Why Animal Crossing went viral: 3 User-Generated Content Examples
2020 has definitely been a whirlwind, most businesses paused — if not stopped completely -, people lost jobs and everyone was stuck at home for the majority of the year.
Although one might think that the games industry must have benefited from the pandemic, the overwhelming amount of people stuck at home, looking for new activities to pass the time, also meant tons of more competition in the entertainment industry. Would they watch the latest Netflix releases, take up baking or play one of the hundreds of video games at their disposal? This meant games would have to fight for their time even more.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) successfully pulled through the fight and became a global phenomenon. Many things factored into its success, but the biggest contributor was its gamers making content about it, and sharing it online. This is what we call “User Generated Content” (UGC) in marketing, and I want to show you three examples illustrating how UGC can take any product and make it viral across boundaries.
1. Animal Crossing on TikTok
The serene gardens, the (sometimes) creepy villagers, the mysterious language, and the multiplayer aspect of Animal Crossing brought people together to make up stories and laugh together about any little thing in the game. As soon as the game launched, it became a sensation on TikTok, with more than 3.8 billion views on #AnimalCrossing, 1.3 billion on #AnimalCrossingNewHorizons, and even more on the #acnh hashtags, as of November 2020.
The video above shows the excitement user @itsbeetlegeuse had when she experienced a villager reveal in her town. The TikTok has almost 3 million likes, 13k comments, and 12k shares (ask any marketing person how great that is). Check out other videos with great performance and viral quality, for example, one about a character singing, or how playing ACNH with your boyfriend turned out to be.
This would mean, if you’re one of the 800 million people using TikTok, you would definitely hear about the game, if not immediately want to play it yourself. If that’s not a great start to get viral, I don’t know what is.
2. (Turnip) Economy Guides
Since the beginning of time, people like a good challenge. And ACNH has gotten super famous for its “turnip economy”, since players actually need to pay attention to the prices of goods in the game, just like in real life. Turnips were discovered to be the key to wealth in the game very quickly, and people started speculating about the best way to earn money in the game, giving birth to a bunch of “Economy Guide”s. Watch one below right now:
The “economy” complexity in a lighthearted game like this was successful in attracting gamers who would also want to take part in a challenge. The memes and guides around how hard it is to become wealthy in ACNH were some of the biggest factors that made the game even more popular.
3. Brand Crossovers
Since ACNH offers a variety of ways to customize your house, your look, and your village, a lot of brands jumped on the hype train as well. The London-based clothing company Lazy Oaf came up with a very cute competition idea: Create their clothes in ACNH the game, tag it with #Oafcrossing, and you might win a gift card!
The competition got close to a thousand entries which had people who spent their time on ACNH design something exciting for the brand, or vice versa: it had the fans of the clothing brand want to play ACNH even more if they still hadn’t. Some very cute entries below:
Well, to sum up, it’s obvious that you can’t plan for a game to go viral as ACNH did. But the examples above show us you can at least have them in mind while creating or marketing your game. Enabling and encouraging User-Generated-Content will be your best bet in adding the “viral” flavor to your game if you want to expand your player demographics, from the typical gamer audience to many others that just can’t wait to try out your game.
