March Monster Madness
Monster Hunter, inZOI, and the Black Soup Bonanza!
Look what comes Marching into the building - Another divulgence of saucy secrets in the Influencer Marketing space you do NOT want your parents to know about.
That being said, while extremely busy, March has been a month of both cooling down from the Q1 busyness, and preparing for the next barrage of campaigns to go live. April is set to have 5 extremely fun launches in short succession, so keep an eye out for its edition as it will be chock-full of nice numbers. In the meantime, please allow us to humbly brag about our March’s activities, as we dive into our contributions to two of the biggest game launches of 2025 (so far) - Monster Hunter: Wilds and inZOI!
By the way - want to be in our newsletter too? Why not run a campaign with Black Soup! From AAA mega studio to solo indie, your game will always benefit from more eyeballs.
Monster Hunter: Wilds - Capcom (DE, FR, EMEA)
Campaign timeframe: February 28, 2025 (which is practically March, right?)
I feel like a broken record, but it’s worth asking every time we write up a piece on a game of this size; “How do you market one of the most anticipated games of the year?”. That’s the question we started with as well, as this monster-bashing, tail-severing, hunter-gathering, action-packed role playing game developed by Capcom was topping the hype charts when we began to work on it. The solution? Identify the target audiences, and latch them together in unique co-op content featuring their favorite creators.
Thanks to our multi-national team, each regional expert (put that on your CV) got to work on hunting down the perfect method of marketing this monster of a game. Though each region received a hand-crafted strategy, each of which being quite different from the other, they maintained some similarities due to the game’s nature. By sharing what works with each other, everyone including Capcom was kept up-to-date on both the best practices and results.
Let’s dive into some similarities. All three regional plans were built around the different tiers, or personas that might be looking at a stream or video on Monster Hunter. The highest and easiest to market tier are the veterans, seasoned hunters who know what they’re looking for. The second are lapsed players who gave up hunting a few years back, but should be eager to hop back into the saddle. The third practically was everyone else; newcomers to the series, who will probably be the hardest to market to. With this foundation confirmed, each team got to work assembling a selection.
Another similarity was content type; though the amount varied for each region, we universally went for streamed content supported by social media posts, to capitalize on the live challenge aspect and to maximize fast-paced viewership.
Finally, we universally took stock of not just their experience with the franchise, but also when they had last covered the series, in addition to the last time they played a similar (benchmark) title - though we always do the latter for all our campaigns.
Gastronogeek’s Rajma Masala recipe à la Monster Hunter Wilds
If we were to remain true to the theme, we’d show you a series of cutscenes of us cooking up a hot and gorgeous-looking meal to represent the work we did. Sadly, the person that’s writing this cannot cook even if his life depended on it, so you’re going to have to imagine our team using pots and pans to create the highest quality of spreadsheets and emails you’ve ever seen, because wow - a 100% response rate, with only three refusals? At this point, we were feeling the hype as much as the creators were.
Let me save you from reading any more buildup, and go straight for the head with some stats!
France: 2 squads of three creators each playing for 3 straight days to dominate Twitch, plus an actual chef, putting out 18 streams and 9 VOD’s, 4 TikTok’s and 21 social posts.
Germany: 4 four-person squads for 16 streams and 16 social media posts, with an additional 55 organic streams that followed shortly after (we had to stop counting at some point).
Italy & Spain: 7 two-person squads landing us 17 sponsored streams, 3 TikTok’s and 20+ social media posts.
Which is all well and good, but especially when this is coupled with excellent results. Luckily, we have plenty to share. In total, 234 thousand sponsored hours watched (that’s nearly quarter of a million);EMEA getting over 4,5hrs average overtime; Gastronogeek’s enormously popular posts on TikTok and Instagram garnering 1+ million combined views; SimplyOzzy, Repaz and Sterzik all massively overperforming all estimations. I mean, should I keep going…?
