Emerging from stealth is a massive step for any company. After months or even years of planning a rollout, the anxieties of finally revealing your team’s behind-the-scenes work can be grueling. For Toronto-based VR and AR developer Dark Slope, helping them pull back the curtain took careful planning and consideration, but ultimately resulted in well-deserved attention from its top media targets.
Our original plan for Dark Slope’s big reveal involved announcing a major industry business deal and the debut of its first location-based VR game, Scarygirl Mission Maybee. A one-two punch that was sure to make waves. But, (there’s always a but…) the business deal needed more time to settle and we had to pivot our reveal announcement focus.
Staying nimble and being able to adjust on the fly is paramount to PR success. Without the major industry deal to support us, we shifted our strategy around Dark Slope’s recently secured $1.5 million seed funding – a phenomenal amount for a new studio – while including even more details about warehouse scale free-roam multiplayer VR adventure, Scarygirl Mission Maybee.
From here, we doubled down on our “know your core” strategy and developed a media outreach plan to appeal to some of the most important writers covering VR today. Our messaging highlighted Dark Slope’s highly-experienced leadership, use of the cult-favorite Scarygirl IP, and ability to develop some of the most visually and technically advanced free-roam VR games on the market. With these messages, and some bona fide proof, we felt confident in our ability to get Dark Slope on the radars of some majorly influential journalists in the VR space.
And sure enough, we were right. Most of our “core” targets were immediately interested in the news, resulting in coverage, and even a few interview opportunities from an array of media verticals including VR enthusiast, and videogame and location-based entertainment trades:
The future is bright for Dark Slope now that we helped lay a foundation of media interest with its official emergence from stealth. This team has a ton of work and partnerships to announce in the coming months and with a “core” media base set up, we’re ready to help prop up Dark Slope as the next big thing in the burgeoning VR and AR industry.