Larian’s Swen Vincke on Whether Independent Devs Should Go to E3

Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke has penned yet another interesting entry to his blog, this time dedicated to whether it’s worth it for an independent developer to go to E3. While Swen seems very happy with Larian’s experience this year, he also warns other developers to carefully consider whether it’s worth it:

As with any PR effort, the biggest struggle is to first get the media to actually come and see you. Afterwards you also want to ensure that they actually publish a story based on what you show them, something that’s not always a given. Ultimately, your goal in getting the media to write about you, is to make potential players aware of your game, and get them convinced that this is something for them. If at all possible, you’d probably prefer talking to future players directly, but to get there, the media step is one that needs to be taken.

Our PR efforts ever since we started this self-publishing adventure have so far been focussed around three moments. The announcement of Divinity Dragon Commander at Gamescom, a big PR event at Larian Studios in the build-up to E3, and the showing of our games at E3.

Compared to the coverage we had at Gamescom where we focussed everything on one moment, and how we approached E3, I’d definitely suggest our E3 approach in terms of increasing media reach. That means, try to get coverage in selected key media first, get it published just before the event, and then use that to ensure interest from other media. The advantage is that you have more coverage for a longer period of time, thus increasing the chances that you get players interested in your game.

As it turns out, our approach managed to get us stories on most of the major outlets like PC Gamer, IGN, Gamespot & Game Informer.

I’m quite happy about that because it’s something that proved to be a challenge even for some of the mid-sized publishers I used to work with. My most notorious example of that is flying over the Atlantic to visit the offices of one of these, only to be told that the appointment was cancelled because they were busy with a big feature on Dragon Age 2.

The funny thing is that the coverage by the majors was actually a bonus, because our real intent in going to E3 was to get in touch with all those journalists we’d otherwise not reach, e.g. Gaminglives, or Gamercast.

It was also actually a relatively cheap way to get in touch with all these journalists. On our PR event, we spent on around a 1000 euros on average per journalist, whereas at E3, the cost per journalist turned out to be around 400 euros. That’s still a lot of money but if you consider that in the past to promote Divinity II, we had costs of +1000 euros/US journalist, with less coverage generated, it’s quite an improvement. I think we could actually reduce that cost even more by increasing our booth size next time.

One key thing I’d like to stress for any developer thinking of doing something similar make sure you have an ace PR agent, who can literally drag the journalists by their hairs into your booth if need be.

In that respect, we’re very lucky to have Tom from Evolve PR, who’s done a stellar job in ensuring that our booth was continuously full with journalists. To put it bluntly, if you don’t have somebody like Tom & you’re not enormously connected, don’t bother. Next to us were booths that were empty most of the time, and that’s something you definitely don’t want to happen to you. For these guys E3 really was a waste of time and money.