The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2022
Samsung hacked China's biggest game to make bullies pay more — reports fell 40%
Samsung wired Magic Quest's abusive-language detector to its pricing, so every detected bullying act raised that player's in-game prices.
Samsung Electronics
What it had to solve
Online gaming had exploded in China and so had bullying inside it. Samsung wanted to confront the behaviour head-on in a way young gamers would feel, rather than preach at them from outside the game.
How it works
China's online gaming scene had exploded, and so had bullying inside it — so Samsung set out to make bullies pay the price for their behaviour. The challenge was to confront the problem where it actually happens, in the game itself, not in a message delivered to gamers from outside.
Working with one of the country's biggest game developers, Samsung hacked Magic Quest, the biggest game of the year. The game's built-in abusive-language detection was linked to its pricing database: every time the system caught a sign of bullying, the price of that player's in-game purchases went up, in real time, escalating with each further incident.
Over the two-week hijack, more than one million bullies paid the price and reports of in-game bullying fell by 40%. The message — there is a cost to bullying, and when gamers bully they pay it — was delivered through the game's own economy, and the work was later filed in the D&AD awards archive and took the Digital/Mobile Grand Prix at Clio Health 2022.
Why it lands
- The punishment is native to the game's world: raising purchase prices speaks the language of gamers instead of lecturing them.
- It builds a visible feedback loop — every further bullying act raises the price again, so cause and effect are immediate and legible.
- It rides an existing audience: hacking the biggest game of the year puts the intervention in front of millions instead of building reach from zero.
- The result was measurable behaviour change, not just attention: in-game bullying reports fell 40% during the hijack.
What it did
During the two-week hijack more than one million bullies paid the price and reports of in-game bullying fell by 40%; the campaign entered the D&AD awards archive and won Clio Health's 2022 Digital/Mobile Grand Prix.
What you can take
To change behaviour inside a community, don't lecture from the outside — change the incentive structure of the environment where the behaviour happens.
Since then
The hijack lasted two weeks by design, proving the point before normal pricing returned. The campaign then travelled through the awards circuit: D&AD kept it in its awards archive, and Clio Health 2022 gave it the Digital/Mobile Grand Prix along with several Golds, Silvers and Bronzes across digital, gaming and cause-related categories, making its agency the most-awarded Chinese shop at that year's show.
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