Context For the release of Returnal, a PS5 exclusive game combining both TPS and rogue-like style, PlayStation wanted to hit it big and right on the mark. For the occasion they reached out to Biborg in order to create an impactful activation, in touch with the spirit and rhythm of the game.

Challenges The main challenge we faced was to reach two distinctive audiences in one activation. On one hand, we had a mainstream audience that were perhaps apprehensive of rogue-like games because of the try-hard and tough reputation, but also those who might have tried out the latest remake of Demon’s Souls and were frustrated by its difficulty and complexity. On the other hand, we also had to show Returnal as a challenging game to engage and convince core rogue-like gamers in order to appeal to their try-hard preferences.

Creative Thinking Following current trends and what we found during our creative thinking, we decided that a Twitch activation would be the most impactful opportunity for our client. Our strategic team analysed the habits and motivation of our main target audience, and we discovered that many core rogue-like players truly loved to challenge themselves and loved the pressure in these types of games. Furthermore, we saw that these challenges encouraged viewers to be more active and engaging with the content when streamed. As for the more mainstream audience, we found many insights showing that at some point, players rage-quitted a rogue-like game either because of the frustration felt after continuous failures, or the high-difficulty that they couldn’t overcome.

Creative Answer In order to both reassure a mainstream audience about the game accessibility and show that this Rogue-Like could be challenge worthy, we came up with the idea of setting up a special activation on Twitch in a challenge format under the name #NoRageQuitChallenge. Our idea was to invite 6 top streamers to give the best of themselves by taking up in-game challenges. When looking for these partiicipants, we wanted to have core rogue-like player profiles as well as people more capable of reaching a mainstream audience but still resilient enough to give their best in our #NorRageQuitChallenge. To encourage them in giving their all, each successfully completed challenge would unlock gifts for their viewers, ranging from game keys to a PS5 digital edition. For this challenge, Biborg produced every asset from the Twitch overlay to the promotional assets used on PlayStation France’s social media.

We wanted to celebrate every PlayStation player on Twitch, and it seemed essential for us to include people with communities of all sizes. Therefore, from identifiying 50 Grassroot streamers used to playing rogue-like and Souls games by using our internal tool Radacast, we were able to find and pick the appropriate streamers for this activation. Being selected based on their high engagement and interactivity with their viewers, we then asked them the participate in this #NoRageQuitChallenge.

In addition to mobilizing streamers, we also worked in a more creative way to include Returnal on the Twitch platform, along with working on a streaming community kit Which included emotes and alerts reflecting the game universe. This kit is still curently available here.

Results