To quote our own post-mortem; Monster Hunter was as smooth-sailing as Capcom could’ve made it. Though partially due to predictable hype and excitement around an excellent game, the communication with the Capcom teams was outstanding, and — combined with the focused planning and direct approach — made the difference here. The guild authorizes you to play Monster Hunter: Wilds!
inZOI - KRAFTON
Campaign timeframe: March 19th - 27th and beyond
Back in January, KRAFTON and Black Soup first started going back and forth on how to handle the enormous hype-train that is inZOI. In case you’ve been living under a rock, inZOI is a rare new entry into the life-sim genre, and intends to enter in a big way. A fresh take, from scratch, with its own approach? Challenge accepted, though we definitely required some buffs for this mission, ones that KRAFTON was happy to supply.
inZOI strategy was thought up in advance by KRAFTON themselves, where they were the artist, but we held the brush! Although it may seem strange, our approach involved 4 parallel campaigns, of which we can only divulge into one (sorry). Luckily, it’s the big and important one: the organic campaign. By directly contacting 500+ creators, we were able to properly measure interest for the upcoming announcements and Early Access release, though that quickly rose to 600 due to creators getting in touch with us, plus some last-minute additions. The more the merrier! These creators were all personally invited for coverage on all three major beats that we were involved with. We started off with a showcase / co-streaming campaign that included sending some sweet merch. We followed it up with a playtest that included a select few creators. And finally, we ended with the Early Access launch where inZOI was sent into the wild wild world!
And what did this leave us with? 578 creator activations, a result befitting of the title. Through weekly reporting, we counted a steady output of content from these creators, ending in a grand total of 2000+ pieces of content (including social media posts and short-form content) from 18 global regions. All that brought the final tally to a staggering >35 million views and >1.3 million minutes watched. Wow! The sheer volume of content coming through was a sight to behold, and definitely made many of us work hard to keep track of it all. Besides ongoing upkeep, splitting all of this up into categories was a big help in making sure everything was clear to digest for both ourselves and KRAFTON.
And we’re glad we did, otherwise we might’ve missed some fantastic results that we cannot leave uncovered. Twitch results were dominated by Papaplatte, Rubius and Joueur_du_Grenier; harou_; Yoona and Kurolily got us our viral Shorts hits; TmarTn2, GameRiot and Caylus each came in with heavy hitters on YouTube; the hype-train truly arrived at these stations. But the massive cherry on top was Spain firmly establishing their dominance in our charts. Among those not already mentioned are Duvries, BaityBait, Mprin, and Victoriarodrgzz. Each played their massive part in combining to produce nearly 300 individual pieces of content. Truly, every single creator was so extremely hyped that it made the task of just sending a key feel like we were handing out presents, and the community just kept on carrying the torch.
All this to say, what a success. Numbers-wise, this was a homerun. On our own end, we definitely pushed and found some of our limits, only to pick them up and move them further. The lessons we learned this month will go on to influence many more to come, and we sincerely hope to put these back into practice with KRAFTON in the near future.
Black Soup Bonanza, 1st edition!
Our instructions to the newsletter monkeys were very clear when we first started this newsletter: No internal stuff! Talk about campaigns, partners, numbers — good things that do well in a newsletter. And even though that is still extremely important and interesting to do, it’s in our soupy veins (gross) to mix things up every once in a while. That goes both for our newsletter, and our team events!
Alright, so Monster Hunter and inZOI were the 2 biggest game releases of 2025 so far. But a strong contender for 3rd would be our own brand new game show - the Black Soup Bonanza! It was a silly little last-minute team event idea that was to take place remotely, but quickly became so much more as it was bundled with a full-blown hype campaign, “professional” live broadcast, custom voting tool (thanks Alexandre!) and an award ceremony!
When was our company officially founded? What was the most expensive activation ever? Which one of us was the largest yapper (we’ve been told this means “talks a lot”)? Who can guess the most games when described by my mother, who - bless her soul - doesn’t understand video games? These age-old mysteries might never be answered, but everyone gave it a damn good showing. It was a close race, but a good race, and it left us feeling good and refreshed after the busy period of Q1. Work hard, play hard!
Thank you again for reading. As a reward, here’s a lil’ teaser for next month - Do you like indie games? Because we do, and we have half a dozen lined up. Will we crash and burn!? Will we end up victorious, bringing glory (and streamers) to some awesome independent titles!? Will we have more cliffhangers!? No. See you in May!
Stay soupy!
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