Clash of Clans is a mobile strategy game that is based on building a village and raiding other players’ villages. And every year, we host our biggest in-game promotion called, “Hammer Jam,” when upgrades for your village are discounted up to 50%. It’s basically our Black Friday.

But after six years of the same event, players knew what to expect and it was starting to get old. We needed a reason to get them excited and engaged again.

Our audience was existing Clash gamers: they get easily bored of games when they don’t offer anything new, and can be cynical of the promises made by game developers.

Hammer Jam had been around for six years already, so we needed to do something genuinely new, disruptive, and intriguing — something that would have them talking amongst themselves, not just listening to us.

The insight was simple: if people were expecting Hammer Jam, the most exciting move would be to take it away. We started with a shocking Clash of Clans news update in-game and on social that caused a fervor amongst players: The Hammer Jam hammer was missing just days before the event.

Our docu-style trailer set the scene of the crime and established that every single character in the game was a suspect.

From there we drove fans to a multi-episode podcast that dove into theories and clues. It was the first ever true-crime podcast based on a video game. And we took it 100% seriously.

Starting with the victim himself, The Builder, we questioned how innocent he was in all of this and even brought in a real criminal psychologist to discuss his mindset and potential motives.

From there we dove into other characters, such as The Barbarian, who we ‘interviewed’ for the first time (despite the fact that he only grunts).

Throughout we wove fan theories into the podcast to encourage more and keep them guessing and sharing.

But only one eagle-eyed fan figured it out, when he caught an Easter egg we planted in the trailer film which showed The Giant itching his backside. And he was right. It turned out the hammer was simply stuck to The Giant’s butt the entire time — it was a hammer jammed for Hammer Jam. We covered this resolution in a final film and corresponding podcast episode where we revealed the whole thing was just a cheeky joke.

In the end, the fans cracked the case, found the missing hammer and saved Hammer Jam.

Hammerless was a hit in itself. The campaign made off with 13.7m views - and 74% of them were organic, a testament to how gripping the saga was. Community engagement exploded as people combed the scene of the crime, going up from 194k interactions to 2.6 million.

And it did its job, making Hammer Jam 2024 a huge spike in the game: 17 million players joined or rejoined the game in November. Daily user activity grew, from 25 million every day, to 29 million. And across the month, 31 million players took the plunge and upgraded the most important building in the game: the Town Hall. It was the perfect crime.