Reviews

[Seamus]

Any advice on seeking reviewers. I want to get more reviews of our game, but am concerned about sending it to people who may not be objective.

[Eero Tuovinen]

What does that "may not be objective" even mean? I can assure you that whoever you send it to, the review won't be objective. Do you mean that you want a positive review, or what?

Rule number one is that all publicity is good publicity for a small publisher, and therefore you shouldn't care whether a review is positive or not. Rule number two is that if somebody writes a "non-objective" review, you can always post some reasonable clarifications yourself, provided that their medium makes that possible.

That being said, a good way to get reviews seems to be to maintain a list of willing reviewers whose integrity and style you like. Then you can just mail anything you publish to them whenever you get the work finished. I've been following how James Raggi does this thing, he's pretty aggressive about soliciting reviews. He has this long-ass list of people who review the sort of work he does (old school renaissance), to which he mails his work. Raggi seems to get quite a nice amount of attention with his practice.

As for collecting that list of willing reviewers, you'll probably do well by asking various bloggers who already write about things similar to your game. Also, people who've written reviews for sites like RPGnet in the past. Asking costs nothing, after all, and the great majority of the folks takes a review copy seriously. And if they don't, then you'll know not to send your next product to them.

[Seamus]

What does that "may not be objective" even mean? I can assure you that whoever you send it to, the review won't be objective. Do you mean that you want a positive review, or what?

Basically I mean someone who is fair. I just mean I want someone who is professional and doesn't let his or her own biases (not liking a particular genre, prefering 3e over 4e, etc) intrude too much into the analysis. I've been looking at reviews online and every once in a while I see someone who uses the review as a platform for a rant. That is the sort of thing I am concerned about.

[Jasper Flick]

Don't worry too much about "rant reviews". You know them when you see them, right? You know they're biased and not fair to the product, right? So does everybody else (except perhaps other ranters). It won't tarnish your product in a meaningful way. Don't underestimate your audience.

[Luke]

I like CW Richeson, Dan Davenport and Chris Praetorian Gunning, all on RPG.net. Ken Hite and I have had a long term romance. He has a column on the IPR site now. Robin Laws has been known to mention things on his blog, but he's not a reviewer per se -- more of a willing shill.

[Seamus]

I like CW Richeson, Dan Davenport and Chris Praetorian Gunning, all on RPG.net. Ken Hite and I have had a long term romance. He has a column on the IPR site now. Robin Laws has been known to mention things on his blog, but he's not a reviewer per se -- more of a willing shill.

Thanks for suggesting reviewers. I managed to contact Ken Hite. We already have a review on RPGnet, but I will contact the others and see if they post their reviews on other sites.

[Luke]

You can never have too many reviews on RPG.net.