How to pitch Angry Birds, if it was an unknown indie game

It’s hard to imagine, but at some point Angry Birds had 0 downloads. It was released by the Rovio game studio in December of 2009 as the company’s 52nd game. Since then, it has been downloaded over 1 billion times.  At the Red Fox Clan, we thought it would be fun to pretend that Angry Birds was still an unknown indie game as a template for how you can promote your game (aka the next Angry Birds). We’re specifically going to write a pitch that would be emailed to reporters online. If done well, this can be a high impact, low cost solution for getting your game out there. 

*This first blog post covers how to write your subject line. If you're interested in the full white paper, visit the Red Fox Clan resources page

Type of Game

We’re going to stay as simple as possible and call it a puzzle game. For your game, I would also simplify it as much as possible. Is it a board game, racing game, sports game? (HINT If you get stumped, visit the app store to find similar apps and use the categories they are listed under.)

< 3 Word Descriptor

We often describe other games as Angry Birds type games, but starting from scratch we have to determine what makes Angry Birds different than a “word game” puzzle or a “brain teaser” puzzle. Using our hint from before, we see that Rovio considered Angry Birds an arcade puzzle in the app store, but to get a little bit more descriptive and fun, we’ll call it a Slingshot Puzzle.

The unique benefit in < 10 Words

The unique benefit is all about storytelling. We have to get across why your game is different than the other puzzle games on their phones, and give them enough interesting details to have them open the email. This took us a while to come up with, but because we have already identified it as a slingshot puzzle, we can decided to give more details about the characters involved and the fun we’re trying to get across. We landed upon, Topples towers filled w/ greedy pigs to wreak havoc.

The finished subject line of our email is now, “Slingshot Puzzle Angry Birds, Topples towers filled w/ greedy pigs to wreak havoc.” By providing this, we’re letting the reporter known what type of game they’re about to learn about, it’s name, and what makes it different from the thousands of other games they have come into their email.