The last thing a small indie developer wants is for their game to be ignored. But videogame marketplaces such as Steam are being flooded with new games every day, making it extremely difficult for indie developers to stand out from the crowd. Even though STONE, Convict Games’ debut about a drunken koala private detective’s psychedelic search for his missing lover, had an eye-catching premise and impressive list of inspirations, without a sea of marketing dollars or past projects to lean on, Convict Games needed help getting the word out to media and gamers.
With a tight budget and an even tighter timeline, building buzz for STONE required well-executed PR basics with a twist to match the game’s roaring attitude. Thankfully, the prominent messaging around STONE’s “Hip-hop Stoner Noir” tagline and roster of sub-culture influences such as The Big Lebowski and Charles Bukowski made an indelible impression on many media and influencer contacts.
Convict was a fantastic partner, understanding that a great way to make any game stand out without a large budget is to double-down on messaging and creatively explain why your game is special. For STONE, we based our entire strategy around conveying the game’s unique attitude, emphasizing multi-disciplinary influences, featuring the bonkers cast of anthropomorphic characters and revealing tidbits of the powerful story. This meant every piece of media-facing writing, from fact sheets to email pitches, stayed on theme. We even went so far as to completely restructure our press release format and instill it with the same writing style as seen in the game.
STONE’s narrative adventure is layered with cult movie references, subculture influences and a curated soundtrack of underground musical artists. It also had an extremely passionate director and writer in Greg Louden, who we knew could eloquently explain each of STONE’s nuances. As such, we scheduled preview meetings with press via Skype’s screen-share feature – we call these virtual media tours. Each appointment included a 30-minute hands-on demo in which Greg would comment on the key moments, answer questions and slip in an interesting behind-the-scenes factoid or two. By doing this, we utilized STONE’s biggest advocate to gain early fans of the game in the media.
With the virtual media tour complete, we made sure to time our embargo lift around the game’s reveal. Pairing the two meant audiences were introduced to STONE through positive previews and our creatively messaged press release. Shortly after, Convict Games created a 15-minute walkthrough video to highlight STONE’s gameplay. We immediately moved to get this covered by gaming media and viewed it as a great way to set expectations with audiences on how STONE actually plays.
This burst of attention served as an excellent launch pad for our review outreach, which took place only a few weeks later to account for the hard-and-fast PR campaign we put together. By the time STONE was ready to launch we had already amassed a sturdy foundation of fans in the media who were eager to review the game and cover the “available now” news.
Overall, our focus on fostering fans in the media helped STONE receive far more attention than most debut projects from lesser-known developers and we’re proud to have helped it get off the ground. Our work on STONE helped it gain a significant amount of media coverage with a total of 65 articles from 42 different outlets in three months. Below are just a few examples of the coverage we secured for STONE in some of the world’s largest gaming publications:
