Build an Indie Game Press Kit in an Afternoon: The Files Journalists and Streamers Actually Ask For

A press kit is one of the few pieces of marketing you build once and reuse for years, and most solo devs either don’t have one or have a Google Drive folder with the answers buried somewhere journalists will never find. This week’s Marketing Tips Monday tactic: build a real one, in an afternoon, using files you probably already have half-made lying around.

The problem: someone wants to cover your game and you don’t know exactly what to send them

Let’s say a small YouTuber emails you asking to feature your game! You reply super-fast because you’re excited, attach whatever screenshots you took last week, and add a few “thank you” lines. Now they have to go digging to find out whether it’s out yet or still in development, which platforms it’s on, and whether there’s a usable thumbnail anywhere, because none of your screenshots are high enough resolution.

Every guess is a reason for them to move on to the next game in their inbox instead. A press kit removes the guessing. It’s not there to convince someone to cover you (that’s the pitch email’s job), it’s there to make covering you take five minutes instead of thirty once they’ve already said yes. You want to make it as easy as possible to cover your game, and you want it to be done accurately instead of based on guesses.

What a press kit is for, and what it isn’t

A press kit is a reference document, not a sales pitch. It answers questions: what is this game called, what genre is it, when’s it out, what does it look like, who do I contact, can I use these images. It is not the place for hype copy or a wall of features you’re proud of. Save that for the Steam page.

The test for whether something belongs in a press kit: would a journalist writing a two-paragraph roundup, or a streamer filling out a video description, need this fact? If yes, it goes in. If it’s just you being enthusiastic about your combat system, it doesn’t.

The file list: logo, capsule, screenshots, a gameplay clip, fact sheet, contact

Here’s the actual list. Nothing crazy, but each one has a job:

• Logo, on a transparent background, in at least one square-ish version and one wide banner version. PNG is fine.
• Capsule art, the same image you use (or will use) on your Steam store page. Journalists often lift this directly for article thumbnails.
• Screenshots, at least 5, more on that below.
• A gameplay clip, 15 to 60 seconds, not your full trailer. Something a video editor can drop straight into a montage without watermarks, your narration over the top, or music you don’t own the rights to.
• A fact sheet, one page, covered in its own section below.
• Contact info, a real email you check, not a contact form.

For the gameplay clip, if you haven’t already got a capture workflow set up, this rundown of capture tools for Steam trailers covers OBS, ShareX and Unity Recorder and which one fits which situation. The same recording works for both your trailer and your press kit clip if you plan the shot for a clean 20-second loop rather than a whole trailer arc.

Screenshots that get used: resolution, UI on or off, and how many is enough

Export at 1920x1080 minimum. Some outlets will want 4K, and it costs you nothing to render at a higher resolution and let them downscale, but it costs you a rejected asset if you send 720p and they need to crop it for a header image.

If your game is pixel art, get to that resolution by scaling up in whole numbers with nearest-neighbor filtering (a 320x180 game goes up exactly 6x to 1920x1080). Any other scaling blurs the pixels, and a soft screenshot is the one asset nobody can fix on their end. Pixels Per Unit, explained covers why.

Include a mix, not five screenshots of the same room from different angles:

• 2-3 with the UI on, showing actual gameplay (health bars, menus, whatever’s core to how the game plays)
• 1-2 with the UI off, showing environment or art style cleanly, useful for thumbnails and article headers
• At least one that shows a moment of drama or a boss, if your game has one, because that’s the shot most likely to get picked over the others

Five to eight screenshots is plenty. Fewer than five and it looks like you don’t have much game to show. More than ten and nobody’s going to look through all of them, so you’re just adding folder clutter.

Name the files something a human can read without opening them: screenshot-01-village-day.png, not Screenshot 2024-03-11 141207.png. Sounds obvious once you say it, but almost every folder is full of the latter, and renaming eight files takes a minute or two.

Writing the fact sheet: one paragraph, three bullets, release status, platforms

This is the file that gets read the most and takes the least time to write, so there’s no excuse for it being sloppy. One page, structured like this:

Title, developer name, one-line description. The same one-liner you’d use on Steam, not a longer version.

One paragraph, 3-4 sentences, describing the game. What genre, what you actually do in it, what makes it different from the ten other games in that genre. Written plainly, no adjectives doing the work that a fact should be doing.

Three bullet points of key features. Not ten. Pick the three that are actually true and actually distinct, not “beautiful pixel art” repeated three different ways.

