Plan of Attack came onto Somerville a few months before its release. Developer JUMPSHIP had taken a deliberate approach of saying very little about the game during its marketing campaign and letting the positive response it had to its initial reveal and later trailers drive hype and speculation around its mysterious premise and setting. In the leadup to release, however, JUMPSHIP needed our help to ensure that the game was back in people’s minds and that they knew release was imminent, as well as with the practicalities of getting review codes out to the media and making sure the game got plenty of coverage come release.

We kicked off this short campaign at the end of October with an announcement of the game’s release date and the news that it would be coming to Xbox Game Pass. Given the interest media had shown in the game in the past, we knew that this new information alone would be enough to generate plenty of news coverage and were able to stick with JUMPSHIP’s previous strategy of revealing very little detail about the game to keep the sense of intrigue surrounding it intact. Indeed, through a combination of news articles announcing the game’s release date and news about the game coming to Game Pass, there were 624 news articles posted.

The attention generated from this announcement allowed us to begin building a list of outlets interested in reviewing the game, which we added to in the lead up to release via active outreach to our press contacts. Before release, we also made sure to distribute unsolicited codes to big media outlets that hadn’t requested a code up to that point. The review campaign was a huge success. 258 outlets reviewed the game, including The Guardian, the Washington Post , IGN, GameSpot, Metro, TheGamer, GamesRadar+, Polygon, PC Gamer, Kotaku, Eurogamer, VG247, Famitsu and Rock Paper Shotgun.

On the day of release, we also distributed an “Out Now” press release. The news about the game’s release, roundups, walkthroughs and other non-review content generated another 624 articles about the game.

Over the course of the campaign, JUMPSHIP required ad-hoc support in a number of different areas where Plan of Attack was able to assist, from providing information and assets to platform partners, through to submitting Somerville for awards. We also took control of JUMPSHIP’s internal press email account to deal with requests related to the game and drafted and distributed newsletters for the mailing list JUMPSHIP has built since announcing the game to support our key PR beats.

We achieved exactly what JUMPSHIP asked for when we signed on to help them with the launch of Somerville. The huge numbers of news articles about the game’s release date brought Somerville back to the attention of the gaming world and translated into a fantastic review campaign, with every major video games outlet posting reviews of the game. We were able to take the load off of JUMPSHIP when it came to dealing with press and the practicalities of getting review codes out, as well as offer them support in a number of other areas so they could focus on polishing the game ahead of launch and getting the game released.