Marketing Strategies for Your Games
Every game needs a different route to market. A premium PC strategy title should not be marketed like a co-op survival game, a cosy indie or a free-to-play mobile release. We start by understanding the product, the players most likely to care and the market you are entering.
Our game marketing strategy work covers audience definition, competitor analysis, positioning, messaging, Steam strategy, creator opportunities, content, community, paid media and launch planning. The aim is to decide what deserves attention before execution begins.
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Because we understand game development, the strategy can move with production. When features change, milestones shift or playtesting reveals a stronger hook, we can adjust the marketing plan around the game you are actually building.
There's a lot to cover, so it has been divided into two areas:
From Features to Market Hooks
Marketing becomes stronger when it starts inside the game. We work with your team to identify the mechanics, themes, player behaviours and moments that make the product distinctive, then translate those into clear market positioning.
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This helps production and marketing work toward the same outcome. Instead of inventing a campaign at the end of development, we can build audience appeal, shareability and communication opportunities into the wider go-to-market strategy.
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That gives your team clearer priorities, stronger messaging and a practical roadmap for building awareness, wishlists, community and demand.
Our Video Game Marketing Strategy Services
Audience Strategy
Define the players most likely to care, where they spend time and what motivates them to act.
Market Positioning
​Clarify how your game should be understood, differentiated and presented in its category.
Competitor Analysis
Review comparable games, messaging, channels, launches, pricing and audience response.
Go-to-Market Plan
Map marketing from early development through announcement, demo, launch and post-launch.
Channel Strategy
Prioritise Steam, creators, social, PR, community and paid media around the game and budget.
Messaging & Hooks
Turn features and player experiences into simple reasons to care, click, wishlist and buy.
Campaign Planning
Build coordinated campaigns around milestones, festivals, announcements and release beats.
Measurement
Set practical KPIs for awareness, traffic, wishlists, engagement, acquisition and sales.
A Strategy Your Team Can Use
A good video game marketing strategy should not become a presentation that gets forgotten. We turn the strategic work into clear priorities, campaign ideas, channel roles and next actions your team can actually execute.
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We can work as an extension of your studio, alongside an internal marketer or with your existing agencies and partners. The scope can cover the full marketing roadmap or focus on the areas where your team needs senior strategic input.
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The result is a more connected approach where development decisions and marketing decisions support each other instead of competing for attention.
Video Game Launch Marketing: The Framework I Use As a Games Marketing Professional
There is no single right formula for video game launch marketing. Every game has a different audience, production schedule, budget, market position and reason for players to care.
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This is why I rarely start a game launch marketing strategy by asking which social channels we should use or how many influencers we should contact. Before we get anywhere near that, I want to understand the game, the market around it and whether the product is actually ready to support the campaign we are about to build.
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Having worked across game development, publishing and marketing, I look at launch from both sides. Marketing needs a strong campaign plan, but that plan also has to work with the realities of the game being built.
Discovery: Foundations
Section Quick Links
Jump to next phase: Align & launch
1. First, Make Sure the Game Is Actually Ready to Be Marketed
One of the biggest mistakes I see is a development team deciding the game needs to launch, then asking marketing to generate enough attention to make that date work, even if the game isn’t ready to release. Sometimes the right marketing recommendation is actually to not launch yet. And there have been many times where the game production team is allocated additional production time based on my professional games marketer recommendation.
BOX: Pushing back a release window has potentially serious implications that need to be understood and addressed by experienced marketers and producers together. A marketer who doesn't have the expertise within a production environment wouldn't know the underlying reasons production teams pushed back. Studios also have wider financial pressures or hard delivery dates set by publishers or internally. Hiring the right people in marketing can make all the difference. You can read more about this here.
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When I started working on Arms Trade Tycoon: Tanks with MicroProse, the game had already been announced for several months but had generated very little press coverage, follower growth or wishlist momentum. I was brought onto the project in late September 2023 and the original intention was to release as soon as possible; Yes, that was the actual directive.
After reviewing the game, I pushed back the Steam Early Access release. The game simply was not market-ready. Instead, we agreed on a new Early Access window in January; the date moved several times before we settled on it. That still gave us a very short runway, but it gave both development and marketing more time to improve the product, positioning, assets and campaign.
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It is important to plan out the game’s launch window early on. This will help in determining a pre launch marketing timeline. From there, you can begin to plan out asset requirements, sourcing artists and production into a Steam launch timeline. Gather any Steam checklists, guides and planners, as it might help cover anything you may have forgotten.
