X4: Foundations promotion in the Russian market

Client

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 a space simulator genre, it was important for us to select bloggers, both general-game ones and specializing in reviews of SpaceSims games. We used integration, streams and reviews of the game as the main form of ad placement with bloggers.

We offered the client different levels of bloggers by the number of subscribers. 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 on VKontakte - placement in 15 posts in thematic groups.

Since it was important for us not just to make the placement and fulfill KPIs, but to conduct the most effective advertising campaign, we re-contacted bloggers and administrators of groups on VKontakte and achieved 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):

3 bloggers with 500K+ subscribers

4 bloggers - 50K-500K

6 bloggers - 10K-50K

2 bloggers - 1K-10K

and place posts in 22 VK public pages (+7 to the planned ones). Besides, we managed to agree on the placement of one bonus integration on TikTok. On YouTube it was placed 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 the game advertising placement does not always depend on the success of a blogger. The key factor in the selection of influencers should be the relevance of its 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 an audience of 29.4K subscribers showed 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 Steams revenue reports was visibly higher than in other regions: revenue increased by 166% sales in unites 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. So it's clearly visible that the Winter Sale was pushed in Russia.