selling a game nobody would let us advertise

polyarmory: high calibre love is a free fps and dating sim about a prepper who takes a pill and starts flirting with his guns. underneath the premise it’s a satire about gun culture, isolated men and the pipelines that find them. it started as a seven-day game jam entry and turned into fourteen months of work from a team scattered across several time zones.

i ran pr on it. this is what that actually involved.

the constraints

no budget. not a small budget. none. the whole campaign ran on time and a notion board.

the team’s previous game, onlycans: thirst date, is age and region restricted on steam. polyarmory’s first itch.io listing came down for being too erotic. paid social and most storefront promotion were gone before we’d finished thinking about them.

the game is free on purpose. maximum reach, no arguments inside the team about splitting money, and nothing for a payment processor to withhold.

the release moved more than once. a game about a man being radicalised by talk radio doesn’t launch the week of a shooting, so we moved it, and then moved it again.

what we did have

real thematic weight underneath the absurdity. colt is right about the problems and wrong about the causes, the in-game radio escalates the way a real pipeline does, and the antagonists were built specifically to occupy the slot that antisemitic conspiracy tropes usually fill.

an eight hour runtime, which is exactly the shape of a youtube series.

an original theme song by the stupendium, who publishes to an audience in the hundreds of millions of views.

no ai-generated assets anywhere in the shipped game.

and a predecessor still sitting at 96% across 3,489 reviews four years after release, which is the only credibility that matters when a five-person team asks a journalist for twenty minutes.

the approach

four angles, matched to the outlet. a stats hook for the traffic-driven sites. a cultural hook for the features desks, pitched as thematic depth rather than controversy bait. an absurdist hook built on the options menu, which is the one that opens doors at tier 1. and the stupendium collaboration for anyone arriving through his audience.

nobody got a generic pitch. each one was built around what that specific writer’s readers turn up for.

a launch date that was itself the story. we put it out the day before valentine’s day. a dating sim, free, on the most romantic evening of the year. that gave every outlet a peg without anyone having to invent one.

verify before you pitch. games media has moved underneath everyone. polygon gutted, the verge out of gaming, inverse closed its gaming section. every outlet and every byline got checked before anything went out.

bluesky over x. that’s where the journalists actually are now.

mid-tier creators, 50k to 500k subscribers. cold pitching mega-tier channels with no sponsorship money behind you is a lottery ticket. mid-tier is where a free eight-hour game with a strange premise reads as a gift rather than an imposition. creator kit with gifs and timestamps so nobody had to hunt for the good bits, and an in-character colt michigan interview offered as a collaboration hook.

what happened

6,500+ wishlists before launch, and the #2 slot on steam’s upcoming releases page in the hour before it went live.

7,500+ downloads in the first eight hours. past 20,000 inside ten days.

pc gamer ran a feature on 19 february and called it “daylight robbery for how good it is”, then listed it under top free games. that listing still sits on the steam page as an award.

the second wind games showcase picked it up for their spring 2026 watchexp special selection, which came out of a submission i drafted.

game rant covered it three days after pc gamer. yarn spinner featured it in their engine showcase. the launch release went out over games press and got picked up. resetera had a thread running months before launch.

steam sits at overwhelmingly positive: 96% across 565 reviews, and 97% across the last thirty days, seven months after release.

what i’d get wrong less next time

i wanted to lead with the strangest individual details and had to be talked out of it. the absurdity is a door. the substance has to arrive in the same breath or the pitch reads as a novelty and gets filed as one.

the review target was 1,000 inside 90 days and we didn’t get there. free games get reviewed at a much lower rate than paid ones, and i set that number by reading across from games people had paid for. the downloads landed. the reviews were always going to lag, and i should have modelled it that way from the start.

i’d also build the creator kit before the press kit. the creators moved faster and asked for less.

the transferable bit

no money and a platform environment that kept closing doors, and it still got tier 1 coverage, a showcase selection and an overwhelmingly positive rating. most of that came from knowing which writer needed which version of the story, and what week to send it.