Good reviews, whether as a part of a PR push or an effort to get a better KPI (yup, some companies use the Metsacore rating as one), are quite important in the industry. After all, they can greatly influence the sales of your title. In this article I’ll showcase two ways of securing a better rating and, hopefully, making a better game. Keep in mind that what I’m going to talk about are just tools that you or 3rd parties can use. They don’t guarantee that your game will be rated better, but they significantly improve the chances for it to happen.
Method #1 – review guide
Work is best done when you have a robust backlog and everything’s catalogued and described well. While this sentence will apply mostly to the job of a dev, it also may be true for journalists and bloggers. A review guide is a document that describes the gameplay in pretty deep detail. It’s not on a GDD level, but it can easily have a dozen or so pages. Its purpose is to make the reviewer’s experience as comfortable and streamlined as it gets.
A review guide will most often contain at least some of the following segments:
- An elevator pitch/elevator story – thanks to it, the reviewer will be able to quickly understand what the game is supposed to be even before looking at assets.
- A plot summary and character descriptions – in order to provide the reviewer with a reliable and easy-to-use source of info on the lore and who’s who.
- A description of key mechanics – so the reviewer understands better what to do and what some things may provide.
- Additional info about the build – it’s possible that the review build will not be optimised or will be missing a bit of content, so it’s good to write about that in the review guide.
- A list of often occurring known bugs and fixes – thanks to such a list, the reviewer will know how to approach various bugs that they may encounter while playing the game.
- A walkthrough – when you know your game has some over-the-top and tedious segments that may frustrate a person going in blind (looking at you, Shin Megami Tensei 3 HD).
- Additional artworks,
- Comments and quotes from the dev team and the publisher.
A review guide will make your game more approachable. Aside from that, it will also allow the reviewer to have a handy piece of work to use when they write about the title. After all, who wouldn’t appreciate a bit of help?
Method #2 – silent reviews
It’s always good to know what the journalist will write about your game. However, it’s a good idea to “rehearse” the actual PR effort with so-called silent reviews. This service allows you to have (most often) professionals play your game and provide a review that will be exclusively at your disposal. This allows you to get into a trove of insight and great feedback. These reviewers can be pretty ruthless and you’ll almost certainly end up with proper info on what you should work on before distributing the review build.
There was this one case in my career when a company I was a contractor for decided to silent review their title (it was from a pretty well-known franchise, which I’m unable to disclose due to NDAs). The title in the state it was sent out got reviews in the 70+ range. Not bad, but the client considered it underwhelming. They tweaked a lot of things in their game, playtested it and silent reviewed it once again. They got 80+ scores the second time around and decided the game was in a good enough state to be mailed to the press and influencers. The result? The score is in the 85 points zone on Metacritic.
This method is pretty great, as it allows you to achieve something between a “PR rehearsal” and a minor playtest. A unique offering, innit? There are 3 problems with it, though. It’s expensive, few companies do that (I don’t do that, but can coordinate the process for you – hit me up at jakub@heapsagency.com) and there’s also a slight possibility that the reviews you’ll get won’t be accurate, but the last one’s not plausible.
The big point of contention is that silent reviews won’t do much on their own. You’ll need to put more work into polishing and fixing your game. It’s ultimately a good thing, as your title will be of higher quality, but you’ll need to allocate some workforce to introduce the necessary changes. And to playtest and bugfix them.
Conclusion
Look, I’ll be sincere. These two methods are decent when it comes to influencing your review scores. You need to keep in mind that the more unique and BETTER the game is, the higher scores it will get in spite of all that. So focus on delivering the best possible experience possible. And when it comes to video games marketing, give Heaps Agency a shot.
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