How Deep Silver won over thousands of influencers with Dead Island 2

In today's gaming industry, influencer marketing has become an essential strategy for promoting games to a global audience.

However, managing influencer campaigns manually can be a daunting task, especially for AAA publishers who aim to reach millions of potential players at the same time. That's why utilizing a tech platform like Lurkit can significantly enhance the effectiveness of influencer marketing campaigns. This is something that Deep Silver realized and needed to address before its release of Dead Island 2.

Jorge Tavera is the Global Influencer Strategy manager at Deep Silver, the AAA publisher within the media company Plaion (formerly Koch Media). In this article we got to sit down and talk to Tavera about how studios and publishers can ensure immediate traction from day one in the content creator community.

"The reception of Dead Island 2 in the influencer community has been great. We generated over six million views on YouTube during the first two weeks. The game came in as number one in sales in Europe during the weekend launch, " says Tavera.

With only a small team, Tavera has the experience of onboarding thousands of creators without hassle. Much of the hype around the game can be attributed to the 1,200 creators Deep Silver activated through its creator program. Deep Silver’s Dead Island 2 has already sold over two million copies since it was released in April this year.

"We knew in advance that we wanted to onboard hundreds or even thousands of creators in a very short period of time, both to our creator program and campaigns,” explains Tavera. “The process before was a very manual one. The creator had to fill a form, which would land in an email inbox and then someone in my team had to manually make an evaluation of the creator. When you do that, you realize that you spent a week of work and only onboarded 10 people.”

Tavera says that the onboarding process was key to his decision to choose Lurkit.

"Overall, automated onboarding was key for us. We wanted to have time to work with the program and not that much on the onboarding process. This would allow us to put time on the content when we would know that the creators are 100% real and at the same time meet our minimum requirements. This is the flexibility that Lurkit allowed."

Deep Silver knew from the beginning that they wanted to systematically integrate game key campaigns in the creator program.

"This is where Lurkit has an edge compared to other platforms in the market. We have the vision for it to be a campaign-based program, with clear rewards," says Tavera. Lurkit's program and its ability to integrate the campaigns and the creator program seamlessly was a huge plus for the company.

Unlike manual methods such as spreadsheets or working with agencies, Lurkit streamlines the influencer marketing process by providing a comprehensive, all-in-one platform. It allows publishers to search and filter through a database of thousands of influencers, analyze their performance metrics, and communicate with them directly to negotiate contracts and track campaign progress. This eliminates the need for time-consuming and error-prone manual work, as well as the high costs of working with agencies.

“Our goal was 250,000 hours watched on Twitch through Lurkit the first month,” says Tavera.”We doubled that to 530.000 in the first two weeks of the campaign, and this is super cool. For YouTube, our goal was 100.000 views and we got 6.2 million views in the first two weeks.

It is not just about the campaigns, but many creators are reaching out and want to continue playing the game. We now have good relations with all of these creators, and it is all thanks to the creator program we built on Lurkit."

For more stories on how Lurkit supported games publishers, click here. You can find out more about Lurkit and what the team offers through here.