Make-A-Wish UK — Overcooked Live (United Kingdom)
GOLD — 2026 Marketing Makes a World of Difference™ Awards
A live gaming experience turned audience participation into fundraising—allowing viewers to influence the action while helping grant wishes for critically ill children.
Submitted by Arena Media UK
Winner’s Citation
For transforming a much-loved game into a live, participatory fundraising experience—bringing creators, gamers, publishers and partners together so that audience involvement could directly help support life-changing wishes for critically ill children.
How It Makes a World of Difference
For many critically ill children undergoing long-term treatment, gaming is much more than entertainment. It can provide joy, escape, connection and community. At Make-A-Wish UK, gaming-related wishes had increased 400% since 2021, making gaming increasingly important to the charity’s own impact story.
That insight shaped the approach to Wish 200 Week, Make-A-Wish UK’s annual gaming fundraising initiative. The ambition was to raise enough money to grant 200 wishes—but the 2025 campaign had no media budget.
Rather than simply asking the gaming community for donations, Make-A-Wish UK decided to create something people would want to participate in.
The answer was Overcooked Live.
Working directly with Ghost Town Games and Team17, the creators and publisher of the popular cooperative cooking game Overcooked, the team secured access to its characters, soundtrack, graphics and visual identity. Then they brought the game’s famously chaotic kitchen into the real world.
A roster of gaming creators with a combined social reach of 43 million competed in a four-hour live event streamed across Twitch and YouTube.
But viewers weren’t simply watching.
Using the fundraising platform Tiltify, their donations could change what happened in the game—triggering forfeits, choosing dishes and adding new complications for the players in real time.
The Difference Marketing Made
Marketing turned the act of giving into part of the entertainment itself.
That was the crucial shift.
Instead of interrupting a gaming audience with a charitable appeal, Overcooked Live created an experience native to the culture it wanted to engage. Every donation had two consequences: it supported Make-A-Wish UK and gave the viewer greater power to shape the action unfolding on screen.
Participation wasn’t something the campaign asked for after delivering its message. Participation was the idea.
And because the initiative had no media budget, marketing also became an exercise in mobilizing an ecosystem. Game developers, creators, platforms, media owners, outdoor companies and production partners contributed reach, assets, expertise or resources to make the experience possible. The campaign secured £25,000 in donated display media and 300 donated OOH screens worth more than £111,000.
Results That Make a Difference
Overcooked Live initiative contributed to a record fundraising week—the most successful in Make-A-Wish UK’s history.
The live event became the 19th most-watched Twitch stream in the UK on the day of broadcast, appearing on Twitch’s global homepage during its first hour and on its UK and Ireland homepages for the remainder. On YouTube, it generated 195,000 impressions and 13,000 watch hours within 24 hours, with an average viewing time of 16 minutes.
All of that was achieved without a paid media budget, relying instead on donated media, partnerships and the willingness of the gaming community to join in.
The result demonstrates something larger than successful fundraising: when marketing makes participation meaningful in its own right, people don’t simply receive the message. They become part of what makes the outcome possible.
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