The revealing moment in the life of Vicariously came when its name became false. Not legally false, and not embarrassingly false. Just narrow. The company was called Vicarious PR, which suggested a particular ritual: a press release, a journalist's inbox, perhaps a review. Meanwhile, the people inside were buying ads, finding streamers, cutting trailers, studying audiences, rebuilding store pages, booking events, and measuring wishlists. The sign on the door described one room. The business had become the whole house.
Michael Brown and Jorge A. Gaspar started that business in March 2017. Both came from games journalism and content creation, which matters for a simple reason: they knew what a bad pitch looked like from the receiving end. Their early argument was against the industry's lazy default - generic messages sprayed across an enormous list in the hope that a few stuck. They preferred human research, a specific hook, and a result that could be counted.
The name failed first
By 2025, the company had grown from two people to roughly 15 specialists and had worked on more than 200 games, according to its own tally. It served indie developers and large publishers across PC, console, mobile, and VR. The problem was no longer how to get an article. It was how to make an article, a creator video, a paid ad, a demo, and a Steam page reinforce one another before the brief discovery window closed.
So Vicarious PR became Vicariously. Brown announced the change with the useful assurance that the firm had not been bought, sold, hacked, merged, or replaced by artificial intelligence. “This is a glow-up, not a goodbye,” he wrote. The joke concealed the strategic point. Classic PR remained, but it now sat beside influencer strategy and performance advertising inside one campaign.
“Classic PR is still a core part of who we are, but now it lives alongside influencer strategy and advertising in a way that's genuinely integrated.”Michael Brown, announcing the Vicariously name
The discovery machineThree jobs, one player
This is the company's central observation: the channels do different psychological jobs. Press can lend credibility and explain why a game matters. Creators provide lived proof - someone plays, reacts, fails, laughs, and lets an audience judge. Advertising supplies controllable reach. None guarantees desire. Together, properly sequenced, they give desire more chances to form.
The agency's service list follows that logic. It offers media relations, paid and earned influencer work, digital advertising, event support, video production, market research, and bespoke launch strategy. For Steam Next Fest, the work may begin before anybody drafts a pitch: positioning, tags, trailer, store-page conversion, and demo timing. Then come press and creator outreach, a livestream, showcase placement, and paid amplification. Vicariously says it has placed at least one game in the festival's top ten every time since Next Fest began.
That makes the company less like a publicity bureau and more like a small control room. Its clients buy specialist labor and coordination through bespoke campaign engagements. There is no packaged software and no public rate card. The product is judgment: which audience, which message, which channel, which week, and which metric tells the team to change course.
The public scoreboardNot all attention is equal
Agency case studies are, naturally, selected for success. Even so, Vicariously's choice of numbers is instructive. It reports coverage and views, but also wishlists, concurrent users, installs, and sales - measurements closer to the client's anxiety.
For Bad Ridge Games, the agency reports 450,000 wishlists gained, 75,000 units sold in 30 days, a 2.4 percent advertising click-through rate, and a $1.76 cost per install. That last number is the closest its public portfolio comes to answering “what did it cost?” It does not reveal the total spend, but it does reveal the unit Vicariously wanted the client to watch.
The large numbers coexist with smaller, more diagnostic ones. A campaign for Riyo Games and Humble Games reportedly produced 250,000 wishlists in two weeks. A reveal for Haenir Studio generated 209,000 TikTok shares and helped put the title among Steam's ten most-wishlisted games. In 2025, the company says its overall work produced 19,000 pieces of creator content, 12,000 articles, and 500 million ad impressions.
Awards followed the output. The 2025 Bulldog PR Awards named Vicarious PR its Best PR Agency of 2024, while also giving it gold for results and industry focus. Earlier programs recognized its campaign with Interplay for Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. The funny part is the timing: it won a grand prize for being a PR agency in the same year it prepared to stop calling itself one.
What changed their mindThe press release met the feed
The old model did not suddenly stop working. It stopped working alone. Vicariously's own writing points to the weakness: traditional PR can be broad and hard to measure, while social advertising can be targeted, adjusted, and tied to a conversion. Creators speak in the native grammar of discovery. Store pages either close the sale or waste the visit. The agency did not abandon editorial credibility; it surrounded it.
There is a condition hidden inside every impressive metric. The game must give each channel something worth carrying. A creator needs a moment. A journalist needs an angle. An ad needs a visual hook. A Steam visitor needs to understand the promise quickly. A campaign can coordinate these signals; it cannot make an undifferentiated product distinct by decree.
The part worth stealingSequence beats volume
A studio does not need to hire Vicariously to borrow its most useful habit. The habit is to stop treating marketing as a tray of unrelated deliverables. Begin with the player decision and work backward.
- State the hook in one sentence. If the store page, creator brief, and press pitch describe three different games, fix that before buying attention.
- Make the destination convert. Test the trailer's opening seconds, the page art, the tags, the demo, and the call to wishlist.
- Assign each channel a job. Use press for context, creators for demonstrated play, and ads for controlled distribution.
- Plan moments, not noise. An announcement, festival demo, showcase, update, and launch give people reasons to pay attention again.
- Measure down the funnel. Views matter, but wishlists, installs, conversion, concurrent players, and sales explain what the attention did.
This approach is best suited to teams with a demonstrable game, enough lead time to test materials, and the willingness to change positioning when the numbers disagree. It is less useful when the product has no legible audience, the demo does not hold attention, or the studio expects one famous streamer to repair a weak proposition. Coordination multiplies what is already there, including confusion.
Today Vicariously occupies a particular patch of the market: more specialized than a general creative agency, broader than a traditional games publicist, and small enough to sell proximity to a senior team. Its closest alternatives are specialist games agencies and publishers' in-house PR, user-acquisition, and creator departments. Its answer to both is integration with genre fluency.
There is a red heart in a potion bottle in the company's branding. It is cute, slightly strange, and unexpectedly precise. Vicariously's pitch is that game discovery needs both parts: the heart that makes somebody care and the bottle that contains, measures, and delivers it. The company changed its name because “PR” described only one ingredient. The potion had already changed.