Merge Mansion

Merge Mansion is a mobile game developed by Metacore, a Finnish gaming company. Within two and a half years, Merge Mansion has reached 49+ million downloads and a cult-like internet following. Metacore partnered with Reaktor’s Creative Studio to take its already proven recipe for success and leverage it to the next level of pop culture fame. The result was a marketing campaign consisting of a trio of films starring Pedro Pascal and an escape room-style live action theater in LA featuring mystery-solving YouTubers raking in millions of viewers.

The gaming industry is estimated to reach a market size of roughly $320 billion by 2026, with the majority of that being social and casual gaming – the sector Merge Mansion and most other mobile games are operating in. Competition is getting stiffer with the growing market, and even more so with recent developments in privacy regulations that make targeting audiences with pin-point precision increasingly difficult.

The question Metacore faced, amongst many other gaming companies, was how to make the game stand out and reach potential audiences. The answer: getting creative and putting more emphasis on narrative instead of just ad spend. 

The project began at the ideation stage. The brief from Metacore centered around brand activation with lasting impact. We started with a workshop to brainstorm ideas – some were killed, others developed forward. As Merge Mansion had already demonstrated whopping success with its narrative approach, we wanted to continue on the same path when thinking about its next chapter.

We took Merge Mansion’s Grandma Ursula, her granddaughter Maddie, and the whole family drama and decided to inject a load of pop culture into it. We did so by tapping into true crime, a phenomenon that has become increasingly popular in recent years. In fact, half of Americans say they enjoy true-crime content, with one third proclaiming they consume it at least once a week. Adding to that, the largest demographic of true-crime fans turned out to be women between the ages of 25-55 – matching Merge Mansion’s target audience.

Once we had decided to leverage true crime as Merge Mansion’s next narrative bullet, we needed to find an instigator. Someone who had the credibility, magnetism, and mystery to capture the audience’s attention and imagination. 

Enter internet darling du jour Pedro Pascal who jumped into the boots of Tim Rockford, a hardened detective faced with the most challenging case of his career: “What is grandma hiding?”. Pedro starred in three commercial films created by us and brought to life by Bacon Films and director Martin Werner.

The films were released on the eve of the finale of The Last of Us, the HBO megahit starring Pascal. The online response was incredible: the three commercials have generated over 38M views so far and been covered by 300 media outlets around the world. Influencers shared the films in creative ways, and the internet saw a tsunami of likes, comments, headlines, TikToks, fan art, and YouTube reaction videos.

The brand activation campaign culminated in a one-day event in Los Angeles that can best be described as an escape room-style live action theater on steroids. We created a replica of the game’s mansion and invited fans, influencers, YouTubers known for their mystery-busting videos, and our star detective Pedro (...erm Tim Rockford) to find out “what grandma is hiding”. 

That same day, Merge Mansion opened up its mansion within the game as well. Before, the mansion had been an inaccessible area in the game, and by lining up its virtual and physical openings we were able to engage both new and existing fans.

Visitors created a variety of creative content around the experience, bringing even more attention and eyeballs to Merge Mansion. For example, YouTuber MatPat, also known as Game Theorist, made a 20 minute YouTube film about his visit giving his take on “what grandma is hiding”. The film racked up more than 2 million views. Spoiler: MatPat thinks Grandma murdered her husband and chopped him into a pie. Unfortunately, we can neither confirm nor deny if there’s any truth to such theories.

• Idea generation, creative workshops and campaign planning
• Sourcing and overseeing partners for campaign execution
• Creative direction for the execution of the campaign