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Objective
Fable III was very specifically designed to move the Fable franchise from the hardcore Role Playing Game genre, into the more financially lucrative world of Action Adventure games. The game's story was pretty epic - you play as the despotic king's exiled-at-birth brother, leading a revolution to overthrow him and rule your land justly. Our brief was to add new excitement to a quite hardcore RPG franchise and thus help this third installment not just beat its main RPG rivals (primarily 'Fallout: New Vegas', released the week before Fable) but also step up to take on the big Action Adventure games that remain Xbox's top-sellers.
Strategy
'Experience, not message.' From the game's core theme, we wanted to use our marketing to let people actually experience a revolution themselves. To build scale, we needed a way to turn those taking part in our revolution into genuine advocates - mobilising them to spread the news for us. And finally we wanted to make the whole thing cool enough to drive PR (ideally broader than just in gaming media, although there are few categories with such a dedicated suite of sites/publications ready to spread the word.)
Method Deployed
Our answer was Fable III: Kingmaker - a massively multiplayer mobile and web game of revolution that plays a bit like a cross between Foursquare and the classic board game Risk. We set 2 factions - Royals & Rebels - to battle across the 'Kingdom of Europa'.
The kingdom was split into states and then down into a series of smaller regions and territories to be fought over day-to-day, using a GPS-based mobile app. Players were assigned by random birthright to be either Rebel or Royal in the fight, and they could then plant up to 10 flags a day from their phone to claim territories for their side, all the while earning Kingmaker gold. To get really big gold rewards, you had to link your Kingmaker account to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, to notify your friends of your achievements in battle. Kingmaker gold wasn't just for leaderboard bragging rights either - we built a unique mechanic that allowed the player to actually take their Kingmaker gold into the Fable III Xbox game, linking the mobile, physical and Xbox worlds for the first time ever.
Outcome
PR/media: within a week of the game's launch over 600 articles appeared in gaming and lifestyle media about Kingmaker, with the main UK games industry trade publication MCV calling it "Fable's crown jewel" and IGN declaring "Fable III: Kingmaker is no longer just a game, it's an obsession."
Partners and retailers came on board in each country to deliver a series of media-firsts to support the campaign, including personalised "call to arms" ads for games magazine subscribers and ticker tape feeds live-displaying news of flag plants and region conquests from players' Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Players and their social media: the 80,000 active players we had by the end of October had cumulatively planted over 2.5m flags, driving more than 20m social media impressions in the first month of the game across Facebook and Twitter.
Sales: across Europe, Fable III knocked 'Fallout: New Vegas' off number one on its opening weekend, selling more on Xbox than the same-day-released, license-backed 'Star Wars' and 'WWE' games combined. Fable III remains ahead of Fable II in week-by-week sales to date, confirming that we have brought new people in to the franchise to play the new game. ('Fable II' sits approximately number 10 in all-time Xbox 360 sales so it was a tough benchmark.)
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