DayZ used Lurkit's Creator Program to double viewership and boost sales of Frostline DLC
RESULTS
530k+ copies sold
DayZ's new Frostline DLC sold over 530k copies in three months
7,1M hours watched
4,2M for the Frostline DLC alone in October — 7,1M hours in total
6,7M video views
Youtube coverage in release month focused on DayZ Frostline DLC
Company overview
Bohemia Interactive is a Czechia-based independent game development and publishing studio, known for the ARMA series, DayZ, Take On Mars, Ylands, and more.
Game overview
A land overrun with an infected "zombie" population, where you compete with other survivors for limited resources. Will you team up with strangers and stay strong together? Or play as a lone wolf to avoid betrayal? This is DayZ – this is your story.
DayZ Frostline brings a new depth of survival gameplay as the bitter cold sweeps across the land. Explore a Frozen World: Step into the frosty wilderness where every decision could mean the difference between life and death.
Products used
Marketing Insights, Creator Program, Missions and Rewards, Assisted Service
The Challenge:
DayZ is now a game that's 11 years old (the standalone version that is) and soon enough the game will be old enough to get its own drinks. However, the hardcore survival game is more popular than ever and doesn't show any signs of slowing, much thanks to Bohemia Interactive's never ending support for the title and their extraordinary support for modding, or "user generated content" as the current hip marketing term.
While the modding scene makes meaningful and impactful contributions to the DayZ experience, the core game needed some new and challenging systems, especially around the survival elements. This is how DayZ's new Frostline DLC came to life. Frostline DLC brought a "breath-taking winter wilderness teeming with new challenges and opportunities for survival", but also a whole new terrain that's set on a snow-covered archipelago called Sakhal, spanning an impressive 83km². Smaller than Chernarus and Livonia terrains, but significantly more difficult to survive due to harsh cold.
The biggest challenge we had was segregating which creators are in and who are out. I think that was the hardest part. I had a limited amount of keys, a limited amount of server space and I had to attract people that know the game well. So I think the most difficult part was streamlining all of these amazing creators, and making the harsh decisions of, where to put the boundaries up."
Scott Bowen, PR & Brand Manager for DayZ
Being around for over a decade, the game developed a very loyal creator base. Some creators almost exclusively produce content for DayZ, like TheRunningManZ or WOBO, and some mega names like summit1g, shroud and IlloJuan regularly come back to DayZ. Based on this knowledge, Scott and his team came up with a great creator marketing plan for the release of Frostline DLC.
The DLC was set to release on 15th of October, so the team decided to reward the most loyal DayZ creators on Twitch and Youtube with early access and allowed them to produce content in the first week of October, approximately two weeks before the public release.
By the second week, they allowed all creators who met the campaign's minimum viewership requirements and aligned with Bohemia Interactive's brand values to participate.
And come the release day, the DayZ team kept the campaign in an always-on stage and allowed new eligible creators to join in at any given time
The Solution:
In order to execute this strategy, DayZ team received expert help from Lurkit's team. We helped with setting up the creator program and key distribution, and offered continuous help on managing the whole activation. Lurkit worked as an extension of Bohemia Interactive for the whole campaign from day one.
This allowed Scott and his team to solely focus on which creators were the most ideal names for the first week's exclusive activation where limited keys and server space were available. This also gave them enough breathing room to effectively choose which creators were eligible for the second week of the activation.
Lurkit helped us immensely in how we could check each creator's activity and how frequently they were producing content and if said content were being received well. We had so many people just asking and then once we dove into Lurkit's data, we were able to determine our ideal creators for each part.
For example, we had some creators who were highly active and influential within the community, but their actual viewership or the content they were producing didn’t match the level of competitiveness shown by others I could track on Lurkit, who were surpassing them for the first week."
Creator Program to the rescue
For the release of Frostline DLC and to maintain DayZ's longtail success, we launched the DayZ Creator Program and onboarded more than 1,000 creators. We prepared shortlists within the platform that let us know which creators in the program were eligible for Week 1 and Week 2. With automated key, briefing and media kit delivery, everything was ready for the activation and things did go pretty smoothly.
Much thanks to the creator program's unique features, Scott was able to activate each creator group at the right time without facing any technical hiccups, track their performance through the Lurkit platform and export in-depth reports. The program's flexible and intuitive structure also helped meet DayZ's particular needs for this big activation and made it super-easy for us to support Scott and his team.
Lurkit's system worked well, but where I was most happy with was the Lurkit team. You customized the experience for our team that best helped us and our community. And that's why I would like to say, like, the biggest praise was that I didn't feel restricted inside Lurkit. And if I needed to get in contact with someone, there was always help. This was, the biggest, the most helpful thing for us. I would say."
The program is still active on the Lurkit platform and attracting more creators organically, helping DayZ maintain its strong presence on both Twitch and YouTube.
The Results
Full campaign performance
The campaign was a huge success for Bohemia Interactive. Together with Lurkit, they were able to onboard and activate over 1,1k content creators across YouTube and Twitch and track not only each creator's performance at a granular level, but also per published content. They were able to execute their strategy flawlessly and double the viewership on Twitch, and triple it on YouTube. This activation also brough back many creators who took a break from streaming DayZ and helped the game maintain strong viewership post activation.
"There's so much manual work that would have to be done. We have a small but humble team and we're all human at the end of the day, and Lurkit took a lot of that pressure off us. It was like 'Okay, this is intuitive That, that makes sense. This button made sense' and the whole pipeline from A to B was just super streamlined. We had a new community manager who came in like two months prior to the release and two prior to the campaign, And even he could learn it really well."
