The campaign for Thunderful and Clockstone’s LEGO Bricktales began with the game’s unveiling at the Future Game Show on March 24th 2022. To help ensure that the reveal would have the maximum possible impact, we pre-seeded the news under embargo to key press outlets, leveraging the established strength of the LEGO brand, which we knew would garner the interest of the media. We followed this with a press release supporting the announcement after the game was revealed at the show to get the news out as widely as possible. Our strategy paid off with strong results. The reveal generated 235 news articles, including IGN, Gamespot, PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Game Informer, Rock Paper Shotgun, Nintendo Life and GamesRadar+.

The next step for this campaign was to take advantage of the high level of interest in the game by getting it into the hands of press and allowing them to play it. This started with the game’s appearance at two events: WASD in London, England and PAX East in Boston, USA. We reached out to book appointments for both these events, where press and public were able to go hands-on with the game. This was followed with a targeted preview pitch to key outlets, offering them a build of the game to produce preview coverage. Again, we saw plenty of success. The game was covered by IGN, who described it as “wonderfully zen”, Digital Trends, who described it as one of their “favorite games at PAX East 2022”, as well as the likes of Rock Paper Shotgun, Easy Allies, Destructoid, and TechRaptor.

With the game due to appear at Thunderful’s booth at gamescom in August 2022, this was our next priority. We reached out to press about the game’s appearance at Gamescom in July and began booking appointments. A press release announcing the game’s release window for to PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch in mid-August ahead of the show helped to get the game back in the news and in the minds of media who would be visiting gamescom, generating around 250 news hits.

LEGO Bricktales was next scheduled to make a short appearance at a Nintendo Direct on September 13th. By quickly following this with a press release announcing the game’s release date, sent out on September 15th, we were able to generate another big bump in coverage, spreading awareness of the game’s release date in the leadup to its release. Between these two news beats, 290 articles were published that covered the game, including Eurogamer, Nintendo Life, Jeuxvideo.com, Game Rant, NME, putting us in a strong position to move into our review campaign.

We began reaching out to press to offer review codes on the back of this success in preparation for the game’s release on October 12th. During the course of the campaign, we had also been collating a targeted list of influencers, who we also started reaching out to during this period. The review campaign was a huge success. Almost 340 outlets published reviews of the game, including 54 Metacritic outlets and 60 Opencritic outlets and the game was covered by over 200 YouTubers and Twitch Streamers (excluding smaller channels). Outlets that covered the game included IGN, Forbes, GameSpot, Screen Rant, PC Gamer, TheGamer, GamerRadar+, Eurogamer, Nintendo Life, and VG247.

The campaign for LEGO Bricktales was a phenomenal success. Having the LEGO brand to work with undoubtedly helped a lot when it came to getting attention for the game - our job was to make sure we took advantage of that. In using each announcement to build momentum for the next phase of the campaign - using the success of the game’s reveal to secure a large number of previews, for example - we were able to do just that. A combination of good planning when it came to when and where to place key beats, hard work booking appointments at in-person events and successful targeting of key outlets, resulted in the generation of almost 2000 pieces of coverage for the game over the course of the campaign.