Hey everyone,

2024 closed and January started with a bang so I’ve only just got round to getting this out in the nick of time!

We’ve finished planning and projecting for the year, and are knee-deep back into campaigns and executing the early stages of longer term plans beyond our core offering, which is all very exciting.

Here’s what we’ve been up to and interesting things in our sector.

Enjoy!

Logan

For the sake of brevity, I wanted to pull out just one key highlight from Matthew Ball’s State of Video Gaming in 2025 report, in which Discord features heavily as a focal growth area for the industry.

That is, that Discord users play a wider variety of games than typical gamers. The chart on the left shows total PC playtime and the right, Discord’s, with much higher percentages across non-top 10 games.

This is a massive signal for developers and publishers to note when releasing new games — Discord communities are more open to dipping their toes in and are less likely to follow the masses or stick to their old habits.

This really backs up everything we do at Wildfire, sampling new games and creating gamified, fun partnerships to encourage people to try new games.

Our 4th activation with web3 gaming studio Gunzilla Games was a biggie.

We reached 8 million Discord community members across 2 weeks to acquire new players for their early access period, activating 42 communities with a competition to win a pretty slick gaming PC, along with plenty of other prizes.

Check out the one pager for more info here on what a big campaign looks like with Wildfire!

Our focus for 2025 is simple: do what we do best.

Right now, we exist primarily as the entry point to working with creators on Discord.

On other platforms, you can buy paid social ads, or you can work with creators.

We see our role within Discord very much as the latter of these two options, creating and filling this underserved and valuable creator space on the platform!

Those creators aren't individuals making videos like on other platforms, but the concept comprises the whole community participating in organised events, or chatting 24/7.

Last year I found it difficult to know what the distractions were and what the legitimate growth or experiment areas were, but when you strip it down to our core purpose, it makes sense to try and encompass our focus down into one word: creativity.

How?

1. Build exciting, innovative activations with communities. Our proposals are getting bigger and more original. Creating original, community-first content has always been the goal and it's starting to really come into fruition.

2. A renewed focus on content: we are on the front lines of advertising with instant feedback on how an ad performs. Re-reading 'Ogilvy on Advertising' over the break brought this back to the forefront for me.

3. Go beyond our capabilities within just Discord, and experiment with owned & operated properties. Plans are early here and I hope we see them through.

We’re excited about the progress and partnerships ahead.

As always, we’d love to hear from you—reply to this email or click below to start your next campaign with us to get inside the conversation:

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Onwards!