Context and challenges Following the massive success of Paris video game studio, Quantic Dream’s solo narrative game, Detroit: Become Human on its PS4 release in 2018, Quantic Dream has launched the game on PC via the Epic Games Store and is available on Steam from the 18th of June 2020.
The game has already been streamed for over 17M hours since its pre-launch on Twitch and there have been multiple videos of walkthroughs showing the various game endings as well as streams on YouTube, Twitch and other platforms.
Today, streams are unmissable touch points for publishers to reach their audiences when it comes to promoting a game. With an average of 10M daily active users in 2019, there are on average 1,3 million people on Twitch at any given moment.
The challenge of promoting Detroit: Become Human on Twitch was to stimulate streamers of all levels to stream a game that has already been launched and explored on all kinds of streams and videos, a year and a half earlier and from the end of 2019 on the Epic Games store for its launch on Steam. The main objective was to reach viewers that have never played or watched Detroit: Become Human and stimulate streamers that have never streamed the game before with the secondary goal being to generate re-streams and views for people that were already familiar with the game.
Our answer We collaborated with Quantic Dream to create a new way to experience the narrative game with the creation of Detroit: Community Play, a new interactive Twitch poll extension for streamers and their communities whereby the course of destiny can be altered and influenced by viewers' choices in-stream.
We thought of an augmented activation that reinvents the gaming experience and that would have more streamers willing to try the game and stream it on Twitch as well as having more Twitch users that would be willing to watch streams about the game thanks to its engaging aspect.
By designing the Twitch extension for Detroit: Become Human, we wanted to encourage streams of the game for its release on the Steam platform. With the title having enjoyed great success on Playstation 4 in 2018, we also wanted to offer these players a refreshed experience of playing on Twitch by bringing a collective dimension to this usually solo-player narrative genre. To do this, we worked closely with Quantic Dream’s marketing, creative and technical teams and identified two main challenges: narrative and experiential, in order to determine the best times to solicit viewers' opinions and technically to allow the game engine to communicate with the Twitch extension.
We are excited to collaborate with Quantic Dream on the Detroit: Community Play extension. Together we have demonstrated that this type of experience is not just reserved for multiplayer or competitive games, but that it can really enrich the solo and narrative gaming experiences.
Since Detroit: Become Human’s initial release in 2018, the game has been streamed for millions of viewers worldwide. We were inspired by the collaboration that happened both in living rooms and chat rooms around the decision-making process throughout the gameplay. Working with Biborg enabled us to use technology to integrate this collaborative element directly into the game, for our fans on Twitch who have already streamed the game and for new streamers who want to experience the tension and rush from having your entire viewership play along with you.
Previewed during the inaugural live stream of the official Quantic Dream Twitch channel on May 25th 2020, it is now available for free to the general public on DetroitCommunityPlay.com, for all PC players on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
During this live stream, Bryan Dechart, the award-winning actor who starred as Connor, and Amelia Rose Blaire showcased Detroit: Community Play by streaming “The Hostage,” the first chapter of the game. The Twitch extension enabled viewers to answer a few questions, live, from the 150 multiple-response surveys created by Quantic Dream’s narrative team for the extension. Their responses then influenced the sequence in real time.
With Detroit: Community Play, the public will now be able to fully participate in the narrative construction of the game, which has never been seen before for the narrative genre.
Though it’s always a challenge to develop a good and solid Twitch extension that is able to support thousands of user interactions in short periods of time, it’s always easier with good support from the game production team. Detroit’s development team and Biborg were able to work hand in hand to produce an ambitious extension, with an efficient distribution of work between the two teams and minimal impact on the game itself.
The results of the Community Play extension were effective with several million people reached. There was an interaction rate of 50% on desktop and 60% on mobile among viewers exposed to live streams and who engaged with the interactive extension. Out of the 150 questions that the extension offered, 50 questions were asked on average by each streamer and the vast majority of streamers had left it active during their gaming experience.
Install the Community Play Twitch extension here.
*Source: https://twitchtracker.com/games/497480
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