Throughout the years, Stellar Blade developer Shift Up has gone above and beyond to promote its billion-dollar gacha game franchise Goddess of Victory: NIKKE. From offline events and merch to lavish orchestral concerts, the developers have put a great emphasis on expanding the IP beyond the game itself, particularly in Asia. Funnily enough, these efforts have created a state of “marketing inflation” that makes it tricky to figure out what to do next.
During the recently held Nexon Developers Conference 2025 in Korea, NIKKE’s director Hyung-seok Yoo held a lecture titled “How did Goddess of Victory: NIKKE become a successful IP?” As reported by Game*Spark, Yoo talked at length about Shift Up’s PR strategies for the game. Some of these have been very extravagant – like having an artist paint an enormous underwater mural over the course of 20 hours. Even more astonishingly, the studio has sent NIKKE into orbit. For the game’s second anniversary in 2024, Shift Up delivered a message from the game’s popular character Cinderella through a satellite monitor in outer space.
The footage of Cinderella in space was livestreamed to fans in a broadcast on October 26, with audio of her voice added in post-production. Moreover, the satellite also displayed messages submitted by players, so some lucky people got to see their own usernames and words shown in outer space.
These kinds of initiatives have drawn a lot of positive feedback from NIKKE’s playerbase, who admire the passion Shift Up has shown towards the mobile game and its worldbuilding. On the other hand, after doing so much, the dev team seems to be a bit worried about hitting a ceiling. During his presentation, Yoo commented, “What should we even do next for PR after going to outer space?,” earning laughter from his fellow industry peers.
At the same time, Yoo made sure to circle back to the fact that no matter what promotion and fan service you do outside of your game, your “IPs expansion depends primarily on the popularity of the game itself,” which makes solidifying the development team a priority over IP management.
Goddess of Victory: NIKKE is available for PC, iOS and Android.
