LOST RECORDS: Welcome to Velvet Cove.

Lost Records - Velvet Cove: creating fans from scratch

In a year where over 19,000+ games launched on Steam, Don’t Nod’s Lost Records: Bloom & Rage faced a tough challenge: sustaining attention between its two-part release, without AAA budgets or paid media. For the boutique studio, the mission was to keep fans emotionally tethered to the game’s world over an eight-week gap.

So instead of pushing promo content, HAUS of PARK expanded the game’s setting, Velvet Cove. Entirely fan-facing and rooted in social-first behavior, Velvet Cove lived inside a purpose-built Discord server, complete with a welcome center, radio station, weekly missions, NPCs, and in-game characters that responded in real time. Fans did more than passively consume content: they messaged the characters, wrote fanfic, roleplayed, and theorized together.

At the center of it all? MoviePalaceOnline.com, a playable, 90s-style website built with Unreal Engine: glitchy, mysterious, nostalgic, and full of secrets. It became an ever-evolving narrative extension of the game fans could explore, solve, and share. Each week, they received cryptic zips and corrupted JPEGs, fueling Reddit explainers, TikTok breakdowns, Instagram fan art, and X threads written from the POV of in-game characters.

What started as a social campaign became a community movement. The Discord grew organically and in just a few weeks to 3,000+ members. Over 24,000 players participated in the ARG hailing from over 37 countries across the globe. Fans sent characters letters. They made each other mixtapes. Nearly 400,000 messages were exchanged with over half a million people reached across all social platforms. 90% of surveyed players said they’d buy the next Don’t Nod game thanks to the campaign. And all of it happened without a single dollar spent on paid media.

HAUS of PARK turned a marketing gap into a fandom engine, not by shouting at fans, but by designing a space they could call their own and co-creating it together, in real time.