Kicking off with a bang, we just wrapped a biggie: a multi-phase community activation with PlayStation for Marathon, one of the most anticipated game launches of 2026.

Marathon is a new extraction shooter IP from the studio behind Destiny and Halo. For launch, we activated across affinity communities to drive hype around the game's release on March 5th.

The centrepiece was a custom Marathon Gaming PC giveaway: a fully customised rig worth ~$2,500 as the grand prize, plus game keys, cash prizes, and more. Entry methods unlocked over time across the campaign, giving communities a reason to keep coming back: use custom assets in the chat, vote in polls, participate in a UGC challenge (screenshot or clip your Runner in action and submit via Gleam), watch the trailer, visit the site, share with friends. Each activity earned entries toward the prize pool.

Basically, a whole load of community fun that brings real value.

Communities were buzzing with real gameplay conversation, sharing clips, comparing loadouts, debating strategy in polls which is exactly the kind of organic excitement you can't manufacture with a media buy.

Being trusted by PlayStation and Bungie with one of the year's biggest releases is exactly the kind of work we exist to do. Proud of the whole campaigns team for delivering this at scale!

If you're planning a game or entertainment launch and want your audience talking about it inside the communities where they already live, this is a fantastic example of how to do it.

One of the biggest shifts for us since inception: we now activate campaigns across Discord, Reddit, Fortnite and Web communities.

This has been a natural evolution. Our communities are independent content creators and we’ve always viewed them that way. They “own” their audiences and many of them operate across multiple platforms. It made sense for us to follow the audience rather than stay locked to one place as we offer community, conversation and engagement wherever that may be.

Everything starts and ends with community here at Wildfire.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Discord remains the place where community engagement runs deepest. The mechanics that work here like quizzes, polls, giveaways, events, and live conversation, are battle-tested.

Reddit is where we've seen the most exciting growth. Community-native content on Reddit delivers strong performance, and our ability to layer in Reddit Boosts (paid amplification) alongside organic community posts means we can offer reach and authenticity in one buy, with additional insight on targeting and creative based on our understanding of what makes communities tick. We’ve been testing Reddit with endemic and non-endemic brands like 7-Eleven with great success.

In-game (Fortnite) is where things get really interesting. Our campaign with 7-Eleven inside Fortnite proved that non-endemic brands can show up in gaming environments authentically when the activation is community-led rather than ad-led. This is a format we're actively scaling, driving people through communities to Fortnite through a code hunt, and then back again for conversation.

After all, everything with Wildfire starts and ends with community.

We're also expanding our publisher network to include Patreon creators as well: communities with direct, owned relationships with their audiences.

The through-line across all of this: we go where your audience is most engaged. The platform is the variable. The community-first approach is the constant.

Most audience research surveys people who signed up to take surveys for a gift card. That's fine for broad strokes, but if you want to know what gaming communities actually think about your brand, your competitor, or your next product right now, you need to ask the people who are in those communities, not a generic panel.

We've quietly been running custom research studies inside our community network. For a major streaming platform, we deployed a custom survey and got 700 responses in 48 hours with a full insights report delivered within a week. Custom questions, targeted community segments, and real sentiment from real members.

We've also run studies for game developers looking for player feedback on specific features and maps, which is the kind of insight that usually takes weeks through traditional research firms and costs tens of thousands of pounds.

We're now offering this as a standalone capability. You tell us the questions. We deploy to the right communities. You get a full insights report: brand perception, competitive positioning, purchase intent, content preferences, audience sentiment, all possible from the people you actually want to reach.

See for yourself:

We've been busy.

The team was at GDC in San Francisco earlier this month: Aimee, Nohely and Alison represented Wildfire across partner meetings, the Crossfire event, and plenty of conversations about where community media fits in the gaming marketing stack. The energy around community-led activations at GDC was noticeably higher than last year. This is becoming a recognised channel.

Next up: POSSIBLE in Miami, April 27-29. This is one of the biggest gatherings of brand marketers and agency leaders in the US. Logan and Aimee will be there, with Aimee speaking on the Innovation Stage on Tuesday:

If you're attending and want to talk about how community media fits your Q2/Q3 plans — or if you just want to say hi — drop me or the team a note and let's grab time.

Spark is soon going to be available for our clients to use, to track campaign setup and performance, manage community and content approvals, and see reporting all in one place, from multiple community platforms.

We’ll be in touch soon when this has finished testing:

If you want to go into specifics of your upcoming campaign, just reply to this email or send us a brief:

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Onwards!