For Brawl Stars' 5th anniversary, Starr Park CCTV revolutionized digital storytelling for mobile games, immersing players in a dynamic Unreal Engine simulation with day-night cycles, changing weather, and over 30,000 character variations. Streaming 24/7 through 54 cameras, this rich interactive experience combined six weeks of animation, bespoke story drops, daily journals, and voicemail recordings, with hidden timecodes across social media. Attracting 89 million visits and inspiring 8,500+ fan videos with 130 million views, the campaign significantly elevated community engagement, uncovering the game's lore and pushing player numbers to a three-year high, all without media spend.

Launched in 2018, Brawl Stars quickly ascended to global fame but faced dwindling player numbers over the past three years. In the realm of free-to-play games, retaining players is as crucial as attracting new ones. The initial revelation that Brawl Stars is set in an abandoned amusement park sparked immense excitement and fan speculation. However, the subsequent lack of expansion on the game's lore led to a decline in player engagement. Recognizing this, the 5th anniversary presented an opportunity to rejuvenate the community by delving deeper into the game's backstory.

Introducing new lore into a beloved game carries significant risks, particularly the potential for backlash from a community deeply attached to their own version of the story. So the challenge was to reignite interest in a mature game without alienating its loyal fan base. The solution was Starr Park CCTV: a lore-driven interactive experience that cleverly balanced revealing the game's backstory with allowing the community to discover carefully hidden stories, and generate and share their own theories online. This approach revived curiosity and discussion among players while also involving them in the unfolding story.

Starr Park CCTV successfully reinvigorated the Brawl Stars community, demonstrating the power of storytelling in re-engaging players and propelling the game's momentum. It underscored the importance of continuously nurturing player curiosity and investment in the game's world, especially in a competitive market where player retention is paramount.

Situation:

While excitement in Brawl Stars’ lore was high in the early days of the game, interest and player numbers had waned over time.

Brief:

For the 5th anniversary of Brawl Stars, generate excitement and increase engagement within the player community by using only in-game and social channels. The project needed to build the game's lore, while inspiring fans to develop and share their theories and content on social media.

Objectives:

Generate massive excitement & engagement in the Brawl Stars community.

Reactivate lapsed players.

We drove the creative and production strategy based on strong knowledge and understanding of Brawl Stars’ global target player community. These players have grown up in a world awash in content being beamed and broadcasted at them, versus inviting them in as participants. Yet we know from our player research, social listening, and experience in delivering narrative content that our players enjoy solving puzzles and the open-ended nature of stories that offer more mysterious questions than hard answers.

Thus our approach had to strongly emphasize interactivity in a novel way, and meet them with an unprecedented experience in places and platforms where they were already: in the game, and on social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and X.

Our call to action was straightforward: Discover for yourself the mysterious story of how Starr Park transformed from a happy amusement park into a mayhem-filled battleground.

Traditionally, game origin stories are told through animated films known as cinematics. However, to engage the Brawl Stars community for the game's 5th anniversary, we pivoted to a much more ambitious idea: to craft an elaborate story scavenger hunt delivered directly to players in the game itself, and across social media.

This multimedia approach introduced a novel way for the community to engage with the game’s lore, moving away from the traditional use of cinematics. By investing the community with an interactive experience that unfolded over time, we fostered a much deeper connection between the players and the story. This dynamic energized the community and prompted them to speculate on social media and create their own YouTube content, which in turn drove 130 million views.

We developed a security room simulation in Unreal Engine, and over 55 hours of generative animation, including 30 minutes of bespoke animation dedicated to critical story moments. This extensive content library supported a six-week-long, continuously-evolving narrative adventure starting in early November 2023.

We also developed daily journal entries from a fictional Starr Park security guard, and several voicemails from key characters calling into Starr Park’s emergency call center. And we changed the condition of the CCTV security room every day of the campaign, to mirror how Starr Park transformed from a delightful amusement park into a mayhem-filled battleground.

To boost player engagement, we integrated secret codes into Brawl Stars’ social media posts. When entered within the CCTV simulation, they unlocked significant narrative segments. This added an interactive layer to the storytelling and also gave players a sense of ownership over the narrative as they discovered and shared their findings online.

The Brawl Stars community’s response to CCTV was incredible. Over the course of the activation, nearly 25 million players engaged with CCTV in the game, with a total of 89 million visits.

Fans started generating their own theories online, and discussed them avidly on the game forums. They created over 8500 YouTube videos, which collectively drove over 130 million views, all with $0 in media spend.

On Reddit, YouTube and social media, several top key opinion leaders said that CCTV was the best thing to happen in Brawl Stars in 2023.

Interest in CCTV amongst current and lapsed players helped propel Brawl Stars’ resurgence to its highest player numbers in three years, which in turn, has powered the game’s revenue to new all-time highs.

We do not know of another storytelling execution that’s as ambitious as Starr Park CCTV from a production perspective.

We created a six-week, 24/7 storytelling program that evolved over time. To create this vast amount of content, we used Unreal Engine to create over 55 hours of generative live-streamed animation, with 54 separate cameras that we scattered across Starr Park, covering 30,000 character variants, variable weather, and a true day/night cycle. We also created 30 minutes of bespoke animation, 42 daily journal entries, 3 voicemail recordings, 42 different CCTV room states, and supporting social media content.

In creating this huge volume of content, we overcame significant challenges with our rendering pipeline from Unreal, we pioneered visual storytelling techniques with multiple simultaneous camera angles, and we had to repeatedly increase our streaming bandwidth allocation with our cloud provider because the community’s engagement with CCTV was so intense and unprecedented.