When Elden Ring was released on February 25th, 2022, it became a surprise hit and an overnight TikTok culture phenomenon. Regardless of what any Souls-Borne fan would like you to believe, the 12 million copies Elden Ring sold in two weeks was a shock to just about everyone. Likewise, the same thing can be said of the recent success of PlayStation’s live service game, Helldivers 2.
Sony has done little to no marketing for Helldivers 2. There were no TV ads, reviewers were not sent copies, there was no press event, it was even a $40 budget game. A few months ago their marketing strategy made some sense as Helldivers comes from a 2015 era of PlayStation where Sony published AA or borderline indie games to fill the AAA gaps on PS4. In addition to this, the development team had no idea just how popular their game would be. It has taken two weeks for the developers to accommodate the massive rush of players.
Helldivers 2 Goes Viral
So what changed with Helldivers 2 and why was this so unexpected? The real reason behind this is, that we live in a new world now where TikTok has emboldened billions of people internationally to create content around the clock. Becoming viral on TikTok can put you in front of billions of people for just a moment. According to Counttik.com, Helldivers-related hashtags have been seen by over 2 billion people. That is just videos that have hashtags, and none of that is sponsored content.
There have been a number of viral videos, mostly funny moments from the game. One that stands out comes from user sarahebaus who started the “Wives of Helldivers” trend with her funny videos supporting her partner who plays. The 160K views this TikTok has, has more than 10% of the total views the Helldivers 2 launch trailer has on the official PlayStation YouTube channel. It has almost 50% of the views of the announcement trailer from the State of Play.
The billions of engagements on TikTok have created this lighting-in-a-bottle moment for Sony and Arrowhead games where it has gone viral and has surpassed gaming culture and moved into pop culture. This is exactly what happened when Elden Ring launched in 2022.
How TikTok Changed Souls-Borne Games Forever
While fantastic, the Souls-Borne games are niche, challenging, and unwelcoming to casual players. So it makes sense that the series has struggled to reach mainstream success. In the past 14 years, collectively, the six Fromsoft Souls-Borne games have sold around 25 million copies. This number includes the many re-releases that got Dark Souls 3 to 10 million copies. So what changed to have Elden Ring sell 23 million copies alone?
While using the same metrics for Helldivers 2, Elden Ring has around 40 billion views, in marketing terms, that number of engagements is astronomical. To put this in perspective, if .1% of these engagements generated a sale of the game, that would move 40 million copies of the game. The one thing that Elden Ring has over other games from Fromsoftware, is that moment in time when it became part of pop culture, even for just a few weeks. As TikTok users showed off their skills or spouses vented frustrations over broken controllers, Elden Ring grew in popularity with each TikTok video.
Video game publishers are incredibly far behind when it comes to leveraging social media. Both games seeing viral success on TikTok is entirely organic. What we are going to see in the next five to ten years is, that publishers will try to control and generate this content using influencers to kick off the conversations to try to start traction. As fans of the games, we are in a fun and interesting place with social media marketing right now. But it will not last for long.
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