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That is an important part of video game launch marketing that is often ignored. Marketing should not sit outside production waiting for a finished game. It should help identify whether the game is market-ready. Marketing should also ensure all the key marketing aspects like store page, demo, messaging and player experience are ready to support the attention you are about to generate.
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What happens if you can’t move the release date? See this section
2. Play the Game Until You Understand Why Players Would Care
I don't like building marketing strategies from a pitch deck and a feature list.
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Become the expert of your game. Part of your checklist, no, your habit as a video games marketer, is to always be playing the game. When there is a new build, get into it. Save your favourite parts and document, document, document. Not technical, but areas of the game you feel creators, press /media, or players would like to see. This could be for your Steam page, content marketing, social media, etc. Marketers have to understand the game to be able to promote it pre launch leading up to a Steam launch or beyond Early Access.
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For ATTT, I spent hours playing and replaying the game, trying different approaches and comparing what I was experiencing. I also had regular conversations with the developer to understand their intent: why features had been designed in particular ways and where the game was heading.
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This discovery phase can take considerable amounts of time, dedication and lots of iterations, especially as the game evolves with the help of marketing.
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From there I began identifying:
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The strongest player experiences
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Features worth building marketing around
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Potential player friction and churn points
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Different audience motivations
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Competitive games and alternatives
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Messaging and creative angles
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Areas of the game that could be improved before release
You discover and expand on these areas from playing the game, talking to game designers and the production team, and reading the design docs (remember these usually become obsolete quickly). This is where video game marketing strategy and development should overlap. Marketing is not there to tell designers how to design their game. But someone needs to look at the game from the market's perspective.
3. Find the Audience Through Motivation, Not Just Demographics
“Male, 18-35, likes strategy games” isn't a useful audience strategy. You need to understand why someone is interested in the game, what other products compete for their attention, where they spend time and what parts of your game connect with those interests. ATTT gave us a good example.
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At first glance, you might assume that people interested in tanks are one audience. They aren't. Our research showed an important distinction between players interested in building and designing tanks and players primarily interested in driving tanks and playing action-focused war games. ATTT appealed much more strongly to the former.
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These players wanted a slower, more technical experience built around designing prototypes, managing production and understanding the detail behind the machines. That changed how we approached the entire game launch marketing campaign. We looked at the other games these players enjoyed, their interests outside games, the media they consumed, the communities they participated in and where those audiences actually spent their time.
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That research eventually led us beyond traditional gaming audiences and into communities centred around tanks, military history and technical interests. This is also why a game launch plan should never simply copy the channel strategy of another successful game.
The question isn't:
“Which social media platform should we use?”
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It is:
“Where does this particular audience already exist?”
Working out how to find the audience
This is an area most marketers don't like to talk about. Mainly because it is a long, tedious and detailed process that involves a lot of market research, in many forms. Industry data isn’t always free or reliable. Most of the freely available published data is very high-level and not totally useful. Don't get me wrong, they are a good starting point.
Most studios cannot afford data like Statista; there are free ones like Gamalytic, but they don't cater for consumer behaviour or qualitative insights.
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This topic really needs its own page, so let’s move on and I’ll try to put this together another time.
4. Sometimes the Best Part of the Game Is Difficult to Market
ATTT created another interesting problem. It is a tycoon game built heavily around interfaces, production management, resources and engineering decisions. That can be great to play for the target audience. It isn't necessarily great footage for a 15-second social video. The obvious solution would have been to try to make the game look more action-packed than it really was. That would have attracted attention, but it would also have attracted the wrong players.
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Instead, we looked for other ways to communicate what made the game interesting.
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As the discovery of gameplay elements went on (remember section #2 above LINK), taking notes when discovering interesting gameplay, and the calls with developers to discover more about the game. Pouring over their game design docs and creating our own marketing documentation led us to the conclusion that this game was difficult to showcase. But from our discovery phase, we found exactly what areas were the most interesting and important to the players.
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From there we postulated that the following focused content would be most appealing to the cohort who’d be most attracted to ATTT. Remember you really don’t know until you test, evaluate, adjust and test again.
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Tank schematics
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Exploded diagrams
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Developer diaries
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Feature walkthroughs
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Interviews
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Technical content
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Historical material
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Specialist creator content
These assets allowed us to communicate the depth behind the game without pretending it was something it wasn't. Yes, asset production was a challenge compared to action games, but it needed to reflect the game and the experience.
