[EXCLUSIVE] Chat with Expedition 33's Marketing Director: How They Sold 3.3m Copies in 33 days.
From strategy to success: an insider's view of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's Marketing Campaign.
Following my extensive post about the marketing and business reasons behind the success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I wanted to follow up with an interview featuring a team member who directly contributed to it.
Fortunately, Kepler's Marketing Director is one of my oldest friends in the industry. Our friendship dates back to our time at Bandai Namco from 2013 to 2016, where we both began our careers. Since then, we have remained close friends, united by our shared love of video games, manga, Japan, and many other interests, such as… me getting schooled in Smash Bros.
I am super happy and proud of what he has achieved since we went our separate ways. With that being said, we had the chance to chat about this incredible success on and off the record. For the off-the-record part... well, that stays between us! For the rest, please find a summary of our chat below. Please note it has been slightly edited for readability.
Pierre (on the left)
First, who are you, for those who aren't lucky enough to know you?
Pierre SCIAMA-TWARDOWSKI, Head of Marketing at Kepler Interactive, and an inveterate manga, board games, and video games fan.
The Xbox Games Showcase reveal provided Expedition 33 with immediate visibility. How did you secure that placement for a debut title from a relatively unknown studio?
Kepler Interactive and Kowloon Nights have always maintained strong relationships with platform holders. For example, Sifu and Tchia were featured in various PlayStation Showcases, while Scorn and Flintlock: The Siege Of Dawn launched day one on Game Pass.
As the publisher, it's our responsibility to make sure we present the games from our portfolio in their best possible light to potential partners. In this instance, Xbox showed strong interest in the game from the get-go, and the Day One Game Pass deal opened the door to multiple opportunities, such as the Xbox Showcase and the Xbox Developer Direct.
The "Barbenheimer" framing when Oblivion Remastered shadow-dropped was widely praised. Was this a planned contingency or a rapid response strategy? How quickly did your team develop that messaging?
When the rumours started growing on social media about the potential shadow drop of Oblivion, we had to take a moment and weigh up our options. We had built such great momentum so far and had a clear release window. To go from highlight of the week to underdog against one of the most established franchises in gaming felt like it could be the difference between a "great" launch and just a "good" one.
We did discuss multiple hypothetical scenarios based on the rumours we had seen. Still, our community manager and communications senior manager wanted to trigger some form of online interaction with Virtuos, Bethesda, and ultimately the RPG community. Respectful, playful, and strategic.
We had a couple of assets for that purpose on the back burner just in case, and the Barbenheimer messaging just hit the mark. People came online for Oblivion and left with more Expedition 33 in their minds. In the end, being treated as the underdog, as if a battle between David and Goliath was at play, showed how instrumental the Expedition 33 community has been in establishing its success.
The Ben Starr casting story is incredible - fans recognised his voice in the trailer before any official announcement. How did this unexpected community reaction influence your subsequent marketing decisions?
The casting of Ben Starr himself is a fascinating story. His voice was recognised from demo tapes by a developer from Sandfall who was a fan, and we asked him to voice the trailer. Only after that was he then cast for the character of Verso.
Even without the official cast reveal, fans recognized his voice and he playfully shared the asset online, which did half a million views or so on X. From there we knew that both him, Jennifer English, and the other members of the cast would be an incredible bridge between the game and the community, and they have been amazing to work with throughout.
For the character trailers, you strategically timed releases to coincide with smaller showcase events like Future Games Show Spring.
How did you measure the ROI on these smaller marketing moments compared to major reveals?
We iterated on the character series, and they ultimately became the final stretch for the campaign over the last month. Both Future Games Show Spring Showcase and Twitch Galaxies Showcase were perfectly lined up (Thursdays) for our cadence, so we tweaked our schedule a bit to accommodate both.
FGS, being presented by Jennifer English, gave it a nice twist, and both showcases also offered visibility on Steam, which, in the final stages of the campaign, is key to driving wishlists and pre-orders - a welcome addition.
What marketing element delivered the highest return relative to your investment?
I would say the partnership with Xbox drove the highest return, given that it allowed us to get Expedition 33 a platform for the announcement, behind-closed-doors opportunities both at Gamescom and GDC, and most importantly, the Developer Direct in January for our release date announcement.
Our preview beat was also mostly organic and cemented the trust of the press and content creators in the project.
Looking back at the full campaign, which aspect of your marketing strategy do you believe contributed most significantly to bridging the gap between indie perception and AAA-level success?
Giving the game AAA-like treatment was not the most difficult aspect of the strategy, even for an indie, small team.
This is primarily thanks to the Xbox partnership, as well as the retail partnerships with SEGA in Japan, Bandai Namco in Europe and Southeast Asia, Maximum Entertainment in the US, the collector's edition, and the casting of Charlie Cox and Andy Serkis. This, combined with the stunning visual presentation and initial promise of the game, prepared the ground for potentially large success.
Throughout the campaign, most indicators pointed towards a great launch. But the element that really allowed the game to blow up at launch was most likely the Metacritic score on the day before launch, sitting at 92 and not coming down. This seems to have created a form of FOMO and incredible storytelling for a debut game from a small studio.
The fine line to walk was to treat these elements as additional benefits of a good marketing campaign for an otherwise very indie, passion-led project. The complexity was making sure players wouldn't lose focus on the size of the team or the fact that it's their debut game, while enjoying the flashier elements of the campaign.
Not losing that indie spirit and soul was key for us, and we made a conscious effort to double down on the humility, transparency, and authenticity of the team. One aspect that helped us do that was also a more humble price point, which was an intentional choice to provide easier access to the game for the community and not go head-to-head with the real AAA juggernaut games launching from major first and third-party publishers.
Any fun anecdote during the campaign?
I think the fact that Ben Starr was a key ambassador of the game while being unable to say anything about his character until launch was quite funny. This actually led to more online speculation and funny moments as he played along really well.
What was the biggest challenge?
If Sandfall Interactive is composed of only around 30 core individuals, Kepler Interactive is barely 50, and its core marketing team consists of around 12 people for the entire portfolio, not everyone of whom worked on Expedition 33.
From a marketing standpoint, the biggest challenge was simply the titanic task of holding the reins of the campaign, keeping consistency across our messaging while delivering an exhaustive campaign on all fronts.
If you were advising another Marketing Director launching a new IP from a relatively unknown studio, what one lesson from the Expedition 33 campaign would you consider most valuable to share?
I'll be honest - there's been such a good alignment of planets in this case, from creative, production, partnerships, and marketing perspectives, that it's complicated to draw lessons that would be replicable or scalable 1:1.
In the case of Expedition 33, the two things we always tried to keep in mind were: don't lose focus on the nature of the team or the project. In our case, it was delivering an exhaustive campaign without compromising the messaging around the size of the team or scope of the project.
Do not overreach. Games like Expedition 33 have an immediate visual appeal and identity that helped it secure a lot of interest from all parties from the very early stages of the campaign. This is not something that can be artificially crafted for the marketing campaign, and although I would always recommend striving for a unique identity online, you have to stay true to the pillars of the game and identify its core strengths. Draw the identity from there. As a developer, think about that identity as something that would create a unique proposition for your fans.
Thanks a lot to Pierre and Kepler for their time! I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I liked doing it.
Until next time.
Rachid
Great piece! Love his advice for other marketing directors at the end.