How VOID Interactive amassed 5m hours watched for their shooter game ‘Ready or Not’

The secrets behind the game's hit influencer campaign

Feature by Sponsored Article Contributor

Published on March 18, 2024

VOID Interactive's first game Ready or Not was a chart topper, garnering 1.5 million views on Twitch during the first 24 hours after launch. It wasn't a fluke. The small remote team at VOID Interactive had many factors working against them but a successful creator launch campaign propelled their game to become one of the most watched titles in the world last year.

In 2024, Ready Or Not is up there with the top first person shooter games in terms of popularity as the developer continues to roll out upgrades and updates.

VOID Interactive's marketing head, Behrad Sabet, sat down with Lurkit to talk about Ready Or Not's stellar launch and the company's direction in the future. With 12 years of experience in marketing under his belt, Sabet believes Ready Or Not was successful because it's just a great game. According to Sabet, no amount of marketing is enough when you don't have a good product.

“From a commercial, marketing, and brand point of view, Ready Or Not was a massive success," he says. "Just seeing us up there, a self-publishing indie studio, with AAA games with huge established developers and publishers is great. You don’t see that often.”

How they did it

Goal: With only a small team, VOID still aimed for AAA level visibility. After being in early access for almost two years, Ready Or Not had already reached a niche audience that lived and breathed FPS. However, the developer aimed to dominate Twitch and Steam charts and form a solid footing in the shooter genre with its first title, Ready Or Not.

Sabet says: “Our main goal was making this burst, but if you go for the burst, then I want to make sure that for these 24 hours, we have a AAA level of visibility. Therefore, you need to get in the top 5 categories of Twitch.”

Challenge: While Sabet firmly believed that working with the creators was the best way to go about this strategy, he had his qualms. Connecting with the right creators who would be willing to work within the budget, considering the tight timeline, was the biggest challenge for VOID.

Compared to an elaborate strategy spread out through the calendar, the three month burst marketing called for a bigger budget to convince quality creators.

“You need to take into account that you won’t be able to work budget efficiently on time constraints. When you need something done in a shorter time, you have to pay more. But I’m impressed that Lurkit was able to navigate that challenge.”

Solution: Rather than burdening the marketing team, which was composed of just three individuals at the time, VOID Interactive sought a one-stop shop. The budgeting and time problems were both effectively addressed by leveraging Lurkit's platform, thereby streamlining operations for the marketing team and ensuring a successful creator program launch.

In a short time, VOID had applications from skilled streamers interested in trying out their game. At one point, the team at VOID had too many applications.

At the same time, VOID leveraged Lurkit’s customer success team to save considerable time by streamlining the process of contacting large creators individually, vetting them, negotiating, and setting up tasks.

Result: Combined with Lurkit's platform, AAA-campaign management and VOID's efforts in plating the best product in a short time, the reception of Ready or Not has been more than excellent in the gaming community. They also were able to overachieve on the budget by letting Lurkit’s team scout and negotiate with the largest creators and their representatives.

Key facts:

- 250 creators in the FPS genre
- Reached No.3 on Twitch
- 1.5 million hours watched in first 24 hours
- Five million hours watched in the first two weeks
- 227,000 peak viewers
- 55.000+ concurrent players on Steam
- #208 of the 500 most watched games 2023 after only two weeks

Described by VOID CEO Julio Rodriguez as the “quintessential tactical FPS for our era”, Ready or Not was highly anticipated when it came out of early access on December 13th 2023.

Ready Or Not’s burst launch exceeded expectations

VOID Interactive had big goals for Ready Or Not, and the marketing team completely trusted the developers with rolling out a great game. But, the marketing team had just a few months and a long list of tasks at hand. Since the game's early access phase had already established a solid base of core players, the developer needed to reach the mainstream audience with a jaw-dropping launch that made headlines. The team would craft a marketing strategy that would propel it to the top of the Twitch rankings.

VOID’s team was already users of Lurkits platform but now they also turned to the expertise of Lurkit’s customer success team to build an influencer marketing campaign on a AAA level. Lurkit’s team leaned on the brief from VOID’s marketing team and presented a plan to engage the most recognized content creators within the FPS genre, to really hit it home to the audience who enjoy these games.

Lurkits team worked with their native technology to scout for creators that would fit the customers’ brief and deem to deliver on the objectives set out. 250 creators accepted the terms and embargo including streamers such as auronplay, shroud, tarik, summit1g, Papaplatte, Cohhcarnage, ironmouse and many more.

And on December 13th, they all started playing Ready or Not at the same time. And the audience loved what they saw.

Ready Or Not Creator Program on Lurkit.gg

With Lurkit as their external marketing partner and a steady finger on the pulse of their target player base, Ready Or Not's launch exceeded expectations. The game debuted on Twitch rank three, peaking at 55,174 concurrent players on Steam in December 2023.

“With Twitch, it’s always intriguing because it comes down to the daily viewership that you have on the platform," said Sabet. "So, it was a massive success for us to see that we had been able to hit rank three on launch day.”

During the first 24 hours the creators managed to, collectively, amass 1.5 million hours watched and the longtail of viewership kept building across the Christmas holiday as well, totalling five million hours watched by the end of 2023.

VOID Interactive leveraged Lurkit’s Creator Program to build a creator community

Sabet explains that influencer marketing is the most impactful way to reach a larger audience in a short time. He explained how he has always trusted in the power of influencer marketing since he himself has been forged in the Twitch community. To execute his plan of an all-out launch, Sabet looked at content creators, and that’s where Lurkit comes in.

"Being able to have Lurkit now is like the best of both worlds," he explains. "You have this self-serving system where you set up your campaigns, recruit your own talent and have a retention-based creator program. But you also have dedicated support at your fingertips to manage large and global campaigns. From outreach to negotiation, you know all of that stuff"

Lurkit’s Creator Program allows marketers to manage vast amounts of creators with little effort because of the platform technology it has built.

In a short time, the VOID Interactive marketing team had a long list of able creators looking to partner with them. From nano to macro streamers, the pool of potential candidates overflowed with talent.

“There was this one funny anecdote that I always tell people. I think we had 7.5K applications from creators, and three days before the release, I blocked the whole evening and brought the backlog down to 4K. And then I went to sleep and returned to my PC, and we were already back to 6.5K.