Situation Overview
USC Games Publishing, the publishing label of one of America’s best game design programs, neared the finish line to publish its first game, Chambara from student developers team ok, for PlayStation 4.
While team ok generated buzz at select gaming conferences and worked steadily towards launch, they acknowledged that they needed a clear communications plan to get as many consumer eyeballs on the game at launch, especially as review keys would arrive on the day of launch. With less than a week to prepare for Chambara’s launch, USC Games turned to Wonacott Communications to leverage their relationships with media to raise awareness for Chambara’s launch.
Wonacott Approach
On an extremely tight budget we immediately we got to work on Chambara‘s launchby immersing ourselves with the game. We knew proper messaging would be clutch, so we dove deep into the novelty of the team, USC Games as the publisher and the game itself, while closely looking at our media contacts for those who show a propensity toward indies, underdogs and unknowns. With this locked down, we put together a press release revealing Chambara for PlayStation 4 and began to hit the media up for reviews.
But – in the final hour – we learned that review codes would not be available to distribute before launch, which is always preferred. To overcome the challenge, we took the risk of pre-pitching review interest in advance without codes (press always prefer to not get into an email back-and-forth, but rather just be told, “Boom! Here is your code.”). We did this selectively and those with whom we locked in interest received theirs first. Late in the afternoon on launch day we got the PS4 codes, and were able to get them out. With some borderline stalk-ish follow up, the results were crazy awesome.
As a result of our aggressive pre-pitching, distribution and follow-up, we secured plenty of coverage of Chambara’s launch. Further follow-up also secured a number of top reviews across major publications and Metacritic rated sites as Chambara currently has a 73 / 100 on Metacritic – a fantastic feat as this is team ok’s first game. To top it off, we garnered interest and locked in an extensive Q&A with the top tech publication Engadget (6.5 million uniques) on team ok and USC Games.
Achievements
The press coverage for Chambara was huge for fledgling label USC Games and rookie developers team ok. We secured over 50 unique articles hitting nearly 130 million unique monthly visitors. In addition, our approach to IDing appropriate reporters helped garner significant positive reviews and the game went on to boast a 73/100 score on Metacritic – not bad for a developer’s first game.
Some top coverage came from sites including Bagogames (nice social reach!), Comicbook.com, Crunchyroll, Destructoid, Dualshockers, Engadget, Financial Post, Gameranx, Giant Bomb, IGN, PlayStation Universe, Polygon and Reno Gazette Journal.