The wildly talented team at Hopoo had a new game and a new publishing partnership that brought marketing horsepower and NoodleHaus to the table. Gearbox invited us to create a campaign for Risk of Rain 2, a game created by a company that, in recent history, was still in their dorm rooms. Our challenge was to carefully bring new players to the game without insulting opinionated core fans who would not support an indie title “selling out.”
We broke our audience into two segments and carefully rode our “two sides of the middle.” After a deep dive into what players were passionate about, and what possible new players were intrigued (and repelled) by, we had a solid playbook that kept our content true to the core with subtle invitations to new players.
The wide audience trailer played up the cast and storyline. With each character getting a clear cameo. Strong and clear copy walked new players into the idea of a rogue game with all its benefits and pitfalls.
Our core gameplay trailers embraced the chaos of solid, late-game builds with the powers that every player dreams of. As the campaign continued, new players were brought-in with strong character announcements showing each new survivor’s powers and play style while we dropped key plot hints and new info for core players to get excited about.
The campaign has been held together through one core theme, “feeling like a god on the battlefield.” All players wanted a perfect build, items, and abilities that made a once-in-a-lifetime run. When that all clicked, the god-like power, the chaos, and the action came to life on screen in vivid explosions of color. Our results were astounding. We doubled sales in the first month reaching a million users. We outpaced all projections for sales, views, and wishlists through every expansion, adding content releases to date, and approaching more than 4 million players. The game that had a cult following has now become a mainstream success.
