You’ve a good memory, Emily.
My post about press releases is on this forum at:
It’s all still true and/or I still agree with it except that games-pr.com/ doesn’t exist anymore.
I have personally used a combination of gamerelease.net/ three times. The former site is free but requires some demonstration of ‘game trade involvement’ (describe at length in linked post - don’t ask what I mean here). The latter is paid and a good service.
When I let press know about Leadlight (the Apple II version) and Six with an eye to broader public consumption, both games had already been through IFComp and benefited from any bugs found by IFComp players.
Zarf used just gamerelease.net/ for Hadean Lands, but that was after 30k kickstarter plus his profile. (More talk about that in linked thread.) That said, and like I say in the linked thread, Gamespress alone is a very good option.
The crux of using any of these services is - if your game isn’t ready for that level of scrutiny, it’s not worth publicising this way. Even minimal attention from random game punters will result in them tending to find anything/everything technically wrong with the game. Random people who thought they might be interested in your game, but find it’s not up to snuff, won’t be 25% as supportive as IF competition folk. They’ll just assess that you’ve wasted their time.
-Wade