Your game press kit: what a journalist actually opens

A game press kit is one page that gives a journalist or creator everything they need to write about your game without emailing you first: what it is, what it looks like, when it comes out, and where to get a key.

That is the whole job. It is not a brochure and it is not a pitch. It is friction removal, for someone who has 250 unread emails and eleven minutes.

This guide is built on what working games journalists have actually said on the record, not on the statistics you will find on the first page of search results. A warning about those comes at the end, because several of the most-quoted numbers in this niche appear to have been invented.

Press kit or media kit?

Same thing, mostly. “Press kit” is the older term and the one games people use; “media kit” turns up more in music and influencer marketing, where it often means a stats sheet about an audience rather than a product. If you are making a game, call it a press kit and put it at a URL with the word press in it.

A press kit is not a press release

Worth separating, because the two get used interchangeably and they do different jobs.

A press release is one announcement with a date on it: the game exists, the demo is out, the release date moved, the game shipped. You create a new one each time. It is a piece of marketing material with a short life.

A game press kit is the permanent page the release points at. You build it once and maintain it.

Most indie games need four or five press releases across their whole life — announcement, demo or playtest, release date, launch, and one big update. Each is short: a headline, one paragraph saying what happened and why anyone should care, two or three paragraphs of detail, a line about the studio, and a link to the press kit. Put it in the body of the email as text. Never as an attachment, and never as a PDF.

The kit is what lets the release be short. If everything a writer might need is one click away, the announcement itself can be five sentences. Press releases that try to be press kits are the ones that get deleted.

When to build it

At announcement, not at launch.

The press kit is the page you link from every festival submission, every showcase application, every publisher email and every creator message. All of those happen long before release, and each one is a moment where a stranger decides in a few seconds whether you look like someone worth spending time on. A finished game press kit reads as professional intent. An empty one, or none at all, reads as a project that might not ship.

Then keep it alive. The most common mistake after building one is never touching it again. A kit still advertising a release window that passed a year ago is worse than no kit at all, because it actively suggests the project died.

A rough rhythm that works for indie games: build the kit the week you announce, update it whenever the story changes, and do a full read-through before every festival deadline and before launch. That is maybe four hours a year.

The honest part, up front

There is no measured evidence that press kits produce coverage or sales.

I looked. There is no study, no A/B test, no controlled analysis, and no vendor-published cohort comparison linking a press kit’s presence, quality or format to any outcome. The most data-driven public source on game discoverability does not treat press kits as a measured variable at all.

The reason this evidence probably will never exist is that the confounds are unfixable. Studios with good press kits are studios with marketing capacity, a finished trailer, maybe a publisher, and a game far enough along to be worth covering. Every one of those independently predicts coverage. Isolating the press kit would take randomisation, and nobody is going to randomise it.

So what follows is not a growth tactic. It is a professional baseline supported by a lot of first-hand testimony about what makes journalists give up. Anyone quoting you a conversion rate for press kits is making it up.

What journalists actually say

The best available data is the Big Games Machine games journalist survey, published March 2024, with over 150 respondents — 54% staff, 34% freelance, mostly UK and US consumer outlets. It is run by a games PR agency, so read it as an industry survey rather than neutral research. But it has a real sample, named outlets, a free ungated PDF and verbatim quotes, which is more than anything else in this space offers.

Here is what it found about pitches:

And what it found about their day: 62% get 11 to 50 pitches a day, and 12% get more than 50. One respondent put their own number at over 250 emails daily.

James Batchelor, then editor of GamesIndustry.biz, on what that does to a subject line:

I delete emails without even opening them based on the subject line if I can instantly tell that at a glance it’s not relevant to me… I went on holiday last year for ten days. When I left, I had 46 unread emails. When I came home, I had 1,251.

He also notes that GamesIndustry.biz is “only five and a half people.”

The anonymous verbatims from the same survey are blunter, and they are the most useful thing in this whole guide:

The amount of PR emails that don’t include a basic store link is really bloody annoying. Don’t make me hunt for it.

Keep it simple and to the point. Too many of you waffle on with paragraphs of (respectfully) nonsense. We’re all overworked… Put a single easy key in the email. Don’t make us request a key and possibly wait weeks for a reply because you missed our email asking.

Always include images. Nothing gets published without them.

I personally receive over 250 emails every single day… be selective and decide which games you’re working on are actually relevant to the publication, then go for one personalised in-depth pitch.

[We get] unrealistic timeframes for review games — i.e. a 40-hour game provided three days before release.

And one that is worth reading twice, because it is about the relationship rather than the assets:

Remember that real games journalism does not exist to support your marketing plan. Negative coverage should not mean removal from a mailing list or future opportunities.

What the evidence does not say

Two things I expected to find and did not.

