How We Helped Boom Beach Launch a New Update

As the time for the new update approaches, players have usually already maxed out their bases and are tapping their feet, longing for more power. This year’s HQ25, the quarter-century HQ and a very special occasion as such, has allowed them to do just that. We helped craft the narrative, get players excited, and spread the word!

THE CHALLENGE

As opposed to previous update releases, Supercell wanted to do things differently this year with a three-part release - this encourages players to upgrade their HQs over time rather than in one fell swoop, and so extracting the most value out of the content put out there.

What they needed was a creative way to package it so that players understood the change and welcomed it. Supercell wanted us to tell the same story throughout the three releases, and not to give players the sense that there were three separate updates. In order to achieve this, the change in the update process had to be backed up by an engaging story that was congruent with the Boom Beach world.

Would the troops think they only needed a bit of upgrading at first, only to realise that the Blackguard was too powerful? Were the builders unable to meet their deadline? Did the baddies ruin their plans? It was down to us to figure it out, and to beautifully tell the story in three separate animations that would be released through social.

THE BIG IDEA

In order to make narrative sense of the massive HQ25 update being released in three parts, we decided to go down the musical route; so we created two tracks that would end up building to a third, massive, and bonkers hip-hop crescendo!

Here’s the story… After intercepting news of the HQ25 update on their wireless, Dr. T, Lt. Hammerman and Col. Gearheart became SKULL N’ TENTACLES, the most villainous rock band in the whole of Boom Beach (and all time)!

Fuelled by rage at the news of HQ25, the bad guys ramped up excitement and musical fun over the three months. The songs that we wrote for them increased with anger, reacting to each and every advancement of the Allies update. Their performance let the Commanders know that they were fighting back, their takeover of Boom Beach unfaltering! 

HOW WE DID IT

We wrote and oversaw the production of the band's three maniacal tracks, as well as three months of community content. We used a clever and stylised approach to the music videos in order to extract the very best creative outcomes from the budgets and assets at our disposal. This included light-touch 3D for bespoke posing of the villains, in-house game capture of the update features itself, strong and detailed design execution.

Knowing that our audience loves to dissect our posts and solve any mysterious happenings on the beach, we teased them with an illustration of the villains soundproofing their bunker, to get players pondering...

The devil is in the details, so we hid easter eggs such as graffiti in the music videos themselves. We also used them to celebrate our players’ achievements with a leaderboard in the theme of the band’s tour poster. 

We know that players love to see the characters in the game interacting as they would do when they’re ‘off-duty'. Our motion comic series peeked a sodden glimpse at one of the evil group’s hilarious failings - the high-tide filming of one of their music videos!

“For this very special quarter-century HQ update, we wanted to try a different way of doing things and give our players a different experience. Waste was pivotal in helping us find a creative way to communicate the change seamlessly, and the response from the players has been fantastic!" - Laura

THE IMPACT

The videos earned nearly 200k organic views, surpassing benchmarks on key channels like YouTube, where it earned 30% more shares than average. 

On Facebook the series earned 5 x higher FB reach, and on Twitter an active engagement rate that was 57% higher than the benchmark. The teaser posts on Instagram outperformed engagement benchmarks by 70%.

One of the biggest battles for a mature game like Boom Beach is maintaining player positivity and enthusiasm, and our HQ25 campaign generated significantly higher positive sentiment than normal content benchmarks, with a swathe of comments celebrating the freshness and progress the game has made since it first began.