This is something I look for in every game. Your trailer, screenshots, ads and social content should not simply show what exists in the build. They need to communicate why the right player should care about what exists in the build. Sometimes the most marketable asset isn't another gameplay clip.
5. Fix Your Steam Page Before Sending More Traffic to It
Once we understood the game and its audiences more clearly, we started improving the touchpoints players would encounter throughout the campaign. That included websites, social media, community channels and, importantly, the Steam product page.
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Messaging was tightened across those channels and the Steam page was updated to improve its ability to convert the people we were sending there. We also developed an asset production schedule covering the video, static creative and other materials required for the campaign. This is another reason I don't treat wishlist growth simply as a traffic problem. Sending more people to a Steam page that doesn't communicate the game properly can just scale the problem.
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During the ATTT campaign we tested:
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Different messaging
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Static versus video creative
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Ad variations
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Landing page versus direct Steam traffic
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Store-page copy
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Different audience segments
We also learned where not to spend.
Paid game advertising placements on large mainstream gaming sites such as Game Informer and PC Gamer generated traffic, but much of that audience bounced without taking meaningful action. The audience was generally looking for a very different style of game. The size of the gaming audience does not matter if it was the wrong gaming audience.
That is why good Steam marketing is as much about conversion and audience alignment as it is about generating traffic.
6. Don't Use Every Marketing Channel Just Because You Can
A game launch marketing plan should help you prioritise. The idea that you need to be on every channel publishing constantly is a fallacy. It is more advantageous to select channels strategically based on your audience than to waste time, resources and your budget doing a scatter-gun approach.
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For ATTT, different channels behaved very differently.
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Facebook and Reddit became particularly useful because we found older players and enthusiast communities who were more willing to engage with the technical and historical aspects of the game.
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YouTube produced lower direct conversion, but it still contributed to awareness and helped create interest among creators and media.
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Other channels were much weaker.
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The publisher's Twitter audience was more interested in flight simulators and shooters, so ATTT content generated a limited response. Existing newsletters had a similar audience mismatch. Threads also produced very little useful activity despite being a new platform at the time. That does not mean those channels are bad. It means they were not particularly useful for this game, this audience and this launch.
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One of the jobs of an experienced game marketer is knowing when to stop putting resources into something simply because it appears on the marketing plan. Put more effort behind the channels that are showing evidence of audience fit.
7. Creator Fit Matters More Than Creator Size
Influencer marketing presented another challenge for ATTT. The game was complex, and creators needed to understand enough about it to communicate why it was interesting. Rather than simply distributing keys and hoping for coverage, we produced walkthroughs, videos and supporting material and held calls with creators to explain features, benefits and useful ways to approach the game. We also became more selective about the creators we worked with.
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A large creator who attracts the wrong audience can create plenty of views without creating many wishlists or sales. For a niche game, poor creator alignment may even introduce a large number of players who were never going to enjoy the game in the first place.
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One of the more interesting creator relationships was with a genuine tank enthusiast who actually drove tanks and could talk about them in depth. Their existing passion made the game an authentic fit for their content rather than a forced sponsorship.
That is the kind of match I look for. Now there weren’t a lot of them or even any with 1M+ followers. That’s fine. Don’t try to utilise content creators with the wrong audiences or expectations.
8. Your Launch Marketing Must Match the Game Players Are Actually Getting
ATTT was still actively being developed throughout the campaign.
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Several later eras and features that would eventually strengthen the full game were not yet available for the Early Access release. We could have marketed the future version of ATTT. Instead, we concentrated the Early Access campaign around what players could actually experience, particularly the World War I era, and made sure creators, media and campaign partners understood the same message.
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This matters. Your trailer, creators, PR and store page all create expectations. If the game players receive does not match those expectations, stronger marketing can actually make the problem worse.
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This is why I prefer launch marketing to work closely with development. Marketing needs to know what is coming, what is moving, what has been cut and what is genuinely ready before building campaign promises around it.
What This Looked Like at Launch: Arms Trade Tycoon Tanks
ATTT had a short marketing runway, a limited budget and a product that was not particularly easy to communicate through conventional gameplay advertising. But once we understood who the game was really for, we could build the campaign around the right aspects of the product.
We combined playtesting, audience research, Steam optimisation, creative production, creator outreach, specialist communities, social content, targeted advertising, media activity and regular work with the developer.
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The campaign ultimately generated:
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61,000+ net Steam wishlists
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12,000 additional wishlists during the final week before launch
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Only 3% wishlist deletions
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6,000+ Steam followers
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#1 on Steam's Popular Upcoming list
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#5 among MicroProse's best-performing releases at the time
What I find more useful than the final numbers, however, is how we reached them.