Nobody expressed a preference between a ZIP and a web page. Not one journalist in any primary source. What they express is a friction preference — assets present, linked, downloadable, no login, no hunting. The rules you will read about always offering a ZIP, or never password-protecting your assets, come from tool vendors, not from journalists. They are plausible. They are not testimony.

There is no evidenced subject-line formula. Batchelor is the only journalist on record about subject lines, and what he describes is deletion, not a template. The bracketed convention you will see everywhere traces to vendor blogs. Use it if you like; it is sensible. Just do not believe anyone who tells you it is what journalists asked for.

One thing the survey does support, editorially: never send a press release as a PDF.

What goes in it

The standard format was defined by Rami Ismail’s presskit() and every tool since has copied it, because it is the right list.

• Factsheet. Developer, based in, founding date, website, press contact, socials, release date, platforms, price, availability, languages.
• Description. Two or three sentences someone can paste. Then a longer paragraph if they want it.
• History. How the project started. Journalists use this for the human bit of the story.
• Features. A short bulleted list. Concrete, not adjectives.
• Videos. Trailer, embedded and downloadable, with the direct YouTube link. If you have clean b-roll — uncut gameplay with no HUD and no music — include it. It is the thing a video producer cannot make themselves.
• Images. Six to twelve screenshots at full resolution. That range is a convention rather than a measured optimum, but the principle behind it holds: six excellent screenshots beat twenty mediocre ones, and every low-resolution asset is one a print or video producer cannot use. PNG for anything with UI or text, JPEG is fine for photographic scenes. Name them sensibly.
• Key art and logo. Your key art, your logo and your icon, each in multiple formats and sizes, logo on transparent PNG plus a dark version. Concept art if you have it; it gets used more than people expect, because it is the one image nobody else has published.
• Game description. Worth naming as its own asset: a short and a long version, both pasteable.
• Awards, selections, quotes. Existing coverage is credibility — a journalist deciding whether to spend an afternoon on you reads it as evidence someone else already did.
• Monetisation permission. One line saying creators may monetise videos of your game. It removes a real blocker.
• Contact. A working email address, on the page, in text — at the top and the bottom. It is the single most-forgotten item on the list.

Two additions that carry weight in 2026.

A key, or a frictionless way to get one. This came up more than anything else in the verbatims. If a journalist has to email you and wait, a meaningful share of them will not.

Guides assets — the component almost nobody ships. One respondent:

As someone who covers guides a lot, things like internal maps of the locations of collectables, key tips, things we might miss, and general pointers are always super helpful and save us a lot of time.

This matters more than it looks. In the same survey, guides were named as a top traffic driver by 50% of respondents, and one put it at “about 80% of traffic on games websites.” Guides are where outlet attention actually goes, and essentially no indie press kit contains anything that helps a guides writer. Collectable maps, a boss list, secret locations, an ending list. It costs you an afternoon.

The factsheet, written out

The factsheet is the part people get wrong most often, usually by writing prose where a list would do. Here is the shape. Copy it, fill it in, and put it near the top of the page as real text rather than an image.

• Game name. Exactly as you want it printed, including capitalisation.
• Developer. Studio name, or your name if you are a solo dev.
• Based in. City and country. Journalists use this constantly, for regional coverage and for festival eligibility.
• Founding date. One line.
• Website. The studio site, not the store page.
• Press contact. A working email address.
• Social links. Wherever you actually post.
• Release date. Or “TBA”, or a window. Whatever is true today.
• Platforms. All of them, including the ones that are only planned, marked as planned.
• Store pages. Steam, itch, console pages, in a list.
• Price. Or “not yet announced”.
• Languages. Interface and audio, if they differ.
• Availability. Digital only, or physical too.

The test is whether someone can create an accurate one-line description of your video game from that block alone, without opening anything else. If they cannot, something is missing.

Underneath it, put the two descriptions: one of about twenty-five words that a writer can drop into a news post, and one of about a hundred that carries the story of what makes the game itself interesting. Write both in third person, so they can be quoted without editing.

The mistakes that come up again and again

None of these are exotic. They are just the things that keep happening.

• No contact details. Astonishingly common. Put an email at the top and the bottom.
• Low-resolution assets. A 900-pixel-wide screenshot cannot be used for a thumbnail, a print piece or a video. Ship the originals.
• Assets behind a login or a password. Vendors will tell you this is the fastest way to get ignored. No journalist is on record saying it, but every complaint they are on record about is a friction complaint, so the direction is not in doubt.
• A bare Google Drive or Dropbox link. Better than nothing, worse than a page: the link expires, the folder gets reorganised, and none of it is findable in search. If it is your only option, at least link it from a page on your own domain. A zip file of the images alongside the page is fine and costs nothing.
• An out-of-date kit. A press kit still advertising a release window that has passed does active damage — it tells a journalist nobody is home. Update it whenever anything material changes, and make the factsheet scannable in about ten seconds, because that is roughly the attention it will get.

