Whenever you reach out to a company’s support line or interact with their social media, you’re engaging in their public relations personnel. These people are trained in customer relations and depending on their exact job, they’re usually well versed in different aspects of marketing.
But for indie game devs, we don’t have the luxury of having one person to answer emails & Steam support, one person to manage social media, one person to reach out to press, etc…. So how do we end up talking to players?
what is public relations
Public relations are essentially the communication (relations) between an entity and the public. In this case, it’s how you (and your studio) communicate to players.
There’s a lot of venues for this, including but probably not limited to:
- social media comments
- direct messages
- emails
- fan mail
Press relations are how you “voice” your studio to others. Don’t overthink this- it’s just how you talk to people and how those words come off to them.
For large companies, it’s not often that users can directly talk to employees (you don’t follow grocery store employees on social media and ask them about deals, do you?), but for indie studios it’s something that can happen often. While not every interaction may be with a potential player, there is more room for your teammates to talk to players.
So who on the team will be the designated person to communicate with players and how will they do it?
Continue reading “Talking to Your Visual Novel Players”
