Case of Fall Guys: how viral marketing, streamers and sundress influenced the explosive growth of the game

In a new study, Newzoo analyzed the explosive growth of Fall Guys. Among the key success factors are an agreement with Sony, promotion through streamers, viral marketing and working with the community.The developers of Fall Guys used a set of marketing tools aimed at the rapid growth of the audience and its further retention — the so-called growth hacking.

Access to PS Plus on releaseFall Guys became available on Sony’s service on the day of release on August 4, allowing each subscriber to play the project for free for a month;

this practice of agreements with platform holders has long been used by developers and publishers.
In this case, the deal helped Fall Guys gain the first audience;In August, the game’s MAU on PlayStation reached 17.9 million people.
This allowed Fall Guys to become the second in the list of the most popular games on the console (right after Fortnite);at the same time, the audience of Fall Guys played in parallel, mainly in free-play projects like Fortnite and Apex Legends.
Working with streamers

often, small and “strange” projects are just right for promotion on Twitch;

users are interested in watching the streamer’s reaction to game situations, which contributes to engagement and increased activity in chats;
On July 24, Mediatonic sent out the keys to popular streamers — a day before the open beta test;
some letsplayers had a great credit of trust of the audience, and therefore the streams of the then unknown Fall Guys interested many viewers;
at the start of the beta, streamers distributed access to the game to the audience.
However, the hype turned out to be so great that Mediatonic had to conduct another beta test for everyone;In the first month after the release, Fall Guys became the second most popular game on Twitch and YouTube, and the total number of hours viewed was 113 million.
Graph of audience growth and views on Twtich and YouTube

Success on PC and word of mouth

thanks to the huge popularity on streaming sites and word of mouth, Fall Guys quickly gained an audience on Steam;

in the first week after its release on PC, the game sold 2 million copies;
users were attracted by the availability of the game — the average game session of Fall Guys was 33 minutes;
as well as on consoles, the audience of the project also actively played popular freeplay titles.
Viral marketing and working with the community

during the beta, developers were asked to retweet posts with the announcement in exchange for providing additional keys;

Mediatonic managed to quickly gain a large audience in social networks and forums: 1.4 million followers on Twitter, 247 thousand on Discord, and 191 thousand on reddit;
to retain the audience, the developers themselves entered into a dialogue with the players and came up with various activities;
as an example, Newzoo cites the case of the TimTheTatman streamer, who for a long time could not win in Fall Guys.
The developers made fun of him, after which his video views soared, and he finally won the coveted crown (news about this also increased the activity of the community).Attractiveness for brands

the style of Fall Guys, its accessibility and lack of cruelty forced major brands to pay attention to the game;

KFC, Walmart and even Sberbank have already published their costume designs for the project;
this opens up great opportunities for Mediatonic to cooperate with global companies — both advertising and charity.
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