Perspective
How Gaming Twitter fell for Fall Guys
Launch lessons from one of the biggest gaming drops of 2020.
Twitter has always been the place for people to talk about their favorite video games. It’s only natural; both are rooted in bringing people together. So when Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout — a battle royale game developed by Mediatonic — dropped in August of this year, it was no surprise that people took to the platform to share their favorite moments in the game.
What did come as a surprise, though, was the absolutely massive surge in followers. We spoke with Fall Guy’s community director, Oliver Hindle, about the game’s success on Twitter, why authenticity is so important, and how brands can earn points with their own audiences.
Fall Guys is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, game releases of 2020. How has it been seeing its popularity skyrocket?
It's been crazy. I don’t think we ever expected just how big it would become. When I joined the company in 2019, we had a Twitter account but it only had like 3,000 followers. My goal was to hit a hundred thousand followers by the end of 2020. Now, with 1.5 million followers, we’ve obviously smashed that goal.
Up until recently, Twitter was the only social channel you were using. Why is that?
In the beginning, I wanted to invest all my time and energy into a single platform that I knew would work really well. Historically, Twitter has been great when it comes to communicating with an audience. On top of that, it’s a powerful way to connect with people outside your immediate circle, which helps the conversations grow in a more organic way. For Fall Guys, all we needed to do was show people a small clip of the game and they immediately understood what the game was and why it was fun. Twitter made it easy for people to share those clips with their friends, which led to the content becoming viral.
Why Twitter versus other platforms?
For us, Twitter is the one-stop shop. You can get patch notes out on the platform, link to images and videos, communicate in real time with the audience — all in the same Tweet. It ends up leading to these great, organic conversations that really take off. The platform has really made it easy for people to Tweet some of their artwork, memes, and any fun stuff at us. With other platforms, you have to focus on one aspect, whereas with Twitter you can basically do anything. It’s great.
The game even caught the attention of timthetatman, a notorious gaming personality. Can you tell us about that legendary moment when he earned his first win?
One thing we’ve tried to do on Twitter is have stories pan out over a series of Tweets. So with Tim, what happened was this really organic conversation. We hadn’t spoken to him privately about this — it all happened through public Tweets. Our audience was watching this unfold and then hashtags started trending. It really escalated into this moment that was bigger than the game itself. When he finally got the crown, the hashtag #HEDIDIT started trending and it just showed us how much people had invested in this moment.
How else have you interacted with other brands on the platform?
One thing we did was the Battle of the Brands. Basically, whoever pledged the largest amount of donation to our special effects team would get a costume of their brand in the game. For two weeks, these brands faced off and tried to outbid each other, and we were covering the whole thing through Tweets. It was a big moment for our audience because they could see it all happening in real time, and so it became another moment that was much bigger than the game itself.
We recently had a few Tweets with McDonald's and everyone just found it really funny that a game account is talking to McDonald's. They even came up with a few costumes for our characters, with fries and milkshake versions. People really liked that. I think brands should look to Twitter for those opportunities to start conversations and have fun with it.
How else has Twitter helped you?
We use Twitter as our main marketing tool. Anytime we want to promote the game or announce something new, we simply Tweet about it. The press ends up picking it up, so we don’t have to worry about putting out big press releases. Also, we don’t really need to do any A/B testing because we can post within our community and get instant feedback on what resonates with them. We did a survey one time to see what kind of themes people want to see in the future. We set up a Google form and Tweeted it out and ended up getting roughly 25,000 responses. So to get even higher levels of engagement than you would with a professional survey — from our Twitter account — is really cool.
What role will Twitter play for you and Fall Guys moving forward?
Twitter will definitely be our main channel for the foreseeable future. It’s where all our players are and it's been really effective so far. I can't see a world in which we’re not using the platform. Twitter will continue to be the way we interact with everyone, so we look forward to growing our community even further and having fun while doing it.
Zach Mazzotta (@zchmz) is part of the Global Content Partnerships team, managing Twitter’s strategic partnerships with esports leagues/teams, game developers/publishers, and creators to bring premium content to the platform and drive revenue.