Plan of Attack handled the comprehensive PR campaign for Thunderful and Wishfully Studios’ cinematic puzzle adventure Planet of Lana, from its announcement in June 2021, through to release in May 2023. Plan of Attack successfully pitched the game’s reveal to Geoff Keighly for the Summer Game Fest 2021 show, giving the game the strongest possible start in what has become the industry’s premiere showcase. The reveal, along with the associated press release we distributed announcing the game, generated a huge amount of attention and awareness for Planet of Lana. Over 470 news articles were published covering the reveal, including IGN, Gamespot, PC Gamer, Polygon, Eurogamer, and Game Rant, with the game appearing on “best of E3” lists for IGN, Eurogamer, CNET, Screen Rant, and Kotaku Australia.

The next big PR beat for Planet of Lana was the game’s appearance at The Game Awards 2021, where a new trailer appeared and a 2022 release window was announced. This not only generated 250 news hits for Planet of Lana, but was also perfectly timed to help the game place in multiple “most anticipated games of 2022” lists, including from outlets like GameSpot, Kotaku, TIME, Rock Paper Shotgun, Screen Rant, GamesRadar Game Informer, The Escapist and WCCFtech.

The game appeared in two more showcases in June 2022 - Day of the Devs and Future Game Show - which generated another 320 news hits. This kept the game fresh in the minds of the media as we moved into preparation for gamescom and PAX West. Plan of Attack was responsible for booking media appointments for gamescom in August and PAX West in September, where a member of the team also attended to demo the game to press. We also prepared a press release that went out during gamescom with a new trailer revealing that the game was coming to Xbox Game Pass, as well as news it would be delayed into 2023. Combining the delay news with the Game Pass news, as well as the preview coverage coming out of gamescom, helped to ensure that coverage around Planet of Lana remained positive and very little attention was paid to news of the delay. Gamescom and PAX proved to be very successful, with 650 pieces of coverage for the game posted, including positive previews of Planet of Lana from the likes of IGN, GamesRadar, Game Informer, and TrueAchievements, based on appointments booked by Plan of Attack for the show.

Press releases for a couple of smaller PR beats kept Planet of Lana in the minds of press and the public - a developer commentary video in October 2022 and announcement of the participation of the game in Steam Next Fest with a demo in March 2023. The next major beat for the game, however, was the announcement of the release date in May 2023. Our press release for the announcement and the release date trailer generated 263 news hits. Again, this included major outlets like IGN, Gamespot, Eurogamer, Game Rant, Metro, and Rock Paper Shotgun. An “out now” press release on the day of release helped generate a further 307 news hits alongside the reviews that hit on launch, making Planet of Lana incredibly prominent across the media landscape on launch day.

The success of the campaign for Planet of Lana put us in a very strong position when it came to the game’s review campaign. After the release date announcement, we reached out to media and targeted influencers to let them know we had codes available, as well as sending out unsolicited codes to key outlets who hadn’t yet requested a code. Over 200 outlets reviewed Planet of Lana, with positive scores from big outlets like EDGE (9/10), GamesRadar (4.5/5), and Gamespot (8/10) helping the game to achieve an 81 Metacritic rating for PC, 79 Metacritic rating for Xbox and 80 rating on Opencritic.

This success was also reflected in influencer coverage of the game. Well over 400 Twitch streams and YouTube videos of the game were posted, including from big names like Lirik (2.9M followers), alexelcapo (1.8M subscribers), Blitz (4M subscribers), Hollow (4.46M subscribers) and Real Civil Engineer (1.68M subscriber).