Island Games was getting ready to launch a game in a brand new category, arcade games. With their existing games in action and role-playing Island Games knew they had to create a new community around their arcade game: Attack From Space (AFS). The team noticed, from their market research, that arcade players spent a large amount of time on Reddit. The Island Games team wanted to put Attack From Space in front of this community and then build a new community on their own platform.

Island Games’ Community Problem

They turned to AE to help them solve their biggest pain points: creating a new community and then growing it around their game Attack From Space.

STEP 1 – Implement AE Connect

Capture users through social login and get their permission to start listening and grow a strong community.

AE Connect is the keystone that authenticates players and grows a community.

Through in-game ads, Reddit advertising and an email announcement to their existing cross-category users, Island Games directed their players to a landing page for the Attack From Space: Defend Your Country event. The landing page directed players to choose their country and sign in using Reddit with alternate options for Discord, or YouTube.

 

A retro futuristic landing page for fictional game Attack From Space. There are social logins for Reddit, YouTube, and Discord

Customize AE’s social login to align with your brand.

Players would then complete activities related to AFS in order to earn points, both individually and for their chosen country as a whole. As they accumulated points, players would earn in-game rewards such as exclusive guns and power ups for their country-mates. The country with the most points at the end of the competition would award each country-mate a special flair on the AFS subreddit and an exclusive gun upgrade for use in the next event.

RESULTS: The in-game ads, Reddit advertising and email announcement had a clickthrough rate of 26%, 32% and 53% respectively. Island Games captured 134,000 users total across Reddit, Discord and YouTube.

STEP 2 – Assign Point Values to Activities with AE Insights

Add brands to the allowlist and use AE Insights to assign points to activities users take involving key brands.

For AE to understand users, the engine needs to know what users care about. AE does this by looking at every user activity and then comparing it to their list of brands. If the activity matches a brand, AE stores that insight. Each activity can be assigned a point value.

Island Games assigned point values to AFS behavioral and social activities including, but not limited to:

  • Joining the official subreddit and Discord server
  • Participation (commenting) in the official AFS subreddit
  • Completing daily in-game challenges
  • Purchasing in-game upgrades
  • Subscribing to the Island Games YouTube channel

 

STEP 3 – Actions & ROI

AE Insights are used to spark competition, create leaderboards, and reward users for engaging.

Island Games created multiple leaderboards. At any time, players could see how many points they’d earned and activities they could do to increase their ranking. The main Attack From Space landing page also displayed the culminated points of each country, further driving competition and engagement.

A points leaderboard for the fictional game Attack From Space! Players countries are listed alongside rank, username and points.

This is how the leaderboard would look to a participant in the Defend Your Country event.

RESULTS:

 

  • Increase in social media mentions and excitement: Because the Battle of the Factions encouraged users tIncrease in social media mentions and excitement – Because Attack From Space encouraged users to engage on social media, Island Games saw an uptick of mentions of AFS across Twitter, Discord, YouTube and Reddit.
  • Increase in user acquisition and community growth – Due to strategic launch Island Games saw a wave of new players joining the game in order to participate for their country.
  • Easily find more users just like their engaged players – Using AE Insights the Island Games team were able to build very specific look-a-like audiences on Facebook and other advertising platforms to find more players just like their existing audience.
  • Increased engagement and feedback from players – Players flocked to the newly established official AFS Discord server and subreddit. These platforms gave the Island Games team an opportunity to engage with community and get feedback to further improve the game.
  • Simplified and fair contest system – Island Games saved thousands of hours of tracking, compiling and ranking fan activity by powering the event with AE. The Attack from Space, country campaign had no false-positives and no “gaming the system” thanks to AE’s real-time scoring of submissions and automatic enforcement of limits.

STEP 4: Rinse & Repeat

Use an AE-powered strategy in future campaigns to: capture users and assign points to their activities, use contests and leaderboards to build community, collate user data to improve advertising and spend less on advertising

After the success of the first AE-powered Attack from Space campaign to create a new community and grow it Island Games continued to use AE in their marketing strategy:

 

  • AE social login is used to capture new users across their games catalogue.
  • Island Games own their customer data and those contact details, instead of giving it to other platforms and relying on 3rd party channels.
  • Yearly competitions like Defend Your Country are held to boost engagement, retention and new user acquisition.
  • In addition to the feedback Island Games receives directly from players in the official Discord and subreddit, they now have access to a wealth of behavioral and social activity data that their players have consented to being tracked.
  • Island Game’s database of users continues to grow inside AE. They now have over 134,000 registered users creating behavioral data every day.
  • They are spending 13% less per quarter on retention advertising campaigns and seeing their acquisition rates improve each quarter.