The marketing team for video game Halo Wars 2 took a very interesting approach to increase the awareness about their upcoming release by leveraging Twitter card technology paired with their DM (direct messaging) system.
What happens is basically that this installation is the first of it’s kind and represents an “In-Twitter” game. You click on the advertised Twitter card from the campaign account Isabel UNSC Log and a DM conversation opens.
What happens now is a very simplified teaser version of Halo Wars 2, that feels like a mix of rock–paper–scissors and the early Command & Conquer real-time strategy games by Westwood. Within the conversation you can now tap on an attack unit and it will be deployed against whatever unit type your opponent will select. You play against an AI or can invite one of your Twitter friends for a quick sessions of #TwitterHaloWars.
This is a new mode of using Twitter for consumers and companies alike. This is also very likely to unlock a potential area of playing games inside of Twitter, without leaving the platform. There’s a long way to catch up with Facebook, though, as they have successfully managed to introduce gaming into their platform, a long time ago, as a key element to keep the users online on their pages and therefore generating advertising revenue via partners.
Dean Takahashi reports on VentureBeat, “Microsoft Xbox and Halo game studio 343 Industries have partnered with Twitter, ad agency twofifteenmccann, and Emerging Media Technologies to create a real-time social media strategy game for promotion online video and social posts. It’s a new way of marketing a game”.
Ad agency twofifteenmcann, from San Francisco, states on their website, “To launch the new Blitz Mode for Halo Wars 2, we needed a strategy as genre-defying as the game itself. So we partnered with Twitter to create the first real-time strategy game played entirely through Twitter’s new DM platform. Players tweet with Isabel, the main artificial intelligence in the game, in a training module as they use cards to battle their friends or the computer in an escalating three-round war. Start a game on Twitter.“
Halo Wars 2 will be released on February 21 for Windows and the Xbox One.
Vimeo: Xbox Halo Wars 2 – Isabel Promo Video
Photo credit: Microsoft
Source: Dean Takahashi (VentureBeat) / twofifteenmcann
