WARFRAME

We love a good challenge here at Hammer Creative, and developing a UA strategy and suite of assets for WARFRAME – a nine-year-old live-service game built on vast lore and deeply-integrated mechanics – presented a particularly challenging challenge.

Delivered Elements:
User Acquisition Strategy
UA Ads
Gameplay Trailers
CG Trailers

Services:
UA Strategy
Concepting & Script Development
Editorial
Game Capture
CG Production
Music Supervision
A/V Post Production

THE CHALLENGE

First, there was the density of the game itself. Any live service game naturally accumulates quite a bit of lore/systems/content if it’s fortunate and good enough to run for nine years, but WARFRAME is dense by design. Famously, a major narrative beat isn’t revealed until ninety hours into the game.

This high barrier of entry can make it difficult for lapsed players to return and for new players (and creative agencies) to be onboarded in the first place.

Nevertheless, we, and everyone who saw our UA campaign, sprinted into a patented slide-turned-bullet-jump and easily cleared that high barrier of entry!

OUR STRATEGY & PROCESS

We began by developing a UA strategy aimed at demystifying the player experience.

These were premium UA ads, targeted at audiences with specific messages and features that appealed to different types of players – from combat gamers, to sci-fi junkies, to MMO and co-op fans. We evolved our strategy as we released assets into the wild, honing in on what players were connecting with most.

DE was thrilled with the results – our UA spots led to a surge in engagement and interest in Warframe, bringing players back to the game they loved while also bringing in new members to the passionate community.

THE NEW WAR

THE NEW WAR expansion had been in the works for years and needed a CG trailer worthy of the wait. Primarily created for the core community (current and lapsed players) who had been eagerly awaiting the expansion, we leaned into learnings from our UA campaign to give the community what they wanted (and deserved!) – an epic CG Trailer that leaned into emotion over narrative, letting players experience a taste of the stakes and journey that awaited them.

THE PATH

CHOOSE YOUR WARFRAME

LET WARFRAME BE WARFRAME

As we immersed ourselves in WARFRAME UA, we gained a deep appreciation for the game as a whole and we then proposed something unusual for a UA asset. We asked

“WHAT IF WE JUST LET WARFRAME BE WARFRAME?”

Rather than slicing and segmenting different aspects of the player experience for different audiences, we proposed making a UA asset that made the game’s entire depth and breadth the central focal point, and we packed as much of it as we could into a short spot.

The resulting spot outperformed nearly every other.