Through strategic activations across the month, DayZ Frostline had over 4,2M hours watched on Twitch live streams and a little over 2M stream hours watched on YouTube. In addition, YouTube videos also garnered a total of 6,7M video views during October 2024. Adding the core DayZ streams into the mix, the game amassed over 7,1M hours watched on Twitch, doubling the average viewership and over 20M video views on YouTube.
Most of the viewership came from English speaking content creators with TheRunningManZ taking the lead across both video views and livestream hours in the full span of October. Being a DayZ champions since the good olden days, he alone generated 2,4M video views on YouTube and 332k hours watched on Twitch. However, in terms of coverage and viewership on Twitch, long time DayZ streamer Smoke was in the top spot with 566k hours watched for the full month.
On the non-English speaking side IlloJuan dominated the Frostline activation with 1,1M views on YouTube and 348k hours watched on Twitch. BibixHD, a long-time DayZ creator from France, also came through with 85.3k views on YouTube and 118k hours watched on Twitch and broke into top 10 creators for DayZ for this specific activation.
Using Lurkit's technology, Bohemia Interactive was able to have full control over the full campaign and make strategic decisions to ensure the DLC had a strong digital footprint in October and further on. This strategy also allowed them to rekindle the flame in many micro and macro tier creators, and acquire new ones to keep interest in DayZ and retain viewership.
Per the above Twitch performance graph, the Frostline launch was a great success, but post-DLC launch viewership may seem like it stagnated. Which is partially true, but the graph doesn't tell the whole story. DayZ usually gets massive viewership boosts from mega-level creators when they tune in, but they come and leave for other games after a while.
This time around, we see regular content coming from new micro and macro-tier creators keeping the week-to-week performance stable, slowly becoming loyal DayZ creators themselves. Building a creator community, doing meaningful collaborations and keeping in touch turns visiting creators into loyal ones. Meaning, if mega creators like summit1g, shroud, elxokas, LIRIK or xQc come back to DayZ, the game's viewership will have much higher spikes and in turn, better sales numbers. After all, DayZ Frostline sold over 530k+ copies within the first three months and counting.
Pre-Launch — Week #1 Performance
As mentioned earlier, Bohemia Interactive had limited server space and player allowance for this event. Meaning creator selection had to be pitch-perfect. This is hard for a game like DayZ, because over the course of many years, the game has generated buzz among tens of thousands of creators.
Adding to the challenge, Scott and his team wanted to let in creators who have been loyal and active, but also folks who have the power to influence other creators and understand the unique hardcore challenges DayZ brings to the table. Consider the fact that Sakhal introduces harsher survival conditions, select creators had to know their way around DayZ extremely well. Luckily, Lurkit's technology was more than ready for this challenge.
"We didn't follow the normal marketing of going for reach first and getting the biggest streamers you can get. We focused on our people first and then broadened our horizons later. This reception with our community… was very well received. and even the press picked it up that we focused on our community. We had expectations on us and, yes, we hit them and went far beyond. And I can't see how we would have done it as effectively as easy without Lurkit."
In Week #1, we onboarded approximately 300 creators. Our primary goal was to highlight why the Frostline DLC is worth players' time and money. While viewership was a secondary objective, both creators and players showed greater-than-expected interest, surpassing all KPIs.
Creators we activated for the exclusive early access generated over 1,4M hours watched on Twitch, and 2,4M video views on YouTube. We also saw 2.8 content produced per creators, which is not something you see everyday, even with some of the most extremely popular AAA-level titles.
Spanish content creator IlloJuan was the most impactful creator in the first week, contributing to nearly half the viewership on YouTube and 1/4 of Twitch.
Pre-Launch — Week #2 Performance
For the second week of pre-launch activation, Bohemia Interactive increased the server space and we allowed all eligible creators who have been onboarded via the creator program. This resulted in more creators tuning in as expected, and even more content being submitted for the Frostline DLC, but viewership slowed down a bit. We expected this outcome since some of the big guns have done their part in the first week and moved on. Plus, the anticipation we built was towards the first week, as is the case with almost any release.
We also supported the early access participation with community key handouts, meaning any creator who was accepted to the program and produced content for the release of DayZ Frostline received a bunch of keys to gift to their community. Handing out keys for free is almost always a great incentive to get coverage for your game, especially when you know there's massive interest in what you're cooking. Handing out a few thousand keys doesn't mean lost revenue, if anything, it's alarming if your key campaigns doesn't get creators interested. Luckily, DayZ has proven its value time and time again and the level of interest shown by creators was very high.
"We had minimum to no error of communication with our influencers. Creators were able to get their release keys and reward keys. Plus, they were able to communicate with us very effectively."
Getting nearly 1k pieces of content produced across Twitch and YouTube for a very exclusive event, and for a game that defines a niche genre like "hardcore survival" is a big win.
The Launch Week Performance
When the long awaited launch day arrived, the chemistry between Bohemia Interactive and Lurkit teams were already at top level. Performance was quite strong again, in fact, the launch week's viewership levels were almost as high as the first week of Frostline exclusive event.
However, Lurkit faced a unique issue here. Many creators who are still actively creating content for Frostline stopped tagging their content properly, which made it hard for us to track which DayZ content was dedicated to Frostline. On top of that, livestream creators were switching between Chernarus (the core map), Livonia (the first DLC map) and Sakhal (Frostline DLC map), meaning attribution took a hit here.
Adding to that, over 20k creators across Twitch and YouTube started producing content specifically for the Frostline DLC outside our campaign with the release. For instance, while we were able to directly track 240k hours watched on Twitch for the DLC upon release, DayZ actually accumulated over 1,5M hours watched in total. A similar story was present on the YouTube side. While we were able to attribute 1,2M viewership directly to Lurkit, DayZ generated over 3M video views on the DLC release week.
We're already back at working together with Bohemia Interactive and planning to focus on the full DayZ experience now and see what we can do together next.
