Are you looking to market your game? This guide will teach you everything you need to know about game marketing, from targeting your audience to using unconventional tactics. You'll learn about the history of video game marketing, how social media and community management play a role, and more.
Marketing is simply the act of promoting or selling a product. A smart approach to game marketing is to incorporate it into the game’s development plan, conducting market research and beginning marketing processes at the inception of the game. It is a crucial component in attracting and engaging players, and it is ultimately crucial to success in driving sales: without a clear and well-executed marketing strategy, a game is unlikely to have success in the short or long term. Read on for more details on the components that can build a concrete campaign, including social media, community engagement, audience analysis, paid campaigns, and app store optimization.
The video game market is oversaturated. In a marketplace where plenty of high-quality games are competing for players’ attention, it is not enough to focus purely on the product itself: consumers need to be convinced to buy your game over a competitor’s. An effective marketing plan can make your game a focal point in an expanding tide of other gaming opportunities. Take, for example, Honkai: Star Rail, whose massive marketing campaign secured millions of pre-registers before the official launch and generated $40m in gross revenue on the day of its launch in China. Marketing is not just about the initial launch, however, and regular updates and expansions alongside sustained marketing activities can maintain a game’s relevance and continue to attract new players. Game marketing is, therefore, a crucial component of a game’s success and survival in an increasingly competitive environment.
Advertising in video games isn’t a new concept; however, methods and techniques have shifted significantly in the last few decades. Where marketing of the 80s and 90s relied on print advertising, informative and attractive packaging, and TV commercials, the digital revolution of the last 20 years has seen companies utilize social media, influencers, online trailers, e-mail, websites, and digital storefronts and platforms. It is worth noting here that an expensive marketing campaign has never been a guarantee of success. Atari’s 1982 game E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was a complete commercial failure despite having the branding of one of the highest-grossing films of all time. In other words, just as making an exceptional game alone does not guarantee success, nor does marketing.
Today, companies marketing their games have two options: work with third-party marketing firms or conduct all marketing activities in-house. With both avenues, the overall practices will involve a combination of traditional advertising and digital marketing. Companies’ focus will include social media and influencer marketing, content marketing, community engagement, email marketing, events, press releases and reviews, and paid advertising. As mentioned, it is crucial to embed marketing strategy within the development of any game, ensuring marketing plans are robust and that they span a game’s full timeline—from development to launch to maintaining its relevance in the long term. When creating marketing plans, companies will consider the following:
Target audience: Market research is needed to identify and explore the prospective audience—are they casual or hardcore players? What is the demographic? Do they prefer short experiences or long play-throughs? In order to know how to sell to your target audience, you need to have a thorough understanding of their preferences.
Key features: It is important to identify the key pillars of a game—important and interesting elements that should be promoted most prominently. These could be things like a unique aesthetic or unusual game mechanics and will be highlighted throughout the marketing campaign.
Marketing channels: Identifying which channels of marketing are most suited to your product and audience is crucial. For example, while there is a vast array of social media platforms to choose from, better results arise from the platforms where companies can sustain a high level of engagement with players; being spread too thinly over too many low-output accounts can be counterproductive.
Timelines: In a fast-paced and competitive environment, especially on social media, trends burn brightly and die quickly, so it is important that companies create marketing timelines that can sustain interest and engagement, peaking at the correct moments. Companies can control the narrative in this way through marketing beats—specific milestones in a campaign that are strategically planned to sustain interest: for example, staggering trailer releases, beta testing, community engagement events, and so on.
The best way to decide on the appropriate marketing channels and content depends on the target audience you are trying to reach. Modern gamers are diverse individuals with an array of preferences and habits. To best strategize around your target audience, it is important to define market segments and then decide which you are targeting. The common marketing segmentation variable types are:
Geographic (generally this refers to world region or country, but audiences can also be defined by city)
Demographic (age, gender, education, religion, occupation, income, family size)
Psychographic (social class, lifestyle, personality)
Behavioral (casual or hardcore gamers, company loyalty, awareness stage, attitude towards product, genre, favorite games)
Technical (speed of internet connection, age of computer)
In an extremely competitive environment where companies must battle to garner and sustain attention online, marketing games through social media has never been harder. That being said, the tools to find people have never been better. The cheapest methods for marketing Indie games come from social media sites like X (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, Tumblr, and Reddit.
