SOS OPS!

The Challenge

SOS OPS! is a chaotic co op game about saving the city with your friends. It launched in November 2023, and by September 2026 it was selling about 65 copies a day. The studio had a new DLC, OVERBOOKED, coming out on 25 September and a 90% discount lined up for the same week, which put the base game at 49 cents.

A deep discount only converts people who already know the game exists. For a title almost three years past launch, the sale needed its own discovery wave, big enough and fast enough to land inside the discount window, and the studio wanted the result measured in its own Steamworks data.

The Approach

The studio ran three creator campaigns on Trapster back to back, starting on 26 September, across TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.

175 creators published 336 videos. Tracked views reached 11,452,423, with TikTok carrying about 73% of them, Instagram Reels 2.4 million and YouTube Shorts the rest. Across the three campaigns the effective CPM settled at $1.23. German speaking creators brought in a large share of the early reach, and Germany became the biggest market: almost 40% of copies sold on day three.

The studio shared its Steamworks data. Daily copies went from 4,670 on day one to 28,035 on day two and 62,771 on day three. For the week of 24 to 30 September the game sold 287,139 copies, against 452 the week before, plus 207,294 DLC units. The new OVERBOOKED DLC sold 98,346 units in its first six days, and the older BACKROOMS, GUNS N' OPS and TRIALS DLCs sold about 28,000 to 35,000 each. The game then set its all time concurrent player peak of 8,562, almost three years after launch.

The part worth studying is the DLC. With the game at 49 cents and each DLC under a dollar, the store sold about seven DLC units for every ten copies of the game. The discount worked as an entry ticket, the co op format pulled friends in, and the DLC carried the revenue.