Donaldson states in the video that the stunt cost $3.5 million to produce—likely more than Netflix spent on a single episode of “Squid Game,” which reportedly cost the company $21 million to produce the entire season. Donaldson’s video amassed over 100 million views in just the week after its release, bringing viewership of Donaldson’s production close to the original Netflix series, which had 111 million viewers in the month following its release. (Netflix users, however, tuned into “Squid Game” for a total of 1.6 billion hours in the show's first month on the platform, while Donaldson's video was viewed for an average of roughly 20 million hours in its first week.)
For Supercell, sponsoring Donaldson’s TV-quality production translated into immediate impacts, with global downloads of the game “Brawl Stars” surging by 41% in the week following the video’s release, according to Sensor Tower data. In that same timeframe, player spending on in-game items more than doubled, with consumers around the world paying over $8.2 million that week alone.
Though it’s unclear how much Supercell paid Donaldson for the partnership—Supercell didn’t respond to requests for comment—the game developer and “Brawl Stars” are featured heavily throughout the video, with the game’s logo emblazoned across the ball holding the $456,000 cash prize and looming over a nail-biting challenge where players attempt to cross a glass bridge without plummeting into a pit of foam blocks below. Additionally, Donaldson works a lengthy ad read into the midpoint of the video, interspersed with clips of footage from one of the challenges.
“If you yell, ‘Thank you, Brawl Stars,’ before you throw, I hear you’ll flip it,” Donaldson said in the video as contestants play the Korean game ddakji, where two players compete to flip over a folded piece of paper lying on the ground by throwing another piece of paper at it. Those papers, of course, are marked with the “Brawl Stars” logo.
And, in the video, the players heed Donaldson’s advice, shouting, “Thank you, Brawl Stars!” in unison.