A Game About Chopping Trees

The Challenge

A Game About Chopping Trees does what the name says: grab an axe, ride a handcar into the forest, chop, upgrade, repeat, alone or with a friend. Cozy loops like this are easy to love and hard to advertise. Nothing explodes, so the game has to win people over by looking relaxing and satisfying in the first few seconds.

Spaghetti Cat had already launched and wanted a fast discovery push on short-form, where that kind of oddly satisfying footage travels best.

The Approach

Flat $5 CPM across TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, tagged #agact.

The whole posting window took about ten hours on a single day. 18 creators posted 39 videos, and tracked views reached 1,087,420 with 32,834 likes, a 3.02% like rate. Views kept accruing after the posting day, so the effective CPM came in at $1.47, under a third of the nominal rate.

The Steam page went from 30,205 to 31,785 wishlists across the campaign window, +1,580, for a cost per wishlist of $1.01.