Your press kit exists for one reason: to save a journalist 20 minutes so they write about you instead of someone else. A good kit gets a story written; a bad one gets deleted. Here’s how to build one that works, with no money and no PR agency.

What a Press Kit Actually Is

A press kit is a folder of files — text, images, and video — that gives a writer everything they need to cover your game without emailing you. It should answer the five Ws in under a minute, show the game clearly, and make it trivial to grab a logo, a screenshot, and a fact sheet.

Journalists get far more pitches than they can cover. They scan, they click, they decide. Your kit is the thing that makes the decision easy. If it takes longer than one click to find the trailer or the key art, they’re gone.

The 5 Files That Matter (and Nothing Else)

1. The Fact Sheet

A single page, 10 lines max, in plain text or a simple PDF. Include:

Full game title and developer name
Release date, or “TBA” if you do not have one yet
Platforms (Steam, itch.io, Switch, etc.)
Price (or “free” or “TBD”)
One-sentence description
One-paragraph description (keep it punchy)
Developer contact email
Links to an embeddable trailer and a downloadable build

That’s it. No history, no vision statement, no manifesto. Put it at the top of the folder as fact-sheet.txt.

2. Screenshots

Six to ten screenshots, 1920×1080 or larger, in PNG or JPG. Show gameplay, not menus. Vary the scenes: an action shot, a quiet moment, a boss fight, a UI screenshot. Name them descriptively (screenshot-01-combat.png). Do not watermark them. Writers hate watermarks.

3. Key Art / Capsule Image

Your Steam capsule is the most important piece of art you have. It’s what appears in search results, on the store page, and in articles.

Steam wants several sizes, and they are larger than most guides say:

Header capsule — 920 x 430. Top of your store page and in recommendations.
Small capsule — 462 x 174. Search results and lists. Steam generates the tiny versions from this one, so it has to stay legible when shrunk.
Main capsule — 1232 x 706. The front-page carousel.
Vertical capsule — 748 x 896. Seasonal sales and promo pages.

Put whichever of these you have into the press kit. Writers reuse them as article headers, and a capsule that is already sized for Steam saves them a crop.

4. A Logo

A transparent PNG of your game’s logo, at least 1000px wide. Also include a small monochrome version for dark backgrounds. Writers use logos for header images, and they need a clean one.

5. A Trailer

Host it on YouTube (unlisted or public) and link it. Also include a downloadable MP4 if you can. The first 10 seconds must show gameplay — no long studio logos, no five-second fade-in. If the trailer is boring, the article is boring.

Where to Put It

Your press kit should live at a single, easy-to-find URL: yourgame.com/press or yoursite.com/presskit. Link it from your main site footer and from your Steam page’s “Developer” section. Do not gate it behind a password or a contact form. Journalists will not email you for access; they’ll move on.

You can use a free service like Google Drive or Dropbox, but a dedicated folder is cleaner. If you have no site, use itch.io’s game page — it supports a press page.

What Developers Get Wrong (Bluntly)

The press kit is an afterthought. You spend 200 hours on the game and 10 minutes on the kit. That’s backwards. The kit is what gets you covered, and coverage is what sells copies.
The description is a wall of text. A journalist works through a lot of these in a sitting. If your first paragraph doesn’t tell them what the game is, they skip. Lead with the hook, not the history.
Screenshots are dark or cluttered. If a screenshot doesn’t read at a glance, it’s useless. Bright, clear, high-contrast shots win.
The trailer starts slow. Every second before gameplay is a second a viewer might leave. Cut the logos, cut the fade-in, show gameplay in the first two seconds.
No contact email. You’d be shocked how many kits lack a contact. Use a plain email (not a contact form) that you check daily.
The kit is a single PDF. A PDF is fine for a fact sheet, but not for the whole kit. Journalists want files, not a 15-page document.
Key art with text. Your capsule image should not have the game title in huge letters if Steam already shows the title next to it. It looks redundant and amateur.

How to Make It Without Money

You don’t need a designer or a video editor. Use free tools:

GIMP (gimp.org) for image editing — make a simple, clean capsule.
Canva (free tier) for the fact sheet and logo variations.
OBS Studio (free) to record gameplay footage for the trailer.
Shotcut (free) to edit the trailer.

Take screenshots in-engine. If you have a decent art style, your own screenshots are fine. Just make sure they’re in focus and not compressed.

A Template to Copy

Create a folder structure like this:

presskit/
├── fact-sheet.txt
├── screenshots/
│   ├── screenshot-01-combat.png
│   ├── screenshot-02-exploration.png
│   └── screenshot-03-boss.png
├── key-art/
│   ├── header-capsule-920x430.png
│   └── small-capsule-462x174.png
├── logo/
│   ├── logo-full.png
│   └── logo-mono.png
└── trailer/
    └── trailer.mp4

Upload this folder to Google Drive, set the link to “Anyone with the link can view”, and put that link on your site and in your Steam developer page. Also include a direct download link to a zip of the whole folder for people who want everything at once.

Getting It in Front of Writers

Your press kit won’t get you covered by itself — you still have to pitch. But it makes the pitch ten times easier. When you email a journalist, link directly to the press kit. Don’t attach a zip to the email; that’s a red flag.

Find five streamers or small outlets that cover games like yours. Email them a two-sentence pitch: what the game is, why it’s interesting, and the press kit link. Personalize each email. Do not mass-blast.

Build the kit before you need it. The week you launch is the week you will have no time to make one.

A worked example

Two lines of the fact sheet above — the one-sentence description and the one-paragraph one — are the hardest part of the whole kit, and the part writers actually lift. Here is that part generated by this site’s copy tool. The game is made up, but the copy is the real, unedited output — not something written for this article.

Chronos Rift — puzzle adventure, time manipulation

In Chronos Rift, you rewind time to grow plants that solve environmental puzzles. Each flower has a unique temporal effect, like slowing enemies or opening paths that only exist in the past.

Tagline

Grow time, solve gentle puzzles.

Steam short description (172 / 300 characters)

Rewind time to grow plants that solve environmental puzzles. Each flower has a unique temporal effect—slow enemies, open past paths, and restore the world at your own pace.

Suggested tags

Puzzle · Adventure · Time Manipulation · Singleplayer · Indie · Atmospheric · Relaxing · Stylized

You can run your own game through it in about thirty seconds: Steam store copy generator. It is free and needs no account.

Build an Indie Game Press Kit That Gets You Covered