Release status and platforms. “In development, targeting Windows and Mac, no release date set” is a completely fine and honest thing to write. Vague and true beats specific and wrong, and a journalist would rather know you’re pre-release than find out later you told them a date you missed.

Links. Steam page, itch page if you have one, social accounts, trailer.

Contact. Name and email again, even though it’s already elsewhere in the kit. People don’t always read every file.

That’s the whole document. If it’s longer than one page, you’ve written a pitch, not a fact sheet.

Where to host it: a page on your site, presskit(), or a plain folder

Three options, roughly in order of effort:

1. A page on your own website or itch page, laid out with the sections above and downloadable assets. Best option if you already have a site, since it’s one URL you can drop in any email and it stays current when you update the page.
2. presskit(), a free tool from Rami Ismail that builds a press page in the standard layout journalists already recognize (dopresskit.com). The catch is that it isn’t hosted for you: you download it and upload it to your own web host over FTP, and it’s an older tool offered as-is. Worth it if you already have hosting and want the familiar format.
3. A plain folder, Dropbox or Google Drive, organized with clear subfolders (/screenshots, /logo, /video) and the fact sheet as a PDF at the top level. Not glamorous, but functional, and it’s what a lot of small studios actually use.

Whatever you pick, the one non-negotiable is that it has to work without a login. If someone has to “request access,” you’ve added a step between a busy person and covering your game, and busy people skip steps.

Worked example: building a press kit for Crown Code Chronicles, including what’s still missing from mine

Crown Code Chronicles has a Steam page listed as Coming Soon, and building the press kit around it is a useful exercise in what’s actually ready versus what only feels ready.

The logo exists, in a couple of sizes. The fact sheet is quick to write because the one-line description and feature bullets already exist from writing the Steam page copy, so that part’s mostly a copy-paste job with the sales language trimmed out.

What’s missing, honestly: the screenshots on the store page are older builds and don’t reflect the current combat system, so a press kit built off them right now would be showing outdated art and UI, which is worse than showing nothing. The gameplay clip situation is the same problem, since the trailer on the page needs an update before a clean 20-second clip can be pulled from anything current. That’s the actual order of operations for a game still in production: update the assets that feed the Steam page first, then build the press kit from the updated versions, not the other way around. Building a shiny press kit around stale screenshots just means redoing it in a month.

Naming and licensing your files so people can legally use them

Two small things that save real confusion later.

First, put a one-line usage note somewhere visible in the kit: something like “All assets in this kit may be used for coverage of [game name] in articles, videos, and streams.” That single sentence answers a question a lot of smaller creators are quietly unsure about, and answering it up front means one less email back to you asking permission. It can only cover what’s yours, though: if the gameplay clip has licensed music in it, a creator who uses it can still get a copyright claim on YouTube, so keep the clip’s audio to sounds you own.

Second, when you update an asset, give it a new name like logo-v2.png rather than silently overwriting logo.png. Anyone holding an older download can tell at a glance whether theirs is current, and a browser or file host that cached the old logo.png can’t quietly keep serving it.

How to send it (the email, not the folder)

Don’t send a bare link with no context. A short email does more work than the kit itself:

Subject: Press kit for [Game Name] (turn-based JRPG, Coming Soon on Steam)

Hi [Name], following up with the press kit for [Game Name] we mentioned, everything’s at [link]. Quick summary: pixel-art JRPG with [your actual hook], currently in development for PC. Screenshots, a short gameplay clip, logo and a one-page fact sheet are all in there, along with contact info if you need anything else. Happy to answer questions or send more footage if useful.

That’s it. Name the genre and hook in the email itself, since some people will act on the email alone without opening the folder, and you want the pitch to survive that.

Do this week: a five-item checklist

• Export 5-8 screenshots at 1920x1080 or higher, mixing UI-on, UI-off and one dramatic shot, named descriptively
• Write the one-page fact sheet: description, three bullets, release status and platforms, links, contact
• Pull or record a 15-60 second gameplay clip with no watermark, narration, or licensed music
• Pick a host (your own site, presskit() on your own hosting, or a clearly organized folder) and get it live at one URL with no login required
• Write the short pitch email template above and save it as a draft you can reuse for the next person who asks

I get it. Any time away from working on your game seems like a waste, or at the least, something that can wait till later. However, this is one thing I’d suggest putting together sooner rather than later (preferably some time between “I have a functioning game” and “my game comes out in a month”).