There wasn't one magic campaign. Some things worked well. Some didn't. We tested, learned, stopped spending time on channels that weren't delivering, refined the audience, improved the Steam journey, helped the developer strengthen parts of the product and continually adjusted the campaign as launch approached.
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That is what video game launch marketing looks like in practice.
Marketing Alignment and Game Launch
You are still with me? Great! There’s a lot more to video games marketing strategies, so let’s go through some more specifics:
Section Quick Links
1. Your Game Launch Date Is a Marketing Decision Too
A game release date should not be chosen purely because production believes the build will be ready on a particular day. Your game does not launch into an empty market. It is competing against other releases, Steam events, major sales periods, showcases and potentially much larger games that are targeting the same players for their time, attention and money. For that reason, I consider the release window to be part of the overall video game launch strategy, rather than a date that marketing simply receives once production has made the decision.
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Before locking a launch date, I look at what is happening around the proposed release window and, more importantly, whether those events actually compete with our audience. A major AAA release might dominate the overall games conversation but have very little impact on a highly specialised simulation title. On the other hand, a smaller release in exactly the same niche may be much more important to consider. Relevant Steam festivals, major updates to competing games, creator availability, press schedules and industry events can all influence how much attention is realistically available.
The timing also needs to make sense internally. If the trailer, Steam page, screenshots, demo, creator build and campaign materials are not ready, then having a technically releasable game does not necessarily mean you have a market-ready launch. Similarly, I want to know whether the development and community teams will actually be available after release. There is little value in concentrating months of marketing activity into one launch window if the team then has no capacity to respond to technical issues, player feedback or unexpected opportunities.
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Sometimes moving a release by a few weeks creates a much cleaner window and gives the campaign additional time to build momentum. Other times there is little benefit in moving it. The important point is that the game launch schedule should be considered deliberately by production, publishing and marketing together. A release date is not simply the end of the production roadmap.
2. What If the Game Isn't Ready, But You Can't Move the Launch Date?
Sometimes delaying the game is the best decision, but sometimes it simply is not possible. Studios may be dealing with publisher commitments, investor expectations, platform obligations, funding milestones or the more basic reality that the business needs revenue. In those situations, marketing cannot manufacture another three months of development time, so the priority becomes reducing launch risk as much as possible within the time that remains.
The first thing I want marketing and production to establish together is which problems are most likely to damage the player's first experience and which marketing promises create the greatest risk if they cannot be delivered.
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A serious onboarding problem is more important than producing another social video.
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A feature being heavily promoted but missing from the release build is more important than creating another set of screenshots.
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A creator build that repeatedly crashes is more important than increasing the number of creators receiving keys.
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When time becomes limited, trying to complete every activity on the original marketing plan often makes the situation worse.
The campaign itself may therefore need to change. We might narrow the features being promoted, reduce the number of channels being supported, delay some creator activity, replace marketing assets that no longer represent the game or change the emphasis of the campaign so that expectations match what players are actually going to receive.
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This happened with Arms Trade Tycoon: Tanks. The game was still evolving during the campaign, and several of the later eras and features that would strengthen the full experience were not going to be available for the initial Early Access release. Rather than market the future version of ATTT, we concentrated the Early Access messaging around the World War I experience that players could actually access and made sure creators, media and campaign partners understood that same positioning.
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This is an important distinction in a game launch marketing plan because marketing is not only generating awareness. It is also creating an expectation of the product. If the trailer, Steam page, creators and advertising promise an experience the player does not receive, stronger marketing can actually magnify the problem.
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When the date genuinely cannot move, my priority is therefore to protect the player experience first, make sure marketing accurately reflects the available game, remove serious store-page or positioning problems, stabilise creator and review builds and then concentrate resources on the campaign activities that are most likely to make a difference. The nice-to-have activities can wait.
3. What I Measure During a Video Game Launch Marketing Campaign
A successful game launch campaign should be measured long before the game actually releases. I do not like evaluating a campaign using one headline number in isolation because almost every metric needs context. Ten thousand wishlists might be an excellent result for one niche game and disappointing for another. A creator generating 100,000 views might drive a significant increase in store activity, or those views might result in almost no meaningful player action at all.
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Before launch, I am particularly interested in momentum and causation. I want to understand whether wishlist growth is accelerating, what happened immediately before that acceleration and which traffic sources are sending people who actually take a meaningful action. If we change the Steam capsule, screenshots, trailer or positioning, I want to know whether the behaviour of store visitors changes with it. If particular gameplay features consistently generate better engagement across social posts, creators or advertising, that should influence what the wider campaign emphasises.
