Bear & Breakfast
As part of our ongoing relationship with Armor Games Studios, we devised and delivered a comprehensive PR campaign that helped make Bear & Breakfast one of the most successful indie releases of 2022.
Project Details
Client:
ARMOR GAMES STUDIOS
Project Type:
LONG-TERM/RETAINER
Services Provided:
MEDIA RELATIONS, INFLUENCER MARKETING
An un-bear-lievable launch...
As part of our ongoing relationship with Armor Games Studios, in late 2021 we identified Bear & Breakfast – a B&B management sim in which players step into the furry shoes of Hank the bear – as a high-potential release.
Armor asked for our help in making the game’s launch among the biggest indie releases of the year, and we hatched a plan to deliver a campaign involving high-impact news, reviews and video coverage from the some of the biggest games press and content creators on the planet.
We worked with Armor to position the game as a ‘cosy’ title with a mischevious bite – writing key promotional copy to be utilised across the campaign to bring out the game’s USPs.
We identified key contacts across the games press and influencer channels, whose audiences were most likely to connext with Bear & Breakfast. Performing bespoke outreach and personalised pitching, we made sure to communicate early and often and provided early access to review code to encourage embargo-day content for maximum impact. We also identified ‘guides’ sections of games websites as being high potential for coverage and ensured to liaise with Guides Editors at a range of leading websites to assist with content creation.
“Charming… Bear & Breakfast finds the magic in woodland resort management.”
As our pre-launch campaign gained momentum, we also needed to manage a busy PR inbox with more than 400 inbound key requests by launch day. This involved identifying high-potential coverage opportunities while also filtering out key scams to limit the risk of piracy.
One of our major goals was to encourage a groundswell of awareness and engagement around launch day. Ultimately more than 100 items of coverage were posted online on release day alone, across press and influencer channels.
Coverage appeared on leading games websites such as IGN, Gamespot and Polygon; in mainstream / non-specialist gaming outlets such as The Guardian and NME. Streams of the game were watched for over 300,000 cumulative hours, and the game was covered by prolific content creators such as RTGame, GabSmolders and BaerTaffy, who boast almost 2 million followers between the three of them.
The game also performed well on TikTok with several notable content creators publishing widely shared content. The result was a title that had received more than 1,000 positive reviews on Steam within just a few days of its launch and spent several days in the featured area on Steam, having sold an estimated 50,000 copies in its first week.
“Taking a personal approach, Game If You Are are able to surface key elements in our games to match them with press and players who will genuinely be interested. It’s that level of detail that gets results, and is one of the many reasons we’re excited to continue working with them.”
Sean McKenzie
Director of Publishing, Armor Games Studios
Partners
We’re proud to be a founding partner of the LevelUp initiative from Safe In Our World – a charity that works to promote mental health in the video games industry.
For more information or to get involved, visit safeinourworld.org.
