At two o’clock in the morning, Anthony, an independent game developer, was awakened by a series of email prompts. When he checked the Steam background, he found that the casual game _Suika Game_ he developed topped the sales list without any notice. “It all started with a 30-second video uploaded by Japanese player @kayou_rinrin,” he recalled, “The surprise scream she made when she successfully synthesized two big watermelons in the video, with magical background music, created the #西瓜ゲーム challenge tag on TikTok.”
From Obscurity to Phenomenal Popularity
_Suika Game_ was originally just an ordinary puzzle game on the Nintendo Switch platform. Until October 2023, Japanese anchors began to share their game process on TikTok. With the magic gameplay of “synthetic watermelon” with various creative clips, this tag quickly gained more than 200 million views on the platform. “We don’t even make official publicity for the game,” said the representative of the publisher Aladdin X. “It’s completely the spontaneous creation of players that makes the game popular all over the world.”
This phenomenon in _Only Up!_ is more dramatic in the off-shelf incident. This climbing game was virally spread on TikTok because of the exaggerated “heartbroken” clips of the anchors, but the negative comments that followed also made the developers finally choose to remove the game from the shelves. A complaining video that ‘playing this game is too painful’ can not only make game sales skyrocket, but also put pressure on developers. Game analyst Benji-Sales said so.
The Double-Edged Sword of Community Creation
On TikTok, the creative content under the tag #VampireSurvivors perfectly interprets the power of the community. Player @gamingwithpotato created a unique immersive experience with ASMR sound effects with the live broadcast of _Vampire Survivors_, and a single video received 500,000 likes. These contents not only drive game sales, but also give rise to a new game subdivision type of “card construction + mowing”.
However, when the marketing video of _The Day Before_ was far from the actual game quality, TikTok became an accelerator for the spread of negative comments. The exquisite promotional clips before the release of the game received millions of views on TikTok. After the release, the complaining video of the “worst game” also spread rapidly, which eventually led to the game being quickly removed from the shelves.
A New Form of Player Influence
Ordinary players play a key role in this change. Content creator @MeganPlays has accumulated millions of fans on TikTok by continuously sharing the construction ideas of _Palworld_. “After the release of my ‘Aerial Castle Building Tutorial’ video, I saw a significant fluctuation in the number of people online in the game that day,” she shared, “this feeling that directly affects the fate of the game is wonderful.”
Revolution of Marketing Methods
Game companies began to adjust their marketing strategies. Warner Bros., the publisher of _Hogwarts Legacy_, partners with “magic girls” on TikTok to invite them to reproduce the classic scenes of _Harry Potter_ with game images, and the cumulative number of views of related videos has exceeded one billion. “Compared with traditional advertising, this kind of creator-led content can impress young players more,” said Sarah Phillips, marketing director.
Do you have any works purchased because of TikTok videos in your game library? Or have you ever changed your view of a game because of a short video? Welcome to share your experience in the comment section to see to what extent short videos shape our game taste.
