CASE STUDY Warframe: The Duviri Paradox

CASE STUDY Warframe: The Duviri Paradox

Overview

Collaborating with 91 creators across eight key beats and services, we capitalised on the release of an accessible Warframe expansion by engaging prospective new players for a 10-year old game. Our services included:

  • Figurehead ‘big’ creative activations.

  • Competitions between creators with supporting content.

  • Twitch launch streams.

  • YouTube dedicated content.

  • YouTube integrations.

  • Creator gifting.

Baruuk from The Duviri Paradox

The Challenge

Warframe is a long-established and well-known brand within core gaming communities, and so generic gameplay wouldn’t go far enough to re-engage. Essential points to consider were:

  • A focus on long-term, entertaining creative that moves the needle in terms of brand awareness.

  • Dispelling the myth that the new content would only appeal and be accessible to existing players of the game.

  • Balance bringing new people to the game while also recapturing lapsed players.

Our Approach

Re-igniting interest required a range of creative eye-catching moments supported by entry-level gameplay that highlighted both the accessibility and innovation of the new expansion.

  • A multi-platform, multi-format campaign framing Duviri as a new, exciting, and distinctive entry point to Warframe.

Paid

Figurehead creative

As well as foundational gameplay, we enlisted Colin Furze, the UK’s biggest ‘mad scientist’ YouTube channel, to create a machine that allows you to move like a Warframe. This was our tentpole creative piece for this campaign, and we achieved our aim of driving mass awareness to Warframe at a pivotal point of accessible onboarding led by Duviri. The videos and social posts that were generated far exceed expectations based on previous campaigns and benchmarks.

Colin invited his engineering creator friends to try the build after it was complete. This led to content from Emily the Engineer, Hacksmith, and more; including the Warframe logo on the branding. This generated not only millions of views on extra content that included the Warframe logo and name, but also a chance for some of YouTube’s biggest creators to see that Warframe sponsors cool and exciting projects.

Mesa from The Duviri Paradox

Earned

Cross-channel community competition

As paid content, we recruited a roster of creators to make short-form, attention-grabbing content to target sci-fi and gaming-adjacent audiences. we challenged them to use a 3D printed Duviri mask as a blank canvas to convey the key themes of the update in their art style. The blank mask file was shared publicly to encourage the community to create their own design. The completed masks were sent to Digital Extremese to be exhibited at TennoCon 2023.

Gifting

Rewarding the most engaged Creators

We collaborated with Warframe’s brand partner HP Omen to create a memorable gift box that uniquely captured the spirit of the Duviri Paradox, while providing Warframe-branded hardware for creators to actually use. There were four tiers of packages sent to creators, which included a combination of HP hardware, custom Warframe merch, and a bespoke Duviri Paradox chocolate selection box

RESULTS

We saw huge successes and a remarkable CPV across paid, earned and gifting strategies. Targeting 28,000 concurrent viewers across 37 hours of paid streams, we instead saw over 50,000. Expected viewership based on benchmarked data for paid YouTube content reached 123% of target, and Colin Furze’s figurehead content alone hit 6m+ views and over 61m views across all social platforms.