Give the People What They Want: Zombie Mayhem
Dead Rising 3 becomes one of the best-selling titles in Xbox One history
There’s a lot riding on the launch of a new game. And when that new game is being released alongside a new console, the stakes are especially high.
The launch of Dead Rising 3 was to coincide with the unveiling of the new Xbox One, a highly anticipated new console with heavy competition. And because many gamers choose their consoles based on the exclusive games featured, getting people excited about Dead Rising 3 was vital.
Xbox needed to reach out to the game’s core audience in an engaging way. Yet because Dead Rising 3 was operating on a new console, Xbox was unable to demonstrate the game. A demonstration is one of the primary ways gamers typically decide whether or not to buy a game, so the team tasked with building a launch campaign had to get creative.
“It was easy to get in the mindset of the audience, because we’re a team of dedicated gamers ourselves. It’s in our DNA. We just asked ourselves, ‘What about this game really gets us excited?’” said Jon East, Technology Director at POP.
The POP team braced itself for the zombie apocalypse and set to work providing other gamers with an experience they knew they themselves would love.
Choose-your-own viscera
Gamers love video. The statistics are clear on this point. This was an audience that would be thrilled to see footage of the new video game, but just showing them video left out two important aspects of gaming — choice and participation. Gamers want to play! It was the campaign team’s task to get the target audience excited about the new game by getting them involved.
Rather than being blocked, POP turned not having a demo into an advantage by creating an innovative way to engage with a new title. The “Path to the After Party” was established — an interactive video experience that stitched together hours of game footage into an interactive adventure, where the decisions that players made after each video clip (run or fight? muscle car or steamroller?) would guide their path through the story.
It was “Choose your own zombie adventure,” YouTube style.
“The interactive video for Dead Rising 3 was a fantastic way to get fans to experience the ‘After Party’ we were imagining,” said Kevin Hooper, Digital Marketing Manager at Xbox. “The game was the biggest open-world zombie game ever attempted, and it was crucial to let the fans feel the massive sense of choice that the game would offer. Xbox fans loved it.”
Players’ final goal was to find the “After Party” — a unifying cross-channel tagline for the title. But through the YouTube experience, there were many ways to get there, and some unlucky players couldn’t make it at all, adding to the drama. Along the way, a zombie kill–tracker counted how many zombies the player had destroyed. Players’ virtual scorecards were shareable — as were favorite moments of game footage they discovered along the way.
Bloody infectious
“Path to the After Party” generated terrific buzz on social media, as gamers shared their excitement for the launch and passed on their favorite moments of the game with animated GIFs. The interactive trailer generated 385,000 impressions and earned significant media coverage on channels including Kotaku, CNet, Videogamer.com and more.
All told, the campaign generated:
268M paid and owned impressions
8x purchase lift at retail over the client benchmark
75% completion rate of pre-roll video
The interactive video experience and surrounding marketing efforts helped Dead Rising 3 become the most successful campaign of the launch year, and one of the best-selling zombie titles in Xbox history.