And write the elevator pitch first

One or two sentences that make someone understand the game instantly. It goes at the top of the kit, in the first line of every pitch email, and in your store description. If you cannot say why the game is worth a look in a sentence, a journalist will not work it out on your behalf.

Where it should live

On your own domain, at a URL you control, and one you will not change.

I went looking for well-known indie press kits to use as examples here, and the result was bleak enough to be the point of this section. Dodge Roll’s press page — for years the canonical presskit() example — now 301-redirects to a marketing site with no press assets on it. The two “live examples” that dopresskit.com still advertises today, Vlambeer’s and Octodad’s, return nothing.

A press kit URL that dies takes years of accumulated inbound links with it. Every article that ever linked your press page, every aggregator, every wiki. That is an argument for hosting it yourself rather than on someone else’s platform, and it is the same argument as your website: the channel you own makes about everything else.

If you do have to move it, redirect properly. A 301 to your homepage is not a redirect, it is a deletion with extra steps — and if you are wondering why an old page of yours has stopped appearing in search at all, why your website isn’t showing up on Google separates the two problems that produce that symptom.

One more thing, and it applies to press kits specifically because they tend to get built as image galleries: your factsheet has to be real text in the delivered HTML. If your release date and platform list only exist inside a JavaScript-rendered widget or baked into a picture, a crawler cannot read them and neither can a language model summarising your game. That is the whole argument in humans hate text, AI needs it, and a press kit is the page where it bites hardest.

Tools, as of August 2026

presskit() is abandoned

This is the tool every guide still recommends, so it needs saying plainly. dopresskit.com is live and still says “presskit() 2.0… currently in beta”. It still advertises integration with distribute(), which no longer exists. Its GitHub repository has 41 commits total, zero releases, 33 open issues and 19 open pull requests. It needs PHP5 and FTP.

The site is up. The project is not. Do not start a new press kit on it.

What does survive is the format Rami defined, which is the list in the previous section. Every tool below is a reimplementation of it.

What is actually maintained

presskit.gg — a self-hosted WordPress plugin, so your kit lives on your own domain. Steam App ID import, structured metadata, themes. Free tier covers one press kit and 20 screenshots; the paid tiers ($69 and $169 a year at time of writing) add embargo scheduling, key-request management and download analytics. Actively developed — the changelog shows releases through July 2026. Built by a single developer in the Netherlands, which is both why it ships fast and the risk you are taking.

Press Kitty, from impress.games — hosted SaaS with a free tier, from the same team as Coverage Bot, which tracks where your game gets mentioned. Hosted means less work and less control; see the section above about URLs.

IGDB — free, owned by Twitch, and fine as a fallback. No bulk asset downloads and no analytics.

Whichever you pick, the tool is not the point. A hand-written HTML page with the right contents beats a beautifully generated one that is missing the store link.

Doing it completely free

You do not need to spend anything on this.

The cheapest version that works is a single page on your own website: the game name as a heading, the factsheet as plain text, your screenshots and game art as normal images with download links, an embedded trailer with a download link beside it, and an email address. That is the whole thing. No plugin, no subscription. A static page will outlive every tool listed above, and it is the one option nobody can discontinue.

If you want more structure without paying, presskit.gg’s free tier covers one press kit and twenty screenshots on your own domain, IGDB is completely free, and Press Kitty has a free tier as well. Any of the three will get you further than most indie devs manage.

The one thing not worth doing for free is skipping the domain. A video game press kit hosted on someone else’s platform is a page you do not control, and the whole argument above is that the URL is the asset. A domain is the only line item here that is genuinely worth money.

Key distribution, and a caveat

Keymailer, Lurkit and IMPRESS Launchpad distribute keys to creators and vet them for you. Woovit, which many older guides still recommend, shut down in December 2024.

The caveat is the most interesting number in the survey: 45% of journalists rated key-distribution platforms as “not important” or only “slightly important” for how they discover games. These platforms solve your problem — fraud, volume, vetting — not the journalist’s. They are worth using. They are not a substitute for a direct, personal email.

About those keys

Key scamming is persistent, professional, and older than most people assume. Scam templates from 2016 are still in circulation.

The mechanism is simple: Steam gives you free keys for press and creators, grey-market sites let anyone list a key and keep most of the sale price, and so people request keys under false pretences and resell them. The classic versions are the “I’m a Steam Curator” bulk request — some developers just auto-delete anything containing that phrase around launch — and an email from an address one character off a real creator’s.

