"There is a great interest of publishers in creating their own regular mini-conferences," Kirill Perevozchikov from White Label PR about the main thing for 2022

We continue to summarize the results of 2022 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones). Next up is an interview with Kirill Perevozchikov, the founder of the White Label PR agency.

What was the year for you personally, where are you now, were there any things that you finally managed to realize and are proud of?

I have long wanted to live in Barcelona and learn Spanish, and this year this city has become my main base. The team did not have to be transported — everyone was already in Europe. But they decided to make a new jurisdiction in Singapore. We have been working with clients from Southeast Asia for more than four years, and we plan to expand our influence in the region, to do PR campaigns there.

And we redesigned the site, and I really like it.

What was the year like for the company? What have you done, implemented, and what in general would I like to highlight in terms of achievements?

This year we have conducted the largest PR and influencer campaigns on a budget. A significant part of this portfolio was occupied by tinyBuild games, which is confidently moving towards the AAA publisher. Asterigos, Potion Craft, Hello Neighbor 2 are world—class projects that launched simultaneously on all platforms this fall and were widely covered by American and European media.

If we talk about the media, we made more than a dozen exclusive previews with IGN, agreed on publications with VentureBeat and did not forget about the main website about the gaming business in English — GamesIndustry.biz, where our clients regularly published announcements and columns.

There was also a great interest in the services of “investor tests” (investor baloons) — this is when we announce a game based on the trailer and branding collected according to our recommendations, and according to the results of the PR launch, the investor decides whether to continue financing the project or not. Very often, it is easier and safer for an investor to pay $10 thousand for the “packaging” of a press game than to lose hundreds of thousands for a full development and marketing cycle.

And we also partnered with analysts from InvestGame (I love them) in working on their latest report so that publications about it would appear in VentureBeat, GamesIndustry.biz, and other industrial media.

How has the gaming PR market changed over the year?

If we talk about the CIS, then some cool specialists who built or started building their PR and marketing teams preferred to go into hiring. I take it calmly: the hiring there is stable, there are relocation packages.

If you look at global trends, there are noticeably fewer major deals and, as a result, their announcements. Therefore, as an agency specializing in business communications, we had to revise our strategy towards publishing columns, training articles and interviews.

Has the practice of working with gaming companies changed? In what and how exactly?

Despite the removal of many restrictions related to the pandemic, work from home still remains a key method of work: live presentations of games are still a huge rarity, and PR departments prefer to hold them in company offices rather than on dedicated sites, as before. But industrial conferences have returned to full force — in my opinion, b2b events will become even more important in 2023 to promote the corporate brand and the HR brand of companies.

What are the main trends in gaming PR that you would highlight at the moment?

We see a great interest of publishers in creating their own regular mini-conferences or video podcasts – Wired Unplugged, tinyBuild Connect, Devolver Digital Showcase. This format implies a lot of announcements in a short period of time, but, unfortunately, the attention span of players is narrowing. Why “unfortunately”? Because agencies have fewer opportunities to work on each announcement individually.

After the disastrous launch of Cybperpunk, which was talked about all last year, publishers and independent developers began to order mock reviews more often, on the basis of which important strategic decisions were made. For example, how “safe” it is to give the game to the press a few weeks before the release.

We are delighted to see the development of neural networks, because they will be able to displace agencies from the market that simply write and send out press releases on the database. Teams that focus on maintaining long-term relationships with specific authors and editors will benefit from this.

What are the company’s plans for next year?

Reach $1 million (or more) EBITDA by the end of 2023.