Angel’s Souls

Background

The launch of the new PlayStation5 got more media coverage than 26 humanitarian causes combined. Meanwhile, the number of patients waiting for a transplant continued to be way larger than the number of organ donors.

With the pandemic, this gap had become even bigger.

Idea

The Demon Souls is a game where players invade other players’ worlds in order to kill them. Save One Person, an organization that connects living organ donors to patients through an app, saw in the game an opportunity to spread its message and invited two prominent streamers to play the game in a whole different way. Instead of starting fights, they unexpectedly gave the means by which to come back to life.

While the gamers were donating life in the virtual world, they spread the word that anyone can donate life in the real world too by downloading the Save One Person app and registering as a living organ donor.

Results

This simple idea attracted the attention of gamers around the world, impacting more than 2.4 million people. The video of the live stunt was watched in over 18 different countries. Save One Person's website got 520% more visitors and the app got an increase of 270% of downloads.

Our Thoughts

Apparently there are 114,000 people waiting for an organ in the USA alone and numbers of donors declined during the pandemic. So anything that gets young people to become donors is to be welcomed. The lovely part of this idea, apart from switching players from merciless killers into angels of mercy, is it makes them truly heroic. Given there are now at least a billion gamers around the world, talking to them in their language and on their platforms (Twitch in this instance) is a no-brainer. Even so, you still have to have a clever and engaging idea, which this reversal of norms most definitely is.