If there’s one single way to summarise RPS, it’s this: all games are equal until proven otherwise. We want to cover the obscurest indie games as much as we do the glossiest mainstream man-shooters, and everything in between. So please, get in touch about your game. That’s what the site lives and dies on, and also the reason we run it. However, it transpires there are an awful lot of PC games these days, and we are but four men standing against that colourful tide. So, to maximise your chances of getting coverage, please bear this little lot in mind:
1) We’re a PC-only site. Honestly. It says so at the top of the site and everything. If you mail us about your iOS or XBLA game, you’re going to look very silly and we’re certainly not going to believe you when you bang on about being a big fan of the site or whatever. PC-only. No exceptions. And if your game isn’t on PC, why the bloody hell not? It’s the biggest gaming platform in the history of the universe, you know. Port your game over now, you buffoon.
2) If you want us to write about the game, there absolutely needs to be something to write about. “I made a game, write about it!” isn’t helpful to us or to you. Wherever possible, get us something playable in your initial mail. This sounds incredibly lazy, but even having to mail back and forth a few times to get review/preview code means we’re much more likely to look at something else in our often intimidatingly fat inbox instead.
At the absolute least, provide a video. There are squillions upon squillions of indie games out there, so the only way for us small handful of writers to work out what’s amazing is to get a concrete sense of what a game is like. This is true of the wider internet too – you gotta promote if you wanna be seen.
Also: a very important note on Kickstarter projects. If there isn’t concrete proof that your game will exist and do more or less what it promises too, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll post about it – we have to be very careful about seeming to encourage our readers to give money to something that may not come to pass. So, it’s probably not worth contacting us unless you have, at the very least, a trailer, and ideally something playable.
3) Pleasepleaseplease don’t spend hours slaving over a thousand-word missive about how amazing your game is and how weird and wonderful you are. It’s a waste of your time: again, what’s key is that we know what the game’s like, as quickly as possible. We can and will look at interviews and whatnot later for stuff we dig, but that’s also something that’s very hard to do if we don’t have a reasonable understanding of the game in question.
SUPER-IMPORTANT: due to the sheer volume of email we receive these days, we can’t reply to, play or post about everything we’re alerted to. It’s simply impossible. We do what we can, but we are mere mortals. Amazing mortals, but mortals nonetheless. So don’t take it personally if you don’t hear from us.
This is how to contact us, but you can also reach the individual writers by clicking on their names at the very bottom of the site. (Also: targeting specific writers you think would be into your game can help hugely). If you could add us to your mailing lists, that’d be super. If you’d like to put us on your preview/review code lists so we can write up our thoughts on your latest releases without pestering you for copies of them, well, that’d be super-super. We’d even go so far as to say super-super-super.
