X4: Foundations Promotion in the Russian Market
How to promote simulation / sandbox games
Background
X4: Foundations by one of Germany's leading game developers, Egosoft GmbH.
Goal
Conduct an influencer marketing campaign on the Russian market for the X4 winter sale on Steam from December 22, 2021, to January 7, 2022.
Solution
Since X4: Foundation is a game in the space-simulation genre, it was important for us to select bloggers, both general-game bloggers and those specializing in SpaceSims reviews. We used game integrations, streams, and reviews as the primary ad placements with bloggers.
We offered the client different levels of bloggers based on the number of subscribers each had. Initially, within the client's budget, 8 ad placements were planned for gaming bloggers:
- 1 blogger with 500K+ subscribers,
- 2 bloggers - 50K-500K and
- 5 bloggers - 10K-50K.
To enhance the effect, an advertising campaign was planned for VKontakte, with placement in 15 posts in thematic groups.
Since it was important for us not just to make the placement and fulfill KPIs, but to run the most effective advertising campaign, we recontacted bloggers and group administrators on VKontakte and secured more favorable terms of cooperation. As a result, within the same budget, we managed to place advertising integration with 15 bloggers (+7 to the planned ones):
and place posts in 22 VK public pages (+7 to the planned ones). Additionally, we agreed on the placement of one bonus integration on TikTok. On YouTube, there were 7 reviews with letspayers, 6 integrations in the collections of general-game bloggers, and 3 streams in total.
The remarkable thing is that the success of game advertising placement does not always depend on a blogger's success. The key factor in selecting influencers should be the relevance of their content to the game genre. Because the audience of such gaming bloggers is loyal to the genre. When it comes to X4, the placement on the VladSplit SpaceSim fan channel, with 29.4K subscribers, yielded the best result. This case has once again confirmed this theory.
Results
As a result of the influencer marketing campaign, we got:
- 1.14M views
- KPI exceeded 2.2 times
- CPC $1.1
- From Dec 23, 2021 to Dec 31, 2022, 19% of X4 Steam page visitors were from Russia, 3% from Ukraine. To compare: Dec 23, 2020 - Dec 31, 2020 had 11% of Steam page visitors from Russia
- YOY growth in the "Russia, Ukraine & CIS" cluster in Steam’s revenue reports was visibly higher than in other regions: revenue increased by 166%, sales in units increased by 296%
- In Russia, the Steam Winter Sale was more successful for us than the Steam Autumn Sale. In most other regions, this is the other way around, which clearly shows that the Winter Sale was pushed in Russia
