How we helped Fall Guys launch their Free-To-Play era with some spectacularly silly social

The Challenge

Fall Guys was one of the global gaming hits of 2020, a spectacularly silly bean-based battle royale that brought joy and colour during a difficult time. Selling 40m units on PC & PlayStation, it set the world record as the most downloaded PlayStation Plus game ever.

Fast-forward two years later. Epic Games had acquired Fall Guys developer Mediatonic and were about to announce an exciting new Free-To-Play era where the game would finally be available on Nintendo Switch and Microsoft Xbox.

However, Fall Guys was not the buzz game it had been in 2020. Copycats and new titles had arrived, and the inevitable commentary of ‘dead game’ had started to surface.

That’s where Waste came in. Our brief was to help the Fall Guys team bring back the energy and excitement of 2020, re-engage lapsed fans, reassure existing fans and attract new fans to the ‘Free For All’ launch on June 21st.

Insight

Our first action was to decode exactly how Fall Guys had earned so much hype and cultural significance in 2020. Using a mix of social listening and content analysis, we boiled it down to 3 key insights:

1. Community Manager Oliver had cultivated a unique social voice that mixed nice with spice. It gave the wholesome brand a trollsome edge, and fans loved it.

2. Fall Guys behaved like a fan, not a brand. They theory-crafted about their own game, took the mickey out of their own marketing and even hyped up their own competition. For fans that had grown tired of self-regarding brands, it was a tonic.

3. Oliver and the team generated social sagas rather than social spikes. Whether it was their relentless trolling of YouTuber TimTheTatman or their high-profile Battle of The Brands bidding to get a branded skin in the game – these low-cost activations lasted for weeks and fuelled swathes of content, conversation and reach.

Our Strategy

Our strategy for the Free For All announcement was to double down on Fall Guys’ spectacularly silly behaviour. We knew that a sudden shift to shiny corporate comms would unsettle core fans wary of the Epic acquisition, trigger trolls and have limited impact with new fans. In a world of high spending, highly controlled marketing – we encouraged Fall Guys to be more fan-like than ever.

“Gaming fans are tired of the same tactics and language, so they love it when someone like Fall Guys dares to be different. Every brand can put out slick promo content and sponsor huge stadiums, but it takes a brave client to leak a goat screaming video and sponsor a bench in Skegness.” – Christian Perrins, Head of Strategy

Creative Approach

The leaked goat scream focus group

Our first beat was designed to stimulate rumours about what Fall Guys’ big announcement might be, helping to put bums on seats for their YouTube stream on May 16th.

We ran a very serious focus group about a very silly update wherein the game’s cute bean voices were replaced with that infamous goat scream sound. Our respondents looked on in horror as the absurd sounds played out over actual gameplay footage of the new stadium, giving fans a mixture of real and fake news.

Reassuringly raw focus group footage was ‘accidentally’ posted on the official Fall Guys channels three days before the announcement stream, with a flurry of panicked comments from Mediatonic, studio devs and of course community manager Oliver himself trying to work out how it had leaked.

The ‘leaked’ video earned over 200k organic views, but more importantly triggered a barrage of fan content and conversations. Numerous fans isolated the gameplay footage and shared it, many picked up on the Free-To-Play promotional artwork and plushies scattered around the room, plus the ‘incredulous girl’ from the focus group became a meme in her own right. All of this helped the announcement stream earn over 800k organic views on YouTube alone. A solid start.

The sponsored bench in Skegness

Our next goal was to drive home awareness of the Free-To-Play era shortly after it had gone live. Rather than spending millions sponsoring an iconic sporting stadium, we realised we could stand out just as much by putting the Fall Guys name on something small and silly. Sometimes less is more. 

We created the official bench of Fall Guys and placed it on a camping site in Skegness, a small seaside town in Lincolnshire, England. (‘Skeggy’ had been a running reference from the Fall Guys social team.) We dialled up the fanfare with a custom-made velvet curtain that revealed the brass plaque in a ceremony graced by none other than the mayor of Skegness himself, flanked by official mascot ‘The Jolly Fisherman’ and a trio of string musicians playing the official Fall Guys theme.

We invited local press, made the bench an official point of interest on Trip Advisor and an official destination on Google Maps, shared the what3words location with fans and ran an ad for the bench in The Skegness Standard.

All of this was wrapped up in a sixty second promotional video, followed up with behind-the-scenes footage and a spoof marketing presentation from Community Manager Oliver. These videos generated over 1 million organic views and huge waves of fan and Creator content and conversation, from visitor reviews of the bench to fan art, memes and bench-inspired skins. All in all, the bench saga allowed Fall Guys to tweet 20 original posts earning over 60k likes. We also saw press coverage in titles ranging from NME to PopSugar.

Overall Campaign Results

The Fall Guys Free-To-Play launch was an overwhelming success, reaching 20 million players in the first 48 hours and attracting 50 million in the first two weeks. Our 'social sagas' earned 1.2 million organic video views. The game trended on Twitter throughout pre-announce, launch and post-announce phases and was the #1 streaming title on Twitch.

All from one humble piece of oak. ✌️