Transmedia Storytelling: How Expanding Game Worlds Can Win Fans and Fuel Growth
As the gaming industry navigates a post-boom plateau, studios are seeking new ways to sustain engagement and growth. Transmedia storytelling offers a powerful solution - turning game worlds into multi-platform ecosystems that attract, immerse, and retain fans.
Why Transmedia Matters for Games Today
In the fight for player’s attention and spend, games that embrace transmedia storytelling have the potential to fare better. A game whose world and characters are also accessible in films, TV shows, comics and social content not only offers a richer fan experience, but also a wider net of potential awareness, reach and revenue. In theory, additional media entry points to an IP’s universe are gateways for new fans, who can then be converted to new players of the game.
This potential for growth is why we’re entering what Empire magazine calls a “golden age for pad-to-motion-picture offerings”, with Sonic, Super Mario Bros, The Last Of Us, Fallout, The Witcher and Arcane amongst recent high profile releases, and Horizon: Zero Dawn, Helldivers, Until Dawn and Minecraft offerings on the way.
Image source: Berkley Spectator
When it Works: Community, Immersion and Narrative Depth
As we outlined in 2024, there’s a significant upside for gaming brands that can successfully expand their worlds across multiple screens and media formats. Existing fans deepen their immersion, becoming ‘narrative explorers’ who actively seek out and connect ‘narrative fragments’, generating theories, content and expanding the IP’s social graph.
Working closely with Riot Games, we supported the Arcane launch in Northern Europe with a fan-first activation that deepened engagement across the community. Our #ExploreArcane campaign encouraged fans to share their theories about the unfolding story and character after each ‘act’ was aired, while we listened for the richest threads across social media, then plotted and connected them on a virtual pinboard. It was key that we fuelled fires, confirmed official lore, gave nothing away, and of course - made no mistakes in our knowledge of this sacred world and its inhabitants.
Immersion like this gives existing players ‘expert status’ in the community, which, if nurtured, can help new fans to enter and navigate the universe. That kind of belonging and connection is priceless in the battle for loyalty.
When it Doesn’t: Risk to Reputation and Trust
On the flip side, if expansion into film and TV is mishandled, fans of the original games can lose trust in the studio, questioning their integrity and understanding of the stories they love. A well-publicised adaptation ‘turkey’ may not be the death knell for a game brand, but it certainly impacts overall perception and momentum. (Not to mention the sunk costs of making the thing.)
Even a well-received piece of transmedia storytelling can be damaging if new fans fail to integrate with the original community, creating negative sentiment and toxicity between ‘OGs’ and ‘noobs’; all reducing the chances of new players sticking around long enough to belong.
A 4-Stage Framework for Transmedia Marketing
Our team work with a wide range of gaming brands employing a transmedia strategy, from League of Legends to Sonic, with all sorts in between. In our ongoing mission to ‘build brands with fans’ it’s critical that we help our clients deliver an experience that enriches their love of the IP, whether they’re long time devotees or future fans, culminating in a larger, more vibrant community.
To achieve that, we deploy a “4D Framework” to guide the strategic and creative process, from producing campaigns and content, to its launch, to the integration of new fans with old as they join the community. Here’s what that looks like…
1. DISCOVERY: Learning from the Fans
We start every transmedia project by immersing ourselves inside and around the game; its lore, backstories, official channels and fan channels, and all the content and conversations that emerge. Our mission is not only to know the IP as intimately as the fans do; but also to understand the way they feel about the game, and the role it plays in their lives.
We blend secondary social listening with primary focus groups and play sessions, building a picture of emergent fan segments, each with their own unique traits and needs. We then use our custom GWI data to more accurately size these segments, track regional differences and plan for effective media reach.
We helped CCP map out their iconic EVE universe, across the multiple games and fan experiences they offer, overlaid with audience & media data, allowing them to identify opportunities for new transmedia expansion and new fan engagement.
We also look for the shared motivations and passions that unite these fans - the thing they ALL love about the game world and the reason they keep coming back to it. In the case of EVE, this helped us get to a distinctive value proposition that tied their transmedia brand offering together, whatever the player’s skill or experience level.