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Where a demo is involved, I also want to understand more than the number of downloads. Player feedback, obvious confusion, recurring bugs, playtime and the parts of the demo people are talking about can all reveal whether we are presenting the strongest experience effectively. The same principle applies to creators. Views are useful, but I also want to know whether the creator understood the game, whether their audience responded positively, what people discussed in the comments and whether the activity coincided with stronger Steam traffic, wishlists or community growth.
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As release approaches, the emphasis begins shifting towards conversion. Store traffic, sales velocity, wishlist activity, creator coverage, reviews, paid-media performance and community sentiment all start providing signals about how the launch is behaving. The important part is being able to interpret those signals quickly enough to act on them. If one creator or piece of content suddenly performs extremely well, there may be an opportunity to amplify it. If the same complaint appears repeatedly in reviews or Discord, that may require development or messaging changes. If a channel continues consuming resources without producing meaningful player response, it may be time to reduce its importance.
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After launch, I use the same information to determine what happens next. Which audiences actually converted? Which features are players talking about most? Which creators should we continue working with? Which messages performed better than expected? Where did we spend time or budget without getting enough back? Those answers should influence the next update, content beat, creator campaign, sale or wider marketing activity.
The numbers tell you what happened. The more valuable part of video game launch marketing is working out why it happened and what the team should do next.
4. The First 48–72 Hours: Don't Just Watch the Sales Dashboard
Launch day can create the impression that the hard work is over. The campaign goes live, creators begin publishing, the store page changes from Coming Soon to Buy Now and everyone starts refreshing the sales dashboard. In reality, the first 48–72 hours are one of the periods when marketing, community and development need to be working most closely together.
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This is when all hands are on deck; I usually get very little sleep over these first days and weeks.
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I treat those first few days almost like live operations for the launch campaign. Marketing should be watching where traffic and sales are coming from, which campaign assets are performing, what creators are publishing and whether particular messages or pieces of content are gaining unexpected traction. If something is clearly working, there is little value in waiting until the end-of-month report before deciding whether to support it further.
Community provides another important stream of information. Players will quickly tell you where they are confused, what they enjoy, which bugs are affecting them and what they are sharing with other people. This information needs to move quickly between community, marketing and development because a recurring question may indicate poor onboarding, unclear store messaging or a product problem that could begin affecting reviews if it is not addressed.
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The development team therefore also needs visibility of which problems are materially affecting the launch. Not every negative comment or feature request should become an emergency patch, but issues that are preventing players from progressing, damaging first impressions or creating widespread frustration need to be identified quickly.
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Devs need to also be in Discord - observing and noting player feedback. Avoid responding or getting into heated arguments - which happens quite a lot and can derail and you lose credibility, especially when that argument is all over Reddit
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Creator campaigns require the same level of attention. Sending a Steam key is not the end of influencer marketing. Creators may encounter technical issues, misunderstand a mechanic, need additional information or produce unexpectedly strong content that should immediately be amplified through the wider campaign. This is one reason I prefer marketing teams to maintain actual relationships with creators rather than treating outreach as a bulk distribution exercise.
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Reviews should also be read rather than simply reduced to a percentage score. A repeated complaint can reveal a technical problem, an expectation created by the marketing, poor onboarding or evidence that the campaign is attracting the wrong audience. Conversely, positive reviews often reveal the parts of the game players value most, and those comments can become useful information for future positioning and content.
Launch produces an enormous amount of noise. The team's job is to determine which signals actually matter and who owns the response. Launch week is one of the worst times to discover that marketing, production and community do not know who is responsible for making that decision.
5. The Game Launch Is the Start of the Next Marketing Campaign
Launch is obviously an important milestone, but it should not represent the end of your video game marketing timeline. In many ways, release gives marketing something it has never had before: a significant number of real customers playing the product and telling you what they actually think about it.
Before launch, much of your marketing is based on research, testing, wishlists, demos, creator feedback and assumptions about what players will value. After launch, you have reviews, player discussions, creator videos, gameplay clips, purchasing behaviour, support tickets, community conversations and examples of how people are actually using the game. That information should feed directly into the next stage of the campaign.
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Strong reviews can become social proof. Unexpected player behaviour can become excellent social or creator content. A feature that players consistently praise may deserve much greater prominence in future advertising and store assets. A substantial update can give creators and media another reason to revisit the title. Even criticism can be useful when it reveals a gap between what the campaign promised and what players actually experienced.
This is why I prefer to finish a launch already thinking about the next two or three possible marketing beats. That might be a major update, DLC, a Steam sale, participation in a themed event, a creator activation, a new platform release or simply an unexpectedly strong piece of community content that gives us something new to build around.
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Waiting until sales begin slowing down before asking what can be marketed next usually means the team is already reacting too late. Good post-launch game marketing uses the attention, data and player behaviour generated by the release to create the next reason for people to talk about the game.
6. Video Game Launch Readiness Checklist
Before I consider a game ready for a major video game launch marketing push, I want confidence across several areas rather than simply confirmation that the build technically runs.
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The first is the game itself. The build needs to be stable enough for players, creators and reviewers, and ideally it has been tested by people who were not involved in making it. I want to know whether there are obvious onboarding problems, whether the important features being promoted are actually available and whether the experience delivered by the build matches what the marketing campaign has been promising.
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The positioning also needs to be clear. The team should be able to explain what the game is, why the intended audience should care and what differentiates it from the alternatives already competing for that player's attention. This should come from more than an internal description of the feature set. Marketing should have enough audience and player feedback to know which experiences, mechanics or motivations consistently generate the strongest response.
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The Steam or store page should then translate that positioning properly. The capsule needs to communicate enough at a glance, the trailer needs to reach the strongest selling experience quickly, the screenshots should sell the game rather than simply document what the build looks like, and the copy and tags should reinforce the same market position. If the campaign is driving people to Steam, the store page itself is part of the campaign and needs to be treated accordingly.
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Marketing assets need similar preparation. There should be enough gameplay footage, screenshots, renders, trailers and other creative to support activity throughout the launch rather than only the announcement day. I also want enough different hooks available to test because the creative angle we initially believe will perform best is not always the one the market responds to.
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Creator, media and community readiness matter as well. The creator build needs to work, creators should receive enough information to understand the game properly and outreach should prioritise people whose audiences genuinely fit the title. The press kit should be accurate, relevant media should have what they need and someone within the team needs clear responsibility for community management when new players begin arriving.
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Finally, the team needs to understand how success will be measured and how launch operations will work. Marketing should know which metrics matter, where traffic is coming from and which channels appear to deserve more or less investment. At the same time, everyone should know who owns marketing decisions during launch, who monitors reviews, who handles creator problems, who manages community issues and how serious product problems are escalated to development.
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Working out a checklist
The purpose of a game launch readiness checklist is not to create another hundred tasks for a development team that is already overloaded. It is to identify the weaknesses most likely to damage the launch before you expose those weaknesses to the largest audience the game has encountered.
Video Game Launch Marketing: What I Check 30–40 Days Before Release
A month before launch, I want clear answers to these questions:
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Is the build stable enough to support the campaign we are about to run?
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Does the Steam or store page explain the game quickly enough?
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Are we leading with the strongest player experience?
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Do our trailer(s), screenshots, ads and creator briefs tell the same story?
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Are creators receiving enough information and access to cover the game properly?
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Which channels are actually generating meaningful player response?
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Are we spending money sending the right audience to the game?
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Are there production changes that require marketing assets or messaging to change?
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Do we have enough creative ready to react if one message or asset performs particularly well?
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What are we prepared to change if launch performance differs from the plan?
A good video game launch strategy should make those answers clear before release day arrives. If they aren't clear, the priority isn't another social post. It's working out what is missing.
A Practical Video Game Launch Marketing Timeline
A launch timeline should change depending on the state of the game, the size of the audience already built, development resources and the amount of marketing runway available. In broad terms, the earlier stages should focus on positioning, audience understanding and marketability; the middle stages should build demand and test what works; and the final weeks should concentrate on coordination, conversion and removing friction before release.
Frequently Asked Questions About Video Game Marketing Strategy
The earlier the better, particularly if positioning, audience testing or Steam wishlists matter. A useful strategy can begin while the game is still changing and become more detailed as production becomes clearer.
That is normal in development. We build strategies around assumptions, milestones and decision points so messaging, channels and campaigns can evolve with the product.
Yes. We support indie developers, AA studios and publishers, adapting the campaign to suit the game, budget, development stage and internal resources.
Yes. We can audit an existing plan, identify gaps or weak assumptions, and recommend where budget and effort should be reallocated.
We look at genre, audience behaviour, visual and creator potential, platform, budget, development stage and commercial goal rather than assuming every game needs every channel.