What has changed is the quality. Simon Carless documented two fake channels in October 2024 that had purchased subscribers to present at 10–15k, custom thumbnails, original human narration on every video, and plausible comments copied from real comment sections of the same games. His own assessment:

If I had a lot of Steam key requests to check through, this channel would probably pass muster.

That kills the standard advice, which was to comment on the creator’s video and require a reply from the official channel. The same group had been identified in 2021 running at least five other channels with different voice actors. This is a multi-year, multi-channel operation.

Better checks: use the contact address in the channel’s own About tab rather than trusting the sender; be suspicious of a channel that covers only Minecraft and AAA releases and has suddenly discovered your game; check whether a “news site” has real linked social accounts; watch for people who have registered their own plausible-looking outlet domain.

Creators need different things from press

Press and content creators land on the same page, but they open different parts of it.

A journalist wants text they can quote and images they can crop. Someone making video content wants footage — the trailer as a downloadable file rather than only a YouTube embed, b-roll without a HUD, and above all the one line saying they may monetise a video of your game. That line costs you nothing and removes a real blocker, because a creator who is unsure about monetisation will often just pick a different game.

The overlap is larger than the difference, which is why one page serves both. But if you only have time to add one thing for creators, add the monetisation permission.

Calibrate your expectations about the press

Not because it is hopeless, but because sending a good press kit into a shrinking industry and hearing nothing back is a much less confusing experience if you know the shape of it.

Three things happened recently. Game Informer was closed by GameStop in 2024 after 33 years, and relaunched in 2025 under new ownership — by a games developer. Polygon was sold to Valnet in May 2025 with over 20 staff laid off, which the WGA East noted was the fifth round of cuts since November in that bargaining unit. Before those: the Washington Post’s Launcher and Vice’s Waypoint both closed in 2023, Fandom bought GameSpot and Giant Bomb in 2022, IGN bought Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun and VG247 in 2024.

The survey shows what that feels like from inside: 56% feel negative about the future of games journalism against 19% positive, 64% name lack of time as a top-three problem, and 47% report a heavier workload than last year.

So the narrowing is threefold — fewer outlets, fewer people at each, and the remaining hours pushed toward SEO and guides work that a press kit cannot trigger. In the GDC State of the Game Industry survey published in January 2026, with over 2,300 respondents, press and bloggers came last among user-acquisition channels developers actually use, at 25%, behind social media, streamers, paid ads, events and community platforms.

None of that makes a press kit not worth building. It makes it worth building for creators as much as for press, and it makes personalised, targeted pitching worth far more than volume.

What a good one looks like

I wanted to end this with a gallery of great indie game press kits. I could not build one honestly, and the reason is the link rot described above: most of the canonical examples people still recommend no longer resolve.

So instead, here is what to look for when you find a good one, and what to copy.

Everything on one screen. The factsheet, the description and the download links are visible without scrolling past a hero image. You should be able to tell what the video game is, who made it, when it ships and where to click, in about ten seconds.

Assets that are actually assets. Full-resolution screenshots, gameplay footage you can download rather than only embed, key art and logo files in more than one format. Not a Google Drive folder. Not a contact form standing between a journalist and a JPEG.

A description written for someone else’s article. Two or three sentences a writer can paste and attribute, not marketing copy that has to be rewritten before it can be used.

Proof it is maintained. A date, a changelog line, or simply a release date that has not already passed. Press kits for indie games rot faster than anything else on a studio site, because they get built once at announcement and never touched again.

And a working email address. The number of press kits that fail on that alone is the reason it keeps getting listed first.

Sending it

Short version of everything above, as an email:

1. One outlet, one person, one game. The survey’s top reason a game gets picked for review was “good fit for our audience”, at 80%. A mass blast is a fit signal of zero.
2. Say what it is in the first line. Genre, hook, platform, date.
3. Embed an image or a GIF. Multiple respondents said this materially improves their odds of looking.
4. Put the key in the email. Not a form. Not “let me know if you’d like one.”
5. Link the store page and the press kit. Both. In plain text, not behind “click here”.
6. Give them time. 67% want review code at least three weeks out; a quarter want four or more. And if you are announcing under embargo, remember a news story takes about 48 hours to produce and a feature or interview takes at least a week.
7. Don’t send a PDF.

What to ignore

Search results for this topic are unusually polluted — a mix of tool-vendor content marketing and what look like AI-generated content farms, several of which publish confident statistics with no source. Five to watch for.

Video game press kits are one of the few pieces of marketing infrastructure that indie developers can finish in an afternoon and then stop thinking about. That is most of why they are worth building.

Common questions

Next: where the press kit fits in the rest of the picture is in how to market an indie game: the basics, and the free tools worth setting up first are in free and cheap indie game marketing tools.