Wrapping up 2024 - and Ravenswatch!
Oh my goodness, what time is it! January already? 2024, where did you go?! You truly were a year filled with madness and amazing games (but mostly madness). Before you leave, we have a couple more games to talk about - While time progresses, Black Soup does not sit still.
Ravenswatch - Console Launch & Challenge campaign
Do you know we love Ravenswatch? Nacon did as well. They also happened to know we wanted to run another marketing campaign for it as soon as possible. It seems that ‘soon’ was now, as Ravenswatch was about to launch to consoles! And while it’s always a joy to reactivate past creators and involve new ones in a follow-up campaign, we don’t mind spicing it up a bit with a little challenge.
The Heroes of the Reverie challenge gave creators a great excuse to team up and score points. The challenge had to be achievable within the sponsor window, whether they had played for hundreds of hours or started the game fresh, and would reward all participants with gift subscription. That being said, there would also be a winner, who’d be going home (or rather, will get sent to their home) a Unique trophy made specifically for this campaign. Exciting!
Though the battle was fierce and the points were unbelievably close, it were Alphacast & Gius who brought forth a French victory with 91 amazing points. Though it must be said that SingSing & XCaliburYe managed to bring in 88 points with only a bit of practice, claiming a dominant 2nd place, followed by Strippin & Criken with 74 points in 3rd. A real nailbiter!
What also felt very good …
…was the simultaneous YouTube activation netting us 325,000+ views! PlayStationGrenade, Cogumelando and GregContinue were a joy to work with and put the cherry on top for this campaign, together with the repeat streams from several Twitch creators.
It must be said that our personal highlight with these campaigns will always be giving subs live on stream, and making an amazing trophy to remember the campaign by for the rest of time. Ravenswatch is a lot of fun to work on and has given us great opportunities and results, and we’re extremely proud of our work.
Our 2024 - The numbers, Mason!
It shouldn’t surprise you that we have some spreadsheet-savvy folk in our team. One such member (who happens to be writing this newsletter) gets a warm fuzzy feeling from seeing a big dataset combined into cold hard stats. Why don’t we take a look at the most interesting ones?
(No single stat check would be complete without a sidenote; these are numbers from April 1st until December 31st, for financial year reasons. In addition, while financial details are the juiciest, we’re leaving them out this time.)
If there’s one thing we get asked a lot (that is to say, about 3 times per year), it is what our biggest campaign is out of the 68 campaigns we did these past 9 months. Well, for 2024, it was a tie between Space Marine II and Tales of the Shire! With 61 sponsored creators, they just beat Destiny 2’s 57 creators. Corepunk just missed out of the top 3 with 51.
That being said, our monthly ongoing activities for Steelseries are worth mentioning too. Though not a classical campaign, they still bring in over 84 individual activations from a pool of creators.
The topline stats are also fun to look at; with 1,013 entries, this year saw us reach out even more creators than previous years for campaigns big and small. Of course we like to brag about the biggest creators we’ve been able to work with, like Nerdforge, HandOfBlood (5 times!), and JackFrags, but to us it’s the variety that really proves our worth; 480 individual sponsored creators over a 9 months time period is incredible to us.
Some of those collaborations are facilitated by gracious agencies around the world that we’d can’t leave out either: Thank you to GG Talent & Loaded, INSTINCT3, INSIGHT and Fenix Down for each helping us with over 30 activations each.
As for our more involved creative campaigns, we got involved with over 20+ Tournaments for the likes of Respawn Entertainment, Riot, and Ubisoft, along with 20+ additional productions. Among these productions, more than 100 pieces of content were created, with another 100 loot packages sent out. To finish off, a major highlight was getting to work on the League Of Legends LEC & Worlds tournaments in the DACH region this year. The biggest kudos go out to our creative team for their efforts, as the results speak volumes.
Alright, let’s do one more. Back-of-the-napkin-maths lands me at 3375 organic outreaches in the last 9 months (most of whom get a 2nd and 3rd follow up as well). We are not even counting the 2290 creator outreach we did for Make a Wish in that number, given that it was a very unique campaign. Organic campaigns - when executed well - are often worth it, especially when the game is indie. Our biggest outreaches were done for Planet Crafter (both its launch and DLC release),Memoriapolis, and Wild Woods, with each of those at >300 outreaches! Special shout out to Tales of the Shire again here as well, since it was not only big at 300 creators reached out to as well, but also unique in both complexity and results!
Wow, you’ve truly seen some numbers now. Doesn’t it feel good? It’s kind of amazing how these start out as just characters on a spreadsheet, but end up as full-on videos and streams, with character and personality driving new audiences to play the awesome games that we get to work on, all the props of which go out to the creators we worked with. Let’s do it some more!
T’was the season of giving
Finally a big thank you to all of our partners big and small for your kind words and sweet gifts. It’s amazing we get to work with all of you, and these serve as yearly reminders of the wonderful people that we share this incredible industry with.
2024 was full of releases big and small, and Black Soup is happy to have played a small part in this weird and crazy world. Want to be a part of it in 2025? Reach out to us through the usual means, and let’s get your game onto the internet.
Stay soupy!
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