alter your game.

• Crowdfunding efforts such as Kickstarter campaigns should be covered on their milestones. Write a press release when your campaign goes live, and another one after your project is fully funded.

• Awards and festivals are worth covering in a press release if they are actually noteworthy in the broader industry; use your judgement here. Your game exhibiting at PAX or your art director giving a talk at GDC are big news; your Steam getting into some obscure online festival alongside 400 other games is less so.

Above all else, when writing a press release you should be honest with the press and with yourself. Public relations is not the same as marketing. The goal in PR is to disseminate information, to maintain relationships, and to be as accurate as possible with your messaging. When promoting video games there is absolutely a time and a place for such putting out as much high-quality content as possible on a weekly/daily basis, the newsroom is not the place for that. Journalists can see right through the marketing bollocks of an unsubstantial press release, and they will in turn mentally file your studio away as a spam feed.

How Do You Publish a Press Release?

Once your press release is complete, you need to get it out into the world. As we have already discussed, a press release is not a public-facing document; it’s usually not the best strategy to just blast it out on X or on Reddit (at least not as primary channels). For getting your release into the hands of the right people— and ultimately getting your game’s latest news onto the major publications— there are three main avenues that we recommend. For the best results, we recommend you pursue all three paths simultaneously.

Your company newsroom

Traditionally, North American corporations with their sprawling Midwestern industrial campuses and towering Manhattan office buildings would have a literal room in their facility called the “media room” or “news room” where the CEO of Kodak would announce to a crowd of reporters with flashing cameras that profits for Q4 were up 19 percent— press releases were made in physical spaces; even though the telephone was widespread, the best way to get information before your competitor journalists was in-person at a press conference.

Your small indie studio might not even have an office, let alone a dedicated room for press conferences! These days, when games journalists talk about “newsrooms” they mean a dedicated page on a company’s website where press releases are posted, rather like a corporate blog. Your newsroom should have a good UI and it should be easy to find, read, and download both the press release and any other relevant media. Importantly, your newsroom is a different thing from your presskit! Do not conflate the two. The presskit is a single and evergreen (though often updated) package for the media; your newsroom is a linear feed of dated and context-dependent press releases.

A wire agency

Organisations write press releases and journalists read press releases and turn them into stories for the public, but there’s a missing middleman we haven’t discussed yet. There are services whose entire business is to move press releases from newsrooms into the feeds of publications and writers. They are called wire agencies or wire services; they’ve been around for centuries and you’ve probably heard of some of them (the biggest ones like The Associated Press actually hire journalists of their own), but in the game dev world, wire services mostly exist to consolidate huge feeds of press releases from game publishers, PR firms, and anyone else with a stake in this industry.

A major video game wire agency such as Games Press is a members-only website where there might be dozens of releases coming through each day. Journalists, both freelancers looking for their next scoop and staff writers for huge sites like Gamespot, regularly prowl the feed from the wire. One generally cannot pay a wire agency to amplify their news in particular; your little indie Kickstarter announcement will rub shoulders with big news from Ubisoft and Paradox and every other AAA you’ve heard of. So if your goal is to maximise eyeballs on your press release for the lowest cost possible, consider putting yours onto a wire service or two.

Direct journalist outreach

The above two options are cheap and easy, but they both have a discoverability problem. It cannot be overstated just how overwhelmed journalists are with sheer volume of information. And just because a wire agency, for example, is generally pretty egalitarian with how it disseminates press releases, that doesn’t mean that the people most likely to cover your game are actually going to spot it among the endless torrent of marketing copy. As such it is a very good idea to figure out who exactly you want to cover your game and email them directly. 

Targeted journalist outreach is the most effective means of distributing your press release. There are hundreds of games websites and thousands of games writers out there; not all of them check Games Press every morning, not all of them are going to stumble upon your Twitter, and majority of them do not even write about games full time. Your best bet is to reach out to them before they randomly find you. The actual strategy of how to track these people down is a whole blog post in itself. The short version is that this is a very time-intensive process, but building those relationships directly is far more likely to yield actual, high-quality, engagement-driving coverage for your game.

Should I Hire Someone to Write my Press Releases?

This is the big question. After reading this post you might start looking for services who can take care of this for you— not just the actual authorship of the press release, but the distribution, the interaction with the wire agencies, the network of publications and journalists and bloggers. Feel free to shop around, but you may experience some pretty dramatic sticker shock when you see PR agencies charging well over $1000 for a 750 word press release and a basic outreach package. (For reference, when I used to be a games journalist myself, I counted myself very lucky if I earned $200 on a 2000-3000 word, highly-researched feature article!)

Your next move might be to handle it yourself. If you have some basic writing ability you can probably get a decent press release on paper (or a more mediocre one if you just plug some prompts into ChatGPT). But the actual composition of the release aside, the real challenge is the angle, the timing, the keywords, the substance, and of course, the distribution. Again, your team could probably figure this out given some time, but researching contacts takes many, many hours and it will take you a few releases to really get into the flow and start building that network (and remember, you really cannot spam out press releases like tweets). 

We at Player Two Consulting try to offer indie devs, particularly those with small teams and small budgets, a middle ground: our full-service business model allows you to leverage our existing talent and network so we can quietly write, target, and distribute your company’s big news while you work away at your game. Our core service offers one targeted press release per month by default— and even if you don’t want our full outreach campaign service, we also offer one-off press release services for a price that hilariously undercuts the big California PR agencies. So whether you are a pre-release team working in your garage or you’re days away from launch, contact us today and let’s see what Player Two can do for you.

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Philip Harker is the founder and lead strategist of Player Two Consulting. He helps game developers with content marketing, public relations, social media, and more.