Last year, we unveiled an exciting new partnership with Pixelberry Studios' hit game High School Story, integrating potentially lifesaving education in-game. The initiative was the first of its kind, integrating a charitable element into gameplay with a focus on making a difference through education and fun activities.
Players of Hope's Story, one of the High School Story in-game storylines, were provided with educational messaging and unique character items to teach users how to deal with cyberbullying. To help bring more awareness to the initiative, we teamed up with British pop band One Direction to launch a contest this Stop Cyberbullying Day that drew in more than 800,000 entries, bringing a large number of users into the High School Story platform and game.
Since launching our initiative, we've managed to propel the game's popularity among young people around the world while educating them on how to deal with cyberbullying.
In the past year, we've seen the tremendous impact that our unique initiative with Pixelberry Studios has had. In fact, we feel that this is the first time that a charitable organization has been able to have a transformative in-game experience with an educational element. We are grateful to Pixelberry Studios for working with us on this unique initiative.
Dan Raisbeck, Co-founder, The Cybersmile Foundation
Integrating educational elements and in-game purchases also provided users with additional incentives to participate in the initiative and learn about important topics.
Partnering with Cybersmile has been an amazing experience, after announcing our partnership we saw a 16% increase in player numbers and an 18% increase in revenue. They have been incredibly responsive to work with, helped us grow our social media presence and because of our partnership with them – news of our story has been published through media outlets such as The Washington Post, International Business Times and VentureBeat.
Oliver Miao, CEO, Pixelberry Studios
With the initial campaign extending from 30 days to over 12 months, the success of our partnership has surpassed all expectations, having propelled the game's popularity in the App Store from 60th to 15th in just its first 30 days.
They effectively used celebrities to tweet about our partnership reaching millions of people and even arranged for One Direction to be involved in our game. Most importantly, knowing that our partnership has changed and even saved lives has been incredibly rewarding.
Oliver Miao, CEO, Pixelberry Studios
We're thrilled that our work with Pixelberry, through High School Story, has enabled us to help vast numbers of cyberbullying victims and friends of victims across the globe. We hope to use other gaming and innovative platforms to continue this vital work in the future!