In China, online gaming has exploded.

But so has bullying.

Over 79% of gamers have at some point been bullied when playing online.

As an industry leader, Samsung wanted to tackle this toxic behaviour head on.

THE COST OF BULLYING. When gamers bully, they pay the price.

There’s a real cost to bullying.

Which made us think: When gamers bully, shouldn’t THEY pay the price?

Our strategy was to hit them where it hurts.

So we made bullies pay for their actions, quite literally.

The strategy goes beyond just awareness and talk.

It’s an example of strategic targeting and going to the heart of the problem. The solve is effective in the very space where the problem exists.

Working with one of the country’s biggest game developers, we hacked ‘Magic Quest’—the biggest game of the year and China’s equivalent to ‘World of Warcraft’.

A key part of the game are in-game purchases (also known as ‘MTX’ or ‘Microtransactions’)—for weapons, armour and power-ups.

They’re a big deal for gamers.

So we made bullies pay for their actions, quite literally.

Since bullying happens within the game’s chatroom, we used the ‘Abusive Language Detection System’ (within the chatroom) and linked it to the pricing database.

Every time the system detected any sign of bullying, it raised the price for the bully.

So the more gamers bullied, the more they paid.

All in real-time. All within the game.

The hacked game gave online bullies a real wake-up call.

During the two-week hijack, over one million bullies paid the price.

With reports of in-game bullying falling by 40%.

Making this China’s most successful anti-bullying drive to date.

The message was loud and clear: There’s a cost to bullying. And now when gamers bully, they pay the price.