You do not only need to have the "adresses" of your "contacts". You need to actually know them and they need to know you. This way you can make much more easier PR for your product. Ever thought about why companies pay for something called "Press Relation"?
If you are an independent developer or a small software team (read: you don''t produce high-tech like Unreal II) I wouldn''t care too much about PR work. You should only make exceptions if you have friends working in the press. Everything else lands in the dust bin.

But ok. Maybe you didn''t wanted to hear this and want to try it the hard way? Ok here you go.
Put up a website and in this website a special section called "PRESS". There you put all the screenshots, press releases, demos and the like. If you don''t want the public to get this information secure it with a password.
Then you send all magazines, newspapers, radio and television a letter containing stuff like that you''ve founded a new company, include some numbers, tell them why you are the best, but keep everything short and easy to read. Put a press release in there too. How they are done is a bit too much for this post.
Don''t forget to call the magazines and ask to which person to send the stuff.

AND MOST IMPORTANT! Don''t do it like I wrote this post. SPELLCHECK it! Damnit! Writing is the job of the press people and they REALLY recognize the difference.

Yep, what I want to add to my post is that you don''t need to be close friends with all your press contacts. Hell no! That would be difficult to achieve. What I meant was that you can''t simply take a adress list of someone and simply send your press releases to all of them. Well, sure you can. But as I said I think we are not talking about Unreal II and more about something along the lines of budget games.

If you really want to make the PR yourself visit some game developer conferences (not necessarily THE game developer conference; there are more out there). Events like the ECTS are a good start too. Having at least talked to them once raises your chance that they take at least a look at what you''ve send them. I need to know it, I wrote for a game magazine myself and still get bombed with paperwork and the like. For sure a comment like: "Here I send you closer information about the game XY we talked about on the ECTS..." is always good (for sure ONLY if you really have talked with him about the game. )

Hint: Don''t send everyone a free version of your game, but include a formular with which they can order one for free. That''s what companies usually do.

There''s several methods upon which you could use to get the word out regarding your game. Here are a few:

- Advertising. But you need money. To get money, you would have to either provide it yourself or get a loan, borrow, it etc. If it''s a really good game then maybe someone in the business world which is called an "angel" could invest in your game for an equity stake in which they would own a portion of the revenue generated.

- Publishers. If they accept your game and think it would be worthwhile for them to invest the time and money in (e.g. it would provide substantial returns), then they would do all of the advertising for you. Of course, you have to have a really cool game. And if they do accept it, then you usually only get like 10-30% royalties.

The bottom line is that it takes money to show the world your stuff. You just have to find some way to raise it, either by borrowing or giving some royalties away. If all that is required to get one''s game into magazines, websites, etc. is by e-mailing everyone on a list then those people would get bombarded by the thousands of e-mails they would receive from people that makes games from the next Quake killer to a boring tetris game.

RCode