To increase the visibility of your posts, they should contain key aspects of your game, for example:
Concept art and gameplay pictures
Character art from the game
Beautiful scenery or elements of levels in the game
Boss fights
Trailers
Pictures of the team working on the project
Relevant hashtags
X has several campaign objectives:
Tweet engagement (reaching more people and driving conversation)
Website clicks or conversions (sending people to your site to purchase your game or sign up, etc.)
App install or app re-engagements (getting people to reinstall or re-engage with your mobile apps)
Video views (getting people to watch your videos using X’s native video player)
Followers (building your community on X)
Leads on X (collecting emails from people who express interest)
Facebook is another good resource for marketing—many people check their Facebook walls daily, even if they don’t post themselves. The best way to reach gamers on Facebook is through Facebook ads (Facebook also offers paid advertising as X does) and Facebook groups. Joining groups full of active members can help increase the visibility of your game.
In addition to promoting the game, Reddit is very useful for getting feedback on your website, art style, soundtracks, and the game itself through the daily discussions in the various game development subreddits.
As with all social media channels, you will need to be an active participant on Reddit to really benefit from the use of this platform.
When making use of TikTok in your marketing campaign, it’s important to grasp its style: it is known for short, engaging, and informal videos. For this, you must spend time on the app yourself to learn the language of the trending hashtags or popular songs, for example, which you can then use to increase the visibility of your content. Things that would be niche on other platforms have a better chance of reaching their target audiences on TikTok because users swipe through dozens of videos at a time. As such, anything that would normally be aimed at general audiences on other platforms, like progress shots or new trailers, tends to fall flat on TikTok.
Audiences on TikTok prize personal, authentic content coming from normal, everyday people. Interacting with your audience can lead to sales, it surprises the players but also makes them realize you’re an actual person.
Building a community is one of the last campaign components that you can actually control: by actively engaging with players online, you can create a loyal network more likely to share content on social media, help with word-of-mouth marketing, provide feedback, and help retain a player base in the long term. It’s important to keep in contact with your followers by turning on your notifications and replying to their DMs and comments. For fellow game developers, downloading their games and subscribing on their social media platforms to show support will encourage them to do the same for your game.
Pay attention and respond to comments, demonstrating your active involvement.
On TikTok, when people ask questions or prompt new material, don’t just reply to them on the video—TikTok lets you “quote” comments in new videos, a functionality that highlights exactly what comment you’re responding to.
Strategically responding with a video lets you maintain clear communication with your audience, while also making your audience feel important enough to be the focus of an entire upload.
Even negative comments can be a good jumping-off point for a genuine or lighthearted response.
If you have multiple social media accounts—a YouTube channel, a blog, a Discord channel, and so on—they all need to be connected. You want all potential players of your game not only to find you, but to discover there are other avenues to go and consume more content, engage with a community, and share their own thoughts.
If you can’t dedicate enough time to remain active on a certain platform, then don’t use it; only engage on platforms that you can update on a consistent basis. It takes time to build momentum in this space, and if you don’t have time to get things off the ground and keep them there, you won’t gain the full benefits available to you.
Discord is increasingly becoming an important space for community management, with some developers moving their communities over to the platform entirely. Discord was first and foremost created to facilitate free-flowing communication—with users able to interact through text, voice chat, and video—making it a great space for a community to thrive. It also allows players to broadcast game livestreams, allowing real-time interaction, which gives a personal and direct feel.
Visually and structurally, it is easy to set up servers in Discord, but you do need to ensure yours is clear, organized, and intuitive for users. It’s also important to have efficient and helpful moderation on a space like Discord, as keeping your community spaces positive, welcoming, and safe is a crucial element of sustaining a healthy community.
A good website for your game goes a long way. There are many free templates out there that you can use; for example, Bootstrap offers a variety of free and paid templates. The important thing to keep in mind when designing your website is to use a consistent theme that follows or complements your game’s aesthetic.
A website’s presskit is a hub for journalists, influencers, and other interested individuals from the media. It provides images, videos, social media links, contact details, and key information all in one centralized place. It is crucial to remember that this page is not for a general audience; it is specifically for journalists. There are strong conventions with presskit pages, which are important to follow as closely as you can. The page’s key purpose is to allow a journalist to get important details quickly, and all the material on this page must be polished, engaging, and interesting in order to motivate the press to write about your game.
A game demo has only one goal: to get the player to purchase the game. For this, it’s very important to have a good demo version of your game. If the conversion rate—the rate of people who purchase the game after testing it—is low, then you might need to adjust your demo. Concentrate on following issues:
Demo feature limitations:
Does the demo have limited features (like fewer units, levels, powers etc.,) compared to the full version?
Does the player know exactly what they’re going to be buying?
Add nag screens to both the beginning and the end of the demo—these can explain the limitations and benefits of purchasing the game.
Demo time limitations: Time limitations combined with feature limitations can be advantageous—offer 15 demo launches or 60 minutes of gameplay, or a 30-day period. Or try something in between.
Guide the player to make the purchase: It should be easy for a player to purchase the game (within one or two mouse clicks from landing on the website). If it isn’t, adjust the demo.
Including consistent blog posts on your website will increase your game and your company’s search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO has both immediate and long-term effects on your game sales. First, if you can rank highly for search terms relevant to your game, then more potential purchasers will come across you. Second, having that long-term series of posts will bring new readers who could be potential purchasers of the game in the future—this is a “long tail” effect, which can potentially keep sales going long after launch. Guest blogging is a particularly good way of attracting new traffic to your website in this way.
Websites are a key part of the community engagement mentioned earlier: how you respond to and interact with your players here will influence their loyalty to the game and brand. It is important to provide good customer support, and this could include FAQ lists, support databases, and automated emails. You could use support forums, outsource your customer support, or use customer relationship management (CRM) tools. You could also incorporate an online chat function available for those who purchase the game. Regular newsletters and the previously mentioned blog posts are also good tools for maintaining high levels of interaction with your community, relaying new information and updates, and keeping them excited about the game.
If users have opted in to receive communication from you, you can use email campaigns to keep them informed about updates, new releases, and special offers. Use interesting, attention-grabbing subject lines and address the subscriber by their name to increase engagement with the content. It is also a good idea to decide on a cadence for these emails—having consistently released newsletters can increase anticipation and maintain a user’s interest.
Where budget allows, paying third parties to support your campaign can be a beneficial and effective way to attract potential players to your game.
Engaging influencers in your marketing campaign can help you to leverage their credibility and audience to reach a wider circle of potential players. In the video game market, influencers (a.k.a. “content creators”) are personalities that create pre-recorded and/or live-streamed content on any number of platforms. The key to working with influencers is to match the game to an influencer’s tastes: approaching an influencer with complementary preferences to your game will make them more receptive and knowledgeable and means they will be reaching an audience aligned to your game. It is then important to help them use the game to create content that will keep their viewers happy, or even better, increase their viewership. Influencers primarily care about two things: their viewers/followers/subscribers/community and the money they earn. What do you have to offer them that appeals to their motivations?
Another option in attempting to increase the visibility of your game is to use paid advertising. There are several ad types and platforms you could use, but you will need to focus on those most likely to return on your investment. As already mentioned, paid ads are available on Facebook and X, and you can also use targeted ads on other social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and TikTok—which you choose will be dependent on your audience. In-game advertising is also an option, allowing you to target the most relevant players and raise brand awareness within the gaming community.
