Introducing: Press Kitty!

Key artwork design by the lovely Tom Waterhouse (@2dforever)

👋 Welcome back!

If you missed our announcement and launch back in June, you might want to get aquainted with our backstory.

(For the ‘tldr’ crew, we’re on a mission to democratise games publishing – by providing tools, data and educational resources to empower independent games!)

Today, we’re so excited to announce the second part of the impress.games publishing toolkit!

Following the success of stream & creator alerts and analytics tool Coverage Bot, we’ve been able to spend some time implementing what our friend Mike would call our Master Plan.

In doing so, we started with what we think is the lowest-common-denominator in indie games marketing…

📃 Press Kits!

Every game needs one, right? Every studio needs one, too! Without one, whether as a solo creator or as a sizable studio, you’re essentially invisible!

(OK, that’s a slight exaggeration…)

But for new indie teams, creating and setting one up can be a bit of a trouble.

• What do I include?
• How / where do I host it?
• How will I nicely structure and organise the content?
• How will it serve both my brand and the press/creator visitor?

So many questions – and so few answers!

There are a number of solutions out there – and they each have their quirks and idiosyncracies which we’ll discuss in depth in a future post.

The gist, however?

• Some require web development or server knowledge.
• Some aren’t in well structured or standardised formats.
• Some aren’t indexable by search engines.
• Some aren’t available on ‘indie’ or ‘developing-world’ budgets!

We tried a bunch, and settled on… none.

So we looked to fix all of the above with our own unified solution. One that worked for us as a tiny dev outfit, but could also work in all the other use cases and teams outside our own.

We wanted to level the playing field for other independents, and we everyone to benefit, so without further adieu:

Introducing: 😸 Press Kitty!

Press Kittyis a free web-based service to create press & media kits for video games!

It is a visual and navigable design system that showcases ‘at a glance’ a game’s best assets through the lens of creator and journalistic coverage — inspired by the original, Rami Ismail’s presskit().

It’s an online utility that helps indie game developers put their best foot forward when it comes to announcing and marketing their games.

It is all of a game’s press, influencer and content-creator assets, all in one place!

Yes!

We’ve taken games industry best-practices, summarised them into easy-to-use tools and templates, and made them available for indie developers to quickly create effective press kits and to tell their unique stories – and all completely for free!

Features

• A WYSIWYG Editor – to make setting up super easy!
• Upload screenshots, descriptions and trailers, into the cloud – so it’s always available!
• Unique impress.games URLs for studios and press kits – it’s a place to call your own!
• And lots more to come!

We’re offering this service as a gesture of goodwill to the industry that helped us get started back 10 or so years ago – and to push our mission and vision forward.

For full transparency on “how we are pricing”, we’re currently fully monetised through our Coverage Bot tool – and it’s staying that way while we refine Press Kitty into the best service it can be.

In the longer term – again full transparency – we will be looking at a Press Kitty premium tier, however this premium tier will exist to deliver specific PR agency-derived features and won’t impact the free service in any way.

Lastly, we still have our roadmap for more helpful utilities – such as Steam Revenue Calculator – and more free educational resources on topics relating to indie games marketing/pr and to the entire impress.games product suite.

To stay updated with those new tools and resources – or to claim your unique url and start creating your first press kit – just sign up today!

On a personal level, I’m really excited to say: Press Kitty is available now!

All the best,
Ashley

- Founder, IMPRESS
- prev. Game Developer, Force Of Habit

P.S. I’ve had my coffee and now I feel great – take this! ☕️