Nearing the release of what will eventually become indy darling Sifu, Sloclap was looking into ways to increase awareness surrounding the release of their game and to direct traffic to their socials and pre-order pages. With Sifu’s masterful combat and innovative gameplay mechanics, the game almost spoke for itself. However, Sloclap knew that to optimize their release strategy, they had to target their media efforts toward the audiences that would most identify with Sifu’s differentiating features. That’s when we partnered with Sloclap and accompanied them on their journey. Our goal: support them in their pre-release efforts all the way through to their post-launch updates and promotional activities!

EXECUTION
Our involvement with the project started in summer of 2021 with an in-depth audience analysis from our Strategic Planner. The goal here was to narrow the field to the relevant audiences, select the aspects of the game that would interest them most, and share adverts on that basis. This preliminary work allowed us to lay the groundwork for our media planning strategy.
After completing our audience tests, we pivoted the main goal of the campaign from awareness to traffic for Sifu’s pre-orders. From this point, we started redirecting audiences to the game’s pre-order store pages to facilitate conversion. We added display campaigns, with diverse targeting strategies, like contextual, behavioral, and retargeting, to boost traffic and sales!

With Sifu’s release right around the corner, we also started supporting the launch of the game and Sloclap’s post-launch efforts. We’ve launched campaigns to support the first two content updates. The main goals were to remind existing players that the game is receiving developer support and to reach people who might not have heard of the game yet. We’ve also pushed campaigns for the promotional season, as Sifu was on sale to celebrate Gamescom with the hope of converting the laggers and late adopters into players.

RESULTS
The campaigns generated over 83 million impressions over the last year, with over 49% of website traffic coming from paid activations. The game proved to be a great success with over 1 million copies sold in three weeks. Since then, and with a content roadmap with free updates as well as a few surprises, Sloclap kept fulfilling the potential of the game, generating more than 2 million sales to date.