Getting Your Crap Together
It’s not really crap. It’s the culmination of all the blood, sweat, and tears you have been going through to get your game ready for launch. In essence, your media folder is your portfolio for the game and it’s a resource content creators can use to learn, write, or share about it.
What Should Go Into It?
Different content creators will want different things but it’s important to try and get what the majority would want from the get go. This will make your life easier in the long run as you will inevitably add to it throughout the time you use your media folder.
Note, you will likely want this in some kind of online storage so that you can easily give people access to the files. If you were to do this by email, it might take quite a few so it’s better to make sure they can access everything in one place. Just make sure you don’t give them editing permissions.
Anyways, here is what I found to be helpful to have in your media folder:
Small Images/Low Resolution
Not every image needs to be a beautiful, picturesque version of your game. Having some smaller images of your games or components will help content creators slot in images in an article without sucking up a lot of bandwidth. Just make sure they look good though and properly put them in a ‘Low Resolution’ folder.
Larger Images/High Resolution
These are the big images that you want people to look at and get their first impressions of the game and its components. Every campaign should have at least 2-3 of these images, if not more. They need to be crisp and they need to look good. I would find someone professional or at least a hobbyist who you know can take great pictures of stuff like this. Use your favorite Kickstarters and the big board companies as a reference for the photographer. Collect those images into a folder so you can share your vision of what it should look like to your photographer. Also, don’t forget to put these images into a ‘High Resolution’ folder to help differentiate them.
Specific Dimesion Images
You are going to want some images that are prepared ahead of time at certain dimensions. For example, having images at 1920 x 1080 so they can be used for Facebook Groups is one of those things. Also, limiting the width of images to be 640 pixels wide for certain applications like social media is a good thing to have.
Logos
It’s important to have a few versions of your comapny’s logo as well as any logos you have for the game. This will make sure your branding is out there and people know where the game comes from and also help them recognize the name of the game.
Links
I recommend you have a document where you have all of your important links. For example, we had one with the URLs for: Kickstarter, Facebook Group, and our webpage. We also provided a link to our game for Tabletop Simulator so people could download it and check it out. I also recommend adding your Board Game Geek game page and Discord if you have one you use regularly.
Rulebook
We made sure to have a rulebook available for anyone who wanted to look and check it out. The rulebook is essential and the better it looks and reads the better first impressions from content creators. There will be preferences for organization and looks but if you put in the work, people can tell. I believe it goes a long way.
Outlines/Press Releases/Synopsis
You will need some documents that cover your game. Give varying degrees of depth and information that allows the content creators to get a brief outline of the game. You will use this a lot when you first start contacting content creators as you will need to do a quick pitch of the game to see if they are interested in covering it.
A Tool For You
Another aspect of the media folder is that it is a tool for you as much as it is a tool for the media people that you contact. You have all of your text, descriptions, and images you want to release to the public in one spot. It then makes it easy for you to copy and paste your game pitch, your main images you want associated with the game, etc.
Here is a link to our Media Folder we used for Cult of the Deep: Public Media Folder – Cult of the Deep
Now, go forth and get that media folder ready so you can impress all of those content creators. Remember, you can only make a first impression once.
For those more experienced, is there anything you would add? Anything I missed? Let me know.