Naturally, we always map the activity of competitors to understand what everyone else is doing, helping us find fan experiences that feel fresh. Finally, we collate the unique cultural tropes that define the community, from phrases and themes to recurring images and conversations.
The more we’ve learned in Discovery, the better armed we are to help craft marketing that enhances the fan experience and bolsters their immersion in the IP’s world. Fans want integrity in their worlds, and if you break that with misplaced marketing, it can be damaging. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the soul of the story is at stake.
2. DEFINITION: Planning with Purpose and Precision
The Definition stage is where we cherry pick what levers to pull, what details to include, what tropes to embrace, and what to omit. Our ethos is that “fan engagement grows in the gaps”, so we craft marketing strategies that earn attention and intrigue, without giving everything away.
A transmedia strategy broadly comprises:
- Character & story bible (showing what’s visible and what’s staying beneath the surface)
- Storytelling pillars (themes and tone that define us, whatever channel we show up on)
- Fan segments (showing the different tribes that make up the community and their needs)
- Shared motivations & passions (showing how we speak to the community en masse)
- Competitor mapping (showing how we’ll stand out from other stories)
- Creative strategy (the big idea that will define our transmedia campaign)
- Key messages (each story strand and the detail that makes it fascinating to fans)
- Campaign phasing, objectives & KPIs (the beats, jobs to do and measures of success)
- Media mapping (showing where our fan segments are and how they use each channel)
All of this culminates in a creative brief designed to inspire ideas that bring fans (new and old) into the story, giving them more to watch, ponder, discuss and contribute to.
3. DEVELOPMENT: Creativity in Action
One of the magical things about the creative process is seeing unexpected ideas flow from unexpected places. That’s why we foster a playful spirit during the development phase. We’ve created a strategic ‘playground’, and now we have the freedom to play around and see where that takes us. Every idea within a transmedia campaign is placed within a comms plan that keeps track of who we’re speaking to, and how we’re signposting them to join the community, and play our game.
In a recent collaboration with Square Enix, our mission was to bring more people into the world of Final Fantasy XVI, we found that fans were particularly fascinated by its legendary monsters and weapons. Our creative department ran with that insight and asked, what if we invited real-world experts to analyze and interrogate every detail? The strategy was that the more credibility we bring to this ‘fantasy’ world, the more respect we show, and the richer the conversation becomes.
Image source: Final Fantasy XVI
4. DELIVERY: Executing with Impact and Agility
When it comes to delivery, our job is to execute ideas in the most compelling and surprising ways possible. For our ‘Ask The Experts’ videos for Final Fantasy XVI, we pushed for the most knowledgeable real-world experts in the world, recruiting none other than gothic monster expert Dr Emily Zarka and weapons expert Matt Easton, each of whom brought their own fanbase and perspective to the FF world.
The final videos were hosted exclusively with NME, a growing platform for more mainstream gaming audiences, and became some of their best performing content of the year, helping spark tons of fan conversation about the twin continents of Valisthea and its inhabitants.
Often, the emergent conversations and content that our activations inspire help take us to new ideas and evolutions of our existing strategy. It’s our contention that a transmedia world is ‘alive’, since the fans are constantly helping make sense of it, and add to it. That’s why we never stop listening or reshaping our thinking as campaigns unfold.
As we signpost new fans to the IP’s community, we often help our clients find leaders in the player and Creator base, empowering them to welcome new players and create content that helps make sense of the world they’re entering. This search for ‘community unity’ is crucial to an effective transmedia strategy, and it’s usually most effective when the fans are working with us, rather than being handed generic content.
Image source: NME
What We’ve Learned: Fans First, Always
When a gaming brand expands its reach to new media channels, it can be hugely rewarding for the fans, and the studios. The key is to put fans and fan understanding at the centre of every stage of the process, without resorting to crass ‘fan-service’. As we said in 2024, it boils down to respect for the fans, after all, it’s they who find meaning in the worlds we create together, and they who popularize, mythologise, sustain and expand them.
Put fans at the heart of your transmedia marketing, from your understanding of the story, to new content, to its launch, to the integration of the new fans it attracts.
Transmedia really is the fan's media.
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