Most coverage you don't get isn't a rejection. It's a journalist on deadline who opened your email, couldn't find a clean screenshot in 30 seconds, and moved on to the next game in the inbox. A press kit's only job is to remove every reason to say no. Get it right and your game becomes the easy one to write about.
Writers, streamers, and curators are not browsing your game lovingly. They are triaging dozens of pitches a week, often on a phone, often the day before a deadline. Every asset they have to request from you is a delay, and every delay is a coverage slot that goes to someone more prepared.
The checklist mindset matters because press kits fail in boringly predictable ways: the trailer is an unlisted YouTube link that needs login, the logo is a 200px JPEG with a white box around it, the key art is buried in a Google Drive folder that throws a permission error. None of that is a creative failure. It's an operations failure, and it's fixable in an afternoon.
Start with what a writer physically drops into an article or video. If any of these are missing, you are asking them to do your job. Host everything as direct downloads a single ZIP plus individually downloadable files and never gate it behind a form or a login.
- Trailer: the main one as a public YouTube/Vimeo link AND a downloadable 1080p MP4 they can cut footage from.
- Screenshots: 6 10 at 1920x1080, PNG, showing actual gameplay not concept art, not UI mockups.
- Logo: transparent PNG, plus a version that survives on both dark and light backgrounds.
- Key art / cover: the same image you use on your Steam page, in high resolution.
- Animated GIFs: 2 3 short loops of the single best ten seconds of your game, sized for embedding.
One rule that saves you grief: name your files like a human. ApocalypseRunner_screenshot_01.png tells an editor what it is. Untitled-final-FINAL-v3.png does not, and it will get skipped.
Assets get the attention; words get skipped, then quietly copy-pasted from your kit straight into the article. That's exactly what you want. Write the descriptions yourself so the framing is yours, not a writer's rushed paraphrase at 11pm.
Provide three lengths of description: a one-line hook (the thing they'll use in a headline or thumbnail), a 50-word elevator pitch, and a 150-word paragraph for the body of a piece. Add the hard facts as plain text, not prose: developer name, publisher (or self-published), platforms, release date or window, price, and the genre tags you actually want associated with the game.
A surprising number of kits forget the most basic thing: a real name and a working email a journalist can reply to. Use a monitored address, not a contact form, and put a human name next to it coverage decisions are still personal, and writers prefer replying to a person.
- Direct contact: name, role, and a reply-able email not a generic info@ that nobody checks.
- Steam page link, so they can point readers somewhere to add wishlists immediately.
- Social handles and your Discord, in case they want to verify you're a real, active studio.
- A short studio fact: where you're based, team size, and any prior titles worth mentioning.
The best content in a broken link gets zero coverage. A dedicated press page on your own site (or a tool built for it) beats a Drive folder every time, because it won't expire, won't throw permission walls, and won't compress your images. Test it from an incognito window on a phone before you ever send it out.
Keep one master ZIP that contains everything, and update it the moment anything changes a new trailer, a confirmed date, a price. Send the same link to everyone so there's a single source of truth, and so you're never digging through old emails to find which version you sent which outlet.
If you're assembling your first kit and want a second set of eyes before you start pitching, our PR Starter Pack is a sensible next step it's built to turn a checklist like this into outreach that actually lands coverage.