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.
Video Game Marketing Plan vs Marketing Strategy: What's the Difference?
I’ve noticed over the last few years that many ‘games marketers’ are using Marketing Strategy and Marketing Plans interchangeably, as if they were the same thing. In the field of marketing, they are not.
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What is a video game marketing strategy in 2026?
A games marketing strategy covers the high level broad aspects. It includes more macro socioeconomic and market factors. It overlaps with the overall business strategy & direction. Think your business (game studio) is a ship we want to point that ship in a particular direction and have all the ores (departments, teams, etc) rowing together to make that happen.
What is a video game marketing plan in 2026?
A games marketing plan are your actual campaigns, marketing mix of channels, budget forecasts, and execution plans. There is also a marketing planner document or calendar as part of the plan. A marketing plan is how that ore, which marketers own, turn the ore to hit the water, do we swivel or push super hard at the beginning to get our ore pointed true. (We also influence the other ores but that’s not relevant here)
My Video Game Marketing Strategy Framework
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 any games 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 deploying to market.
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Having worked across game development, publishing and marketing, I look at strategic opportunities from both sides. Marketing needs a strong campaign plan, but that plan also has to work with the realities of the game being built.
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When I joined the Phantom Galaxies project, they were presenting elements from marketing strategies from other game studios owned by Animoca Brands, without any real understanding of why those types of businesses do not fit with our studio or this particular project. Separating out larger strategic components helped us build a more laser-focused marketing plan for Phantom Galaxies specifically while keeping in mind other unannounced titles and how they all contribute to the business in its entirety; there were other goals, aspirations and realities that were instrumental in the overall marketing strategy. All of which helped shape our marketing plan and individual tactics.
As a 26-year games marketer, here is how I approach the launch marketing for a game; By first walking you through the high-level marketing strategy. There’s a lot in here, so I’ve broken it down into several strategic areas:
How I Build a Video Game Marketing Strategy
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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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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Turning Your Marketing Strategy Into a Game Launch
Once the audience, positioning, messaging and channel strategy are established, those decisions need to be turned into a coordinated launch campaign.
This is where release timing, Steam readiness, campaign assets, creators, media, measurement and development availability all need to come together.
I cover that process separately in my Video Game Launch Marketing framework, including launch readiness, release timing, the final weeks before release and what happens after the game goes live.
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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. 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.
6. 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.
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.