Launch campaign creative strategy for a franchise game

VNG took Metal Slug: Awakening global this week with a UA push reported as one of the heavier launches of the quarter, leaning hard on the franchise's thirty-year run-and-gun pedigree. Familiar problem. Every studio sitting on a recognisable IP hits it eventually, because the creative that makes a franchise fan click is usually not the creative that makes a cold, algorithm-served viewer click, and a launch campaign has to decide early, and on purpose, which of those two viewers its opening creative is really built for.

The tension every franchise launch creative brief faces

A franchise hands the creative team assets it would otherwise have to build from nothing: characters people already recognise, plus a visual style that signals genre before a frame of gameplay plays. That helps enormously in the first days, when organic sentiment and press coverage put early creative in front of a warm audience. Then the paid budget opens up. At the volume a heavy push implies, spend reaches an audience many times larger than the existing fan base inside a few days, and that audience carries none of the nostalgia weighting the creative leans on. A run-and-gun ad designed to reward a fan's recognition of one specific enemy sprite or level callback can leave a cold viewer with no idea what kind of game they are looking at. That is the most common way franchise launch creative fails.

As we covered in What Big-Budget Launch Campaigns Teach Mobile UA Teams, the same gap opened up around Assassin's Creed Shadows' launch campaign in March: enormous brand equity, and the campaign still had to prove ad by ad that the mobile product delivers a specific, legible gameplay experience to someone who has never heard of it.

Why this is harder for a genre with heavy visual identity

Run-and-gun action franchises get a harder version of this. So much of what makes the genre recognisable, the dense pixel-art enemy sprites, the screen-filling chaos, reads as visual noise rather than a clear gameplay promise to anyone unfamiliar with the style. A viewer who does not already link that density to a satisfying, skill-based shooting loop reads it as clutter. Puzzle and hybrid-casual titles mostly dodge the problem, because their core mechanic is legible from a single still frame. A franchise standing on a dense visual signature has to work harder in its cold-audience creative, isolating the one mechanic that actually drives engagement instead of trusting the whole visual identity to carry the message by itself.

Two creative jobs, not one

The practical fix is to run a franchise launch as two creative jobs in parallel rather than one campaign with a single direction. Job one is fan-facing: creative that goes all in on IP fidelity and quotes the franchise iconography directly, running through organic and owned channels plus whatever paid targeting reaches existing-fan lookalikes or retargeting pools built from earlier franchise engagement. Job two is for strangers. It treats the franchise as set dressing rather than the pitch, leading instead with the core loop mechanic, shown plainly enough that a viewer who has never heard of Metal Slug knows inside three seconds whether this gameplay is for them.

Studios that only make the first kind see launch-week numbers that look strong on engagement from the existing fan base and weak on conversion from the far larger cold audience the paid budget is actually reaching. In a blended report those two effects cancel each other out, which hides which of the two jobs is failing.

A testing framework for the split

Run this through the first week of any franchise-led launch carrying real paid spend:

• Tag every concept by intended audience before it goes live, fan-facing or cold-audience-facing but never both, so the performance data can be read against the right benchmark instead of blended into an average that means nothing.
• Benchmark fan-facing creative against retention and depth of engagement, not raw click-through, since its job is deepening a relationship that already exists rather than winning a stranger's attention.
• Benchmark cold-audience creative against install-to-D1-retention, which tells you whether the gameplay promise the ad made matches what a first-time player actually gets. Franchise creative is especially prone to that mismatch, because it assumes context the viewer does not have.
• Cap franchise-iconography-heavy creative's share of the cold-audience budget for the first two weeks even if early click-through looks encouraging. Click-through on nostalgia creative routinely overstates real interest, since plenty of viewers are reacting to a familiar art style rather than the gameplay offer.
• Re-test the core-loop-led creative weekly through the launch window. This is the creative doing the actual acquisition work at scale, and it is the one most likely to need iteration while the algorithm hunts for its real working audience.

Budget allocation between the two creative jobs

Split creative only works if the media buy splits with it. The common mistake looks like diligence: a team produces genuinely separate fan-facing and cold-audience creative, then runs both through one campaign structure with a shared budget and a single optimisation target, which lets the platform's bidding algorithm blend the two audiences back together no matter how carefully production kept them apart upstream. Build the buy as genuinely separate campaigns instead. Each gets its own budget and its own targeting parameters. Where the platform allows it, each gets an optimisation event tied to what that creative job is actually there to do, and the distinction then survives all the way through into reporting. Without that separation a studio can do every piece of the creative work right and still have no way to tell which audience responded to which message.

What to watch through the first month

The real test of a franchise launch's creative strategy is not first-week install volume, which a strong IP and heavy spend will produce regardless of creative quality. It is whether the cold-audience cohorts recruited by the core-loop-led creative retain at a rate close to the fan-facing cohorts once the initial nostalgia surge settles. A launch that cannot separate those two audiences in its creative reporting will not know, a month in, whether it built a campaign that converts strangers or one that mostly woke up people who were already fans. Those two outcomes call for very different spend decisions going into month two.

Related archive reading

These articles provide related context and remain subject to their stated review status.

• Holiday Creative Hooks for Mobile Game Ads That Convert
• What Big-Budget Launch Campaigns Teach Mobile UA Teams