Context Quantic Dream released Sea of Solitude: The Director’s Cut the 4th of March on Switch, with the ambition to reach a wider audience within the narrative, indie games & adventure games audience. To do so, they contacted us to create a special activation on Twitch fitting the spirit of the game followed up by a paid media plan. The experience needed to be as wholesome as possible and generate word-of-mouth on social networks.

Challenges Our main challenge was to find a way to resonate with thematics addressed by Sea of Solitude such as : self-acceptance, gratitude, mindfulness, motivation, compassion… Additionally, we wanted to challenge the way viewers and streamers are discussing with each other, by creating a real bubble of positive discussion during the stream.
In addition, the title was introduced to a new audience, Nintendo Switch players. We identified a clear lack of mature themed games on Switch in comparison to other platforms.

Creative Thinking We identified the possible audience for Sea of Solitude as a highly positive one, who would be most likely to watch the “Just-chatting” category of Twitch, with some exception to watch “cosy” games.

To reach them, we decided to create an interactive extension, which could be used as a conversation starter around the game between streamers & viewers about intimate & positive topics. Our intention was also to spread kindness during those streams, leading to the creation of the extension Bottle of Hope.

Creative Answer Our extension is based on a kindness gauge that had to be filled by the viewers by interacting with the chat. We listen to the chat, the words being used, emojis and personalized emotes… We take into account everything that can help the extension calculate the positivity level of the chat. This extension also takes into account the negativity of the chat. Once the kindness gauge is full, a bottled message is sent randomly to 25% of the viewers and streamer, they will all get the same message. Those messages tackle various topics addressed by the games, they can be preselected by the streamer : mindfulness, self-acceptance… Quantic Dream directly involved themselves, and worked with the studio, Jo-Mei, and Take This - a North-American organization which works on mental health in the video game industry - to write all of the bottled messages that can be retrieved by viewers. They wanted to make sure the extension provided clear and appropriated messages, beneficial for the community of Sea of Solitude.

We used our internal tool Radacast to identify the appropriate streamers for this extension. To detect them we looked for streamers of games close to Sea of Solitude typologie and themes, with a very positive community and who could be interested in our extension.

Media campaign Regarding the paid media campaign, our focus markets were : USA, UK, France and Germany. With the mature nature of the game, we targeted an atypical demographic made up of millennials, switch owners and fans of walking sims and games that explore more complex themes. For the campaign we blended a mix of social media sites and online video placements, with a media mix covering YouTube, Facebook & Instagram and Twitter. We adapted a core video asset into various cuts that were suitable both for the respective platforms and audiences we were targeting.

If you are a streamer on Twitch and interested by our extension do not hesitate to get it!

Press GamesPress (ENG), Gamasutra (ENG), Actualités Jeux Vidéo (FR)