Merge Mansion maker Metacore has cast Pedro Pascal in its new marketing campaign.
The star of The Mandalorian and The Last Of Us plays Detective Tim Rockford and investigates the weird goings-on at the Boulton family residence in three short films created by Metacore and production company Bacon.
The campaign is launching ahead of the game’s next major update on March 28. Metacore told us there are currently no plans for Pascal to appear in the game, which hit 40m downloads recently and has around 2m daily active users.
The new campaign marks a step up for Metacore’s marketing ambitions, chief business officer Tapio Tuomola told us.
“We’re increasingly looking to speak to the masses with our game marketing, something the rest of the entertainment industry has been doing very well for decades,” he tells us.
“Many of Merge Mansion’s players are millennial women who don’t necessarily consider themselves gamers or actively follow industry media or forums, so we can’t rely on traditional game marketing methods, either.”
“Overall, we think the industry has put too much weight on UA and not nearly enough emphasis on creative,” he continues. “We’re looking to tip those scales. It’s an exciting challenge for us to find new ways to bring our games and their stories to broader audiences.”
The new ads follow on from the campaign Metacore ran with Misery star Kathy Bates. “We got multiple learnings from [that campaign],” says Tuomola. “Naturally, we also wanted to utilise many of those in the new campaign.”
“For example, the previous campaign was darker than the animated films we’ve been doing, and our audience loved them. Our fans have been begging for longer videos, even a movie or Netflix series. Therefore, we wanted to move more in that direction, and the true crime mockumentary style felt like the best fit for the Merge Mansion lore.”
Metacore is also launching a new game later this year, has several more titles in development and continues to work on Everdale, having acquired the game from Supercell.
“We’re going back to square one with Everdale and giving our team space to focus on the development work,” added Tuomola.
“However, we’re also working on multiple new games simultaneously, and gearing up to publish our second game later this year.”
