Plan of Attack was brought on board to help with the Early Access launch of BeardedBrothers and Racoons Studios Storage Hunter Simulator a few weeks before its release on October 10th. While we targeted both media and influencers for this campaign, we knew from the outset that getting coverage from media would likely be tricky given that they can often be reluctant to cover unproven Early Access titles, as well as games in the simulator genre, placing Storage Hunter Simulator in the centre of an unfavourable venn diagram. On the other hand, we knew that among the crowded field of simulator titles, influencers can often make the difference in terms of boosting a game’s profile and sales. For that reason, we anticipated that getting influencers on board was likely to be important to make this campaign a success.

We started the campaign with the announcement of Storage Hunter Simulator’s release date on September 19th. We generated about 50 news hits for the game’s release date announcement, with highlights including IGN, Sektor.sk and mainstream Spanish news outlet, LaRazon.

Our next step was to get the game into the hands of influencers. We built a target list based on influencers who had played other simulator titles and reached out to them offering codes. We made sure to offer influencers codes before the game was available to the public to give an air of exclusivity that would make covering the game more intriguing. We gave out codes with no embargo, allowing influencers to start playing immediately to begin building momentum heading into the game’s launch. This proved to be a very successful strategy, with around 200 influencers covering the game on Twitch and YouTube in the period up to its launch, including the likes of TmarTn2 (5.39M subs), KYRSP33DY (2.32M subs), Camodo Gaming (3.68M subs), GameRiot (1.91M subs), Godenot (3.96M subs), Drae (2.58M subs) and Raptor (1.81M subs). This strategy was very successful in building Storage Hunter Simulator’s profile, helping it to perform exceptionally well on release, to the point that the Steam algorithm pushed the game to the front page of the store on launch day, as well as trending near the top of the simulator tag, hitting the top spot for life and immersive sims and featuring in popular game demos.

While our influencer outreach was by far the avenue where we had the most success driving attention to the game, we also distributed an “out now” press release to the media on launch day. This generated 26 news hits, with IGN being the highest profile outlet to cover the launch and Croatia’s premiere gaming outlet HCL posting gameplay videos on their site.

We continued to reach out and follow up with influencers, as well as distributing codes via Lurkit, throughout October and November. We had fantastic success keeping momentum going, resulting in a host of new influencers like LIRIK (3M followers), Caylus (16.9M subs), ZerkaaPlays (2.95M subs), aceu (2.89M subs), JoshOG (1.7M followers), LipaoGamer (13.1M subs), ElMariana (10.1M subs) and Bax (2.46M subs) picking up the game. We also saw a large number of influencers returning to the game to play it multiple times, including wuant (578k subs), TmarTn2 (5.39M subs), TagBackTV (1.15M subs), St3pNy² (1.02M subs), Raptor (1.81M subs), KYRSP33DY (2.32M subs), JoshOG (1.7M followers), GameRiot (1.91M subs), and Dead Squirrel (564k subs).

Between the beginning of our outreach to influencers and November 18th, counting Twitch streams with over an average of 100 live viewers and YouTube videos with a minimum of 1000 views, we saw well over a thousand streams and videos posted. The game sold well above BeardedBrothers and Racoons Studios’ expectations and the campaign continues to perform well, with influencers still playing the game on a daily basis at the time of writing.