Handling PR, Influencers and Marketing Strategy, we worked with SFB Games for 7 months – covering the initial announcement of Crow Country, launch day, and everything in-between!
The immediate challenge we faced was that Crow Country was a huge departure from SFB’s signature style of bright, whimsical aesthetics. We worked on bringing their existing fanbase along for the ride, while targeting a brand new audience of “cozy-creepy” gamers. As the PS1 horror genre is already full of incredible creators and titles, and yet saturated with imitators, we carefully crafted the positioning and messaging to make sure Crow Country stood out as “one to watch”.
To help us achieve these objectives, we extensively assessed the market landscape. What were people playing and loving in the same genre? Where did similar games fail and succeed? What could we do better?
Using these insights, we built the game’s brand positioning from the ground up, identifying our key audience targets, where they were, and the right messaging to put in front of them. We crafted unique core messaging statements for each audience group, ensuring they’d be met with the parts of the game they’d find most interesting. These branding foundations stayed consistent from announcement to launch, building trust and excitement with communities, press and influencers.
The campaign was a huge success across the board! We got incredible Steam featuring for launch, the press naturally picked up on and re-stated key pieces of messaging, and community sentiment was overwhelmingly positive for all creators. Additionally, we cinched:
- Over 100,000 wishlists on launch
- 210 pieces of editorial coverage published at launch alone, including in top tier publications like IGN, GameSpot, TheGamer and The Guardian
- 1,200 creators live across launch week
- Hundreds of pieces of editorial coverage published across all other key campaign beats
- Our campaign was featured in the How To Market A Game newsletter as best in class