It’s one thing to enlist an influencer or two to promote your game, entirely another for a game studio to create a game entirely around them. With the success of Glu Mobile’s Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, it doesn’t seem like such a wild bet.
For Jack and Jack, two Viners who share not just a name but a Vine account with 5.4 million followers, their new puzzle game isn’t exactly their first rodeo. The duo actually released Let it Goat! in summer last year in conjunction with SkyVu, a game that VentureBeat said “might be the next Flappy Bird.”
Now, less than a year later, Let it Goat! must have performed impressively enough to launch Jack & Jack Vines Puzzle Game {link no longer active}. A few days after the launch, the game was trending worldwide on Twitter.
How They promoted it in a way that most Twitter personalities are wont to do: they asked their followers to tweet a picture of them playing the game with the hashtag #FREEJackandJackGame {link no longer active} and the Viners themselves would follow them. Talk about social currency.
This kind of strategy wouldn’t exactly work on other platforms and is labor-intensive to say the least, but the pay off for Jack and Jack has been huge. Not many games can boast they’ve trended worldwide on Twitter.
It speaks to how teens communicate on the platform and the power of connection. It is absolute proof that a game developer like SkyVu doesn’t even need to get in touch with the likes of Kim Kardashian or a slew of other recognizable regular celebrities to negotiate major contracts and carefully tip toe around. Influencers also wield this celebrity power that can catapult a game in the App Store.
Moreover, influencers like Jack and Jack inherently know how to market themselves in order to build, sustain and entertain their followers. It’s worth keeping that in mind when figuring out exactly how much trust to invest when working with influencers.