In order for potential players to more easily find your game, it needs to be optimized to improve discoverability on the app stores and, therefore, increase downloads. App store optimization (ASO) also involves monitoring the click-through rate (CTR), which means assessing how many people are encouraged to actually click on your app once they’ve found its listing.
ASO techniques involve including key terms in titles, descriptions, and metadata; ensuring high-quality visual assets like icons and screenshots; and encouraging users to leave positive reviews and ratings. You should monitor your competitors, so that you can gauge how well your App Store landing page is performing in comparison, and make adjustments as necessary. It is worth noting that Google Play allows you to change these assets (titles, icons, screenshots, app description) quickly, whereas a submission is required for all changes (other than the app description) on the Apple App Store.
Steam is the most popular digital distribution platform in the world. It has recently lowered the barrier to entry for new developers to sell games on the platform to $100, which has resulted in more games being released at a higher frequency than ever before. As such, gamers are presented with a deluge of possibilities, and standing out against the competition is becoming increasingly difficult. However, there are strategies you can implement to optimize your page for discoverability on Steam. Establishing the correct and most suitable keywords and tags to associate with your page will ensure that it is being made visible to the right type of user, driving traffic to your page and increasing the CTR. Steam also provides marketing features and tools to enhance visibility—explore these to determine which you might best leverage for your game’s optimization.
Given the fierce competition on Steam, it shouldn’t be the only platform you sell your game on. You should consider platforms that give you the most revenue per sale when promoting your game. For example, the Humble Widget (not to be confused with the Humble Store) gives developers a 95/5 revenue split, meaning you earn 95% of net sales when your average distribution platform (including Steam) would give you only 70%. Therefore, including links to something like your website (with the Humble widget) or itch.io as part of your marketing campaign can earn you more revenue per sale.
In addition, if you have a casual game, you might consider casual game portals, such as Big Fish Games, EA's Pogo, Gamehouse, GameXtazy, GameZone, Playfirst, Real Arcade, Shockwave, Trygames, or Yahoo Games. Different portals have different requirements for games, so while these portals can allow you to reach a wide audience, you will need to tailor your approach for each one.
You can also consider retail stores, although in some cases, it can be very difficult to contact retailers directly. However, you can make it easy for them to contact you by ensuring the details are easily accessible to distributors on your website.
Having multiple storefronts reduces your dependence on oversaturated platforms like Steam, offering you the possibility of higher visibility elsewhere.
Attending major industry events is a great opportunity if you can afford it, and you don’t even have to pay for a booth to make your time at the event worth it. If your goal is to show off your game to potential consumers, you can still attend events outside major industry events and just bring your laptop with your game loaded up, saving costs, and still reaching potential players. If your goal is to network, just paying for the expo pass can be good enough, and with services like Meet to Match, you can schedule meetings at events with attendees off-site too.
If you do secure a booth at an event, height is a premium: with so much foot traffic, you want fans, community members, and potential players to be able to spot your game as far away as possible. Also, don’t hesitate to get creative. For example, if you have a pillar or wall near your booth, you might be able to use a projector to draw attention to the area, or you could use cheap Christmas lights to wrap around your monitors/booth.
If you’re trying to build a pure list of potential players, it’s best to not include a giveaway as an incentive—giving away a TV and requiring participants to sign up to your email list is a quick way to build a weak list. An old-fashioned sign-up sheet is still an excellent way to build a good list of people who are genuinely interested in your game.
In addition to all the tips this article has mentioned so far, there are also plenty of creative options for you to explore. Consider placing advertising banners in your own car back window, or hosting live events or social media challenges to generate excitement. There’s no one correct method to game marketing, so meet the challenge with creativity, and think outside the box.
While it might seem a daunting task, establishing a clear and targeted marketing campaign plan at the outset that works throughout the entire development process will hugely benefit the success of your game. Both the marketing and gaming industries are evolving, so keep an eye on the potential of all new trends and technological advancements, as innovative ways of making your game stand out from the crowd are likely to emerge with them.
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