New Player Acquisition: Reach Players Beyond
the Screen
Reaching players digitally is becoming increasingly difficult. Leverage vMarketer's experience in real-world user acquisition to reach untapped audiences, build valuable industry partnerships and turn live events into measurable player growth.
Offline Video Game Marketing: How Studios Can Acquire Players Beyond the Internet
Games are digital products, but players do not discover them exclusively online. Personal recommendations, physical gaming events, cultural exhibitions and real-world partnerships can introduce a title to relevant audiences, build trust and create relationships that conventional digital campaigns may miss. For indie and AA studios, the value often lies in choosing the right opportunities rather than buying the biggest booth.
Offline Video Game Marketing: How Studios Can Acquire Players Beyond the Internet
Games are digital products, but players do not discover them exclusively online. Personal recommendations, physical gaming events, cultural exhibitions and real-world partnerships can introduce a title to relevant audiences, build trust and create relationships that conventional digital campaigns may miss. For indie and AA studios, the value often lies in choosing the right opportunities rather than buying the biggest booth.
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Word of Mouth and Personal Recommendations
Recommendations from friends, family, colleagues and fellow players are particularly important for games. But recommending a game carries a small reputational risk: players are less likely to endorse something if they are unsure whether their friends will enjoy it. A game that delivers on its promises, makes shared play easy and gives existing players reasons to invite others is better positioned to generate referrals.
Referral mechanics work best when they improve the experience rather than simply incentivising spam, because who loves receiving unsolicited shares from friends? Shared progression, cooperative rewards, inviting friends into meaningful activities and onboarding that supports new players can create reasons to recommend a game. This is a product and design consideration as much as a marketing one.
At Gameloft, I explored a buddy-referral concept that would reward both an existing player and the invited friend for playing together. The referring player would actively participate in onboarding their friend, and, in turn, both would receive benefits from the exchange. The idea wasn't fully rolled out after a studio pivot, so I use it as an example of development-aligned acquisition thinking. I also adapted the concept to grow user numbers for Undeads Games.
Gaming Events and Conventions: Different Events, Different Goals
Mention Gamescom or GDC and some developers immediately think of travel costs, booth fees and disappointing returns. Those concerns are reasonable if success is judged only by immediate wishlists or sales. A local showcase, a consumer convention and an international business event serve different audiences and commercial purposes. The starting point is deciding what the studio actually needs from each event.
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Local Game Festivals and Showcases
Smaller physical showcases can be useful places to meet local players, recruit trusted playtesters and moderators, collect direct feedback and build relationships with other developers. Those relationships may later lead to cross-promotion, community introductions or shared event opportunities. These events can be particularly useful early in development, when understanding player reactions matters more than generating a large number of immediate purchases. Treat smaller showcases as focused community and research activities. Present a demo that quickly communicates the game's appeal, give interested visitors a clear way to follow it, and record recurring questions and reactions. A small room of relevant players can be more useful than a large crowd with little genre interest.
Queensland Games Festival
Taking part in your local festivals and showcases can expose your game and studio to a wide range of players, industry professionals and potential publishers. In my experience, you usually don't attend these events to generate large numbers of wishlists or sales, but to build connections, find talent and gather valuable feedback. The Queensland Games Festival is how I first learned about Screen Queensland and its development grants. I also later leveraged connections made there to gain introductions to AusTrade delegates who helped me get BlowFish/Animoca to Gamescom at subsidised costs.
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Cultural Exhibitions and Local Media Opportunities
Cultural exhibitions can showcase a studio's creative work to an audience beyond habitual game buyers. The commercial objective may be local media coverage, community recognition, recruitment or relationships with arts organisations rather than direct wishlist acquisition. The value is in building visibility and credibility with audiences who are otherwise difficult to reach.
Regional exhibitions and cultural venues can be useful because they reach people who may not normally attend a gaming convention. They can create local media interest, relationships with arts organisations and opportunities to showcase the people behind a game. But I would not judge an arts exhibition by the same immediate sales or wishlist targets as a consumer launch activation.
One cultural exhibition where I saw success was a games showcase at Brisbane Powerhouse, an arts and creative venue, hosted by the Queensland Government. I pushed the Gameloft team to attend, although they were extremely reluctant to participate in events. The team received a lot of feedback on the games we'd been working on. We also made connections with local media that I understand later proved useful for the release of Bluey Happy Snaps, which recently received great television coverage from the same network.
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Major Gaming Conventions and Trade Shows
Major conventions can create valuable opportunities, but attendance should be tied to specific objectives. Consumer events are often about players, creators and playable experiences; industry events can prioritise publishing, distribution, partnerships and investment. The staffing, assets, meeting schedules and measures of success should differ accordingly.
Across my work on Phantom Galaxies, marketing activity included trade shows and event management involving Tokyo Game Show, