How Dark Souls Listened to its Base and Made $$$

By Mike Faley, Senior Strategist

One of the riskiest pivots a product can make is the transition from a niche product that means a lot to a few, to a mainstream product positioned for mass appeal. How does a product appeal to the masses without cannibalizing the passionate base that makes up the core demographic?

What is Dark Souls?

Dark Souls is a Japanese action/RPG video game released in 2011. The plot involves a warrior (the player) who awakens in a prison with nothing but a suit of armor and a broken sword. From here, the player explores the world around him, encountering dangers and mystery and lots and lots of bad guys trying to kill him. Dark Souls was received well, getting high critical reception and selling more than was originally forecasted — and quickly became notorious due to its difficulty. Designed to harken back to the difficulty that made early video games next to impossible to finish, Dark Souls was an instant hit with hardcore gamers who prided themselves on figuring out the game’s mechanics, defeating the nearly impossible bosses, and sorting out the hidden story of the game.

Players found that part of the fun of Dark Souls is that it comes with next to no direction — from how to advance in the game, to using weapons and spells, almost nothing in the game is told directly to the player. Before long, fans of the game began gathering information online, cultivating communities of players who worked together to establish databases and logs of game mechanics, data on weapons and enemies, and patching together lore in order to figure out what the hell the game was even about.

In order to proceed in the game, players relied on information pulled together from other players. This sense of involvement, along with the intrinsic difficulty of the game, meant that finishing the game was considered a noteworthy accomplishment.

Before the game was even released in the United States, the fanbase had formed — a tightly-knit, well-educated set of gamers who collectively decided they were going to work together to sort out the difficulties of the game and create resources and a community for newer players.

Product marketing direction

In bringing Dark Souls to the United States, the marketing campaign for the game leaned into the already-well known difficulty of the game with the tagline “prepare to die.”

The insight here is that Dark Souls is known for its difficulty — while this could be a turnoff to much of the gaming audience, the marketing of Dark Souls turned the inaccessibility of the game into a strength, ultimately posing the entire experience as a challenge.

Dark Souls was wildly successful compared to its projections, selling over 8 million units — sales that were largely driven by positive reception from the press and word-of-mouth by its newly established fanbase. According to Wikipedia, “GameSpot scored Dark Souls a 9.5/10. Much praise was given to the… sense of jubilation felt when conquering boss fights after numerous failed attempts. They also suggested that casual gamers may struggle to progress, whereas role-playing game enthusiasts will thrive on the difficulty.”

And with huge success of a new intellectual property comes the inevitable. Sequels.

With Dark Souls II and III, marketing leaned even further into the “this game is very, very difficult” insight and further leveraged the fandom associated with the game to attract new audiences.

For the launch of Dark Souls III, the intense difficulty of the game was highlighted by hijacking a cultural moment relevant to the target audience. Around the time of launch, Ben Affleck was caught in an interview reacting to the news that his latest movie, Batman v. Superman, had received poor reviews. Seeing an opportunity to inject Dark Souls into this cultural conversation, the official Twitter account published this parody video:

Closer to launch, two stars of HBO’s Silicon Valley — a show popular with the target consumer of Dark Souls — were tapped to play the game before release. Content was captured of one of the stars absolutely freaking out after beating one of the first bosses in the game, playing into the familiar sense of accomplishment that is unique to the Dark Souls experience.

The strategy here is clear — recapture the feeling of challenge from the first Dark Souls, but widen the addressable audience of that experience by pairing the challenge with more recognizable IP’s such as Silicon Valley and Batman.

So how has this panned out?

From a mindshare perspective, the strategy has been successful. Each Dark Souls release drew more search volume than the last as more conversation and interest was driven.

Okay, so lots of people are talking — but what about sales?

Though it is too early to calculate total sales of Dark Souls III, the publisher has announced that the title had “the most successful launch day in the publisher’s history, while also becoming the fastest-selling game for the company,” and “sold 61% more than Dark Souls II did in its launch week.”

What can we learn from the marketing of Dark Souls?

A good insight goes a long way. Just because an insight was pulled from a specific audience doesn’t mean it can’t be re-interpreted and leveraged for wider appeal. And yes, it is possible to carry a niche product to the mainstream without alienating the core — but it requires respect for the source material and clever re-appraisals of what the target has interest in.