Race Against Slime
Last Saturday, we launched an integrated product and marketing Holiday campaign for our first game Best Fiends.
For most of 2015 Best Fiends has maintained an audience of between 1M and 1.5M daily players (DAU), and we set ourselves a goal of reaching 2,000,000 DAU before the end of the year.
While December is a competitive time of year for a challenger like us to try and cut through, we felt we had a unique proposition that could work — a competition where you support your favorite influncer each competing for their chosen charity.
We called it ‘Race Against Slime’ and Ellen DeGeneres announced the competition, which has a total prize pool for the charities involved of up to $250,000.
20 of the world’s biggest YouTube stars and social media influencers, including PewDiePie, Markiplier, KSI, Hayes Grier and Rebecca Black, were divided into seven teams to compete in a race within the Best Fiends game.
Teams were playing to benefit charities including Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, charity: water, Hope for Holt, Malaria No More, Oceana, SpecialEffect and War Child.
The competition kicked off on Saturday, Dec. 19 with each of the participants releasing a video on their own channels announcing their involvement, which charity they were playing for, and encouraging their fans to play Best Fiends to help support their cause. Here are a couple of my favorite videos with the others available here.
The race ends on Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2015, with the winning team to be announced through social media by “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Thursday, Dec. 24, 2015.
What makes this proposition special is that players of Best Fiends can help their favorite influencers’ chosen charity win by selecting which team they want to play for. Players then ‘donate’ their defeated Slugs from the Holiday levels of the game. The charity team with the most slugs wins the biggest prize! Latest standings for the competition are on the Best Fiends Facebook page here.
As a community goal, if 100,000,000 Slugs are collectively defeated during the competition by all teams and players (i.e. the whole Best Fiends community), “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” has pledged to match Seriously’s donation to reach a total of $250,000.
With the race fully integrated into the Best Fiends game, allowing the audience to directly participate in the competition, the proposition has been a tremendous success so far.
We were excited to hit over 2,100,000 daily players the day after the race began on Sunday 20th December. We also hit a new engagement record of more than 1,300,000 hours of gameplay on Sunday. And we reached a new daily download record of over 325,000 downloads in one day.
Executing like this is incredibly hard to do and we’re lucky to have a very talented team that have gone above and beyond to make it happen. And it’s just the start of things to come.
We have a great platform to build on with the first Best Fiends game, and we’ll look forward to challenging the biggest puzzle games in the industry in 2016.
And as we build out the Best Fiends trilogy, our team have been working on two more games each set in the Best Fiends world, which will both launch globally next year.
We’ll also be releasing our first animated shorts in 2016 (more on that shortly). And we have some fun new products coming out too, with our first set of limited edition products in collaboration with Kidrobot beginning to sell through their first runs.
More soon, and in the meantime, there are still two days to download Best Fiends and support your favorite team!
