The New York-based PR and marketing agency Sandbox Strategies was founded in 2005. Now, as the company celebrates its 20th anniversary – and as senior PR director Valerie Norton prepares to take over as company head from co-founder Rob Fleischer – it's a chance to look at how the business of PR has evolved over the past two decades.
A lot has changed. At the outset, the focus was on print media, parties, and physical games, with much of the job involving travelling to stores, press offices, and studios. That has slowly shifted to the point where almost everything can now be done online, and influencers have long since displaced traditional media as the avenue of choice for marketers when it comes to promoting games.
Here, Norton and Sandbox co-founder Corey Wade (who left the firm to become head of business development at Saber Interactive in 2021) reminisce about how the nature of games PR has changed irrevocably since the early 2000s, as well as lessons learned from decades in the marketing trenches.
In the beginning
Sandbox Strategies was founded in 2005 by Bill Linn, Rob Fleischer, and Corey Wade. All three had previously worked at Rockstar Games, with the name harking back to the sandbox experience provided by GTA.
“Working at Rockstar was great,” recalls Wade, who was a senior product manager at the company, working on titles like State of Emergency and Midnight Club. “They blew up during those years, it was awesome. But I got burnt out, and Bill and Rob wanted to move on.”
The idea with Sandbox was to combine marketing and PR, with the PR side of the business building pre-launch hype, and the marketing side taking over at launch. Wade says they were under the illusion that because the three of them had worked with Rockstar – “and Rockstar are so cool and they're so successful” – people would be queuing up to use their services. “But no, nobody cared. So we started from nothing, with whatever clients we could get, and just sort of went from there.”
Codemasters was an early client, and Sandbox was charged with marketing the Colin McRae rally games in the US – where no one had heard of Colin McRae and few were familiar with rallying as a motorsport. The franchise was renamed Dirt, and Wade had the idea of bringing in the American rally driver Ken Block. “He started making these wild videos called Gymkhana, and he started getting really popular,” recalls Wade. “So it was perfect because Codemasters needed something fresh for America. And so I got hold of Ken Block and introduced him to Codemasters – and if you look at the cover of Dirt 2, it's Ken Block's car. Then Dirt 3 was full-blown ‘Ken Block: The Game'.”
Activision's licensed games division was another early client, with Sandbox working on titles like the long-running Cabela's Big Game Hunter franchise. “Those games were fun to work on,” says Wade. “They weren't gamers' games, they're not winning awards, but they sold, and that certain type of audience loved it. The Walmart audience loved it.”
Not every game was a winner. Wade says that the many, many games Sandbox has promoted down the years have ranged from “being piss poor to being really iconic”. Ultimately, he says, it's about taking “every project for what it is” and trying to enjoy it. “If the people are cool, that's the most important thing. I'd much rather work on some game that's maybe not going to win every award over some 9 and a half out of 10 game on IGN where the boss of the studio is a complete crazy guy.”
In the end, it's a people business, and not about basking in the reflected glory of a critically acclaimed or successful title. “Why would you associate your self-worth with a game?” asks Wade, who says when he thinks back to his time at Rockstar, he remembers the people rather than the games they worked on.
It might be good by launch
But what does it feel like to promote a game that you know is bad?
Norton points out that early on, at the point when Sandbox is brought in, it can be difficult to know how a game will turn out. “A lot of times, it's kind of this faith that things will come together by the end,” she says, noting that some titles only really become fun in the final throes of development.
“There's this hopefulness. I think we want all of our games to be good, or at least if they're not for everyone, at least they find someone out there who loves it. But there's times where the hype has gone so high, it's almost impossible to reach that.”
Norton says the company uses mock reviewers to assess early builds, and communicates any worries about a game to the studio's management. “I always say, I would rather a client hear it from me as their PR person than in six months, when it's live, from a journalist.”
When dealing with a new client, Norton says they will carefully evaluate the game to decide how it's shaping up, as well as whether it's the right fit. “There's been times where we've just said, ‘Hey, this is a really difficult market, it's really crowded, we don't think we're the right people for this',” she says. “We'll say, ‘Don't work with us, use your money towards something else'. Because we do want them to succeed. This is a small industry, and we would rather tell them what they need to hear, and we would rather work on games that we think we could do well with.”
Party over
Wade says that the wild PR excesses of the 1990s were mostly over by the time Sandbox started in the mid-2000s. Back in the days of print media, when it was all about getting “those five big articles in the five big magazines,” the wild spending on press trips and parties made sense, says Wade.
But one thing that didn't change immediately was the heavy focus on physical retail. “It was all about generating this coverage so people could go visit Walmart, GameStop, or Best Buy,” recalls Wade. Combined with this, there was a woeful lack of metrics for tracking the hype and possible sales of titles ahead of launch. “It was like, ‘Look at this article in this magazine, trust me, people are loving this'. But nobody could measure anything.” There was no point relying on YouTube views as a guide, because YouTube had only just started a few months before Sandbox launched.
The focus back then was on pre-orders. “You couldn't get a retailer to take a proper order for a game unless pre-orders were on a certain trajectory,” says Wade.
It's difficult to imagine now, but the whole business once revolved around discs in boxes. “I remember the office was just stacked with loads and loads of physical product,” remembers Norton. And although showing games to the press is still a mainstay of PR today, the way it's done has changed dramatically. “Back then it was so centralized in San Francisco, with a good amount of journalists in New York as well, that you could do a tour and see a ton of people in a day,” says Wade. “These days it's just not like that. People are all over the place.”
“Back in the day, it was a little bit simpler, because there were these media centres and this rhythm of promoting games: when you first go out, whether you pitch for a cover, when you do a second feature, all that stuff was set in stone for a little while. But those years of 2005–10, it was moving online, where those things slowly started to dissipate. Then a couple years later, it was the rise of Twitch and YouTube.”
Norton started at Sandbox in 2015, moving across from a different agency, and she remembers the initial confusion about how to deal with influencers and online creators. “It was all completely flying by the seat of our pants,” she says. “It was all organic, nobody was getting paid.”
The new influencer landscape felt unfamiliar. “It was kind of a wild west in a way, ” says Norton. “Working with traditional media, there were rules, right? There's a code that journalists work by. There's embargoes and there's NDAs. And this was new to people who were just streaming from their bedroom. There were no rules.”
“I felt like it was healthy though,” adds Wade. “Because they had energy, they were enthusiasts… You just kind of adjust to it and learn the scene, and I think ultimately it ended up being a nice injection of positive energy. There's some negative, but way more positive than negative when it comes to streamers.”
Virtual PR
The big changes came with the COVID pandemic. Sandbox used to have several offices in New York, as well as one in San Francisco, but the need for physical office space has now almost disappeared as game demos and meetings have moved online.
“For about five years, we had a beautiful, out-of-a-movie, concrete-floor loft office in New York, with a demo room and all this stuff,” says Wade. “It was awesome, but it got to the point where it was just like, we don't really don't do events here all that often, and people work from home – and it was just expensive.”
The business as a whole has become much less centralised since the pandemic, says Norton. “We work with a lot more contractors these days than ever, and they're all over the place. And in a weird way, I do kind of like that, because we get to work with people who maybe we never would've worked with, because they wouldn't have had the means to move to San Francisco or New York or London.”
“As everything became so virtual, it gave us a chance to look at other places to hire people. We had our first employee out in the UK, we have one now in Sweden. We've had people in Idaho and Florida.”
Gaffe prevention
We can all think of times when companies have committed legendary PR gaffes. “But there are so many more times that I can think of that we solved them before anyone ever found out,” says Norton. “Some of our clients have had ideas, and we were like, ‘Oh no'.”
The public part of PR is what gets printed or what gets shared online. But what happens behind closed doors – and what's prevented from exiting those doors – makes up a large part of a PR's job. “There's so much more nonsense and craziness that we see on our side that never makes the light of day – and it's our job to keep it that way,” says Norton. And naturally, she isn't able to share any of those juicy stories here, sad to say.
But she's more than happy to talk about Sandbox's successes, and Baldur's Gate 3 is the game that immediately springs to mind. “That is far and away one of the most recognizable games that Sandbox has worked on. And I mean, talk about runaway success, right? It just broke through everything and went on to win every single Game of the Year award.”
Other highlights include Just Cause 3, Fall Guys, Hunt: Showdown, Mouthwashing, and Telltale's various games, like The Walking Dead. Norton particularly remembers a recreation of the Batcave in a hidden room at E3, made to tie in with Telltale's Batman game. “That was incredible” she says.
“It was even fun working on Angry Birds,” adds Wade. “We worked on the 10 year anniversary and did all sorts of fun stuff. They had this fancy ad agency that we could work with, and they ended up making these weird scooters. You could scream into them to go faster.”
The media and PR landscape has changed dramatically over the two decades of Sandbox's existence, and Norton thinks this change will only continue. “We're seeing the rise of blogs that are coming from people who were formerly in games [media] and who are now embarking into more independent journalism,” she says, giving Aftermath and Second Wind as examples. “We're seeing more newsletters and things like that.” So although the media landscape sometimes feels like it's shrinking, she says, “I think it's ultimately changing.”
Other territories are also on the rise. “We work a lot more with Latin America than we ever did,” says Norton, saying that media outlets there have begun to approach them. “And we were like, wow, there's a huge opportunity here. Why aren't we working with them proactively? So that's been a huge change that I've helped spearhead at the company.”
AI is another change, as well as a challenge. “We as a team had an offsite [meeting] in June to agree on our stance on how we approach AI,” says Norton – but adds that because of how fast the technology is changing, that stance might have to be revisited again and again. “In six months, there could be a completely different opportunity, a different use case.”
In the end though, she thinks one thing about the PR business never changes. “It's still ultimately about people. And that's what it's always going to be.”
