Buckle up mateys.

The World of Warcraft team had a surprise for players near the end of the Dragonflight expansion: a secret pirate themed battle royale mode. In an unprecedented move, all content around this mode was kept under wraps from players, except for a tease on a roadmap which caused rampant speculation about what was on the horizon.

A date announce with no further information had players chomping at the bit to know what was coming. With the player base primed and ready, launch day came, and with it a boatload of social content from us to flood the channels with pirate-y goodness, from hype trailers, to themed tutorials, and more memes than you can shake a parrot at.

Without our normal runway to inform players pre-launch for what was coming, the highest priority was getting players excited for the mode and inform them to how it works in the most pirate-y way possible.

We added in a healthy dose of memes and shared experiences we were all having in Plunderstorm…

…including some oddly healthy pirate code principles.

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Gameplay tips eased players journey through the mode and we provided an incredibly catchy shanty to play while getting your plunder on.

RESULTS

Plunderstorm was a success, with high sustained streaming numbers on Twitch and wide player participation through the first few weeks of the event. The shock drop of a brand new genre within WoW primed the curiosity of the player base and a slew of social content on launch lead to incredibly strong launch performance.

  • Three posts in the first few days earned over 1M impressions on X.

  • A profile tease the day before launch lead to 6x profile views than the previous 30 day average.

  • Plunderstorm’s reveal saw the highest volume of franchise social conversation since the global release of Season of Discovery.

  • WoWCast developer reveal video trended #17 on YouTube.

  • Combined 2.2M video views during launch week.

  • Daily peak Twitch viewership 88% higher than the average daily peak over the previous 30 days.

Social Team Credits

  • Creative Direction: Justin Marcus

  • Designers: HB Straw, Eric Matos, Lorraine Pham, Brian H Kim, Kaity Patnode, Jay Friedman

  • Copywriters: Heath Milo, Daniel White

  • Producers: Martin McDonagh

  • Marketing Partners: Britain Taylor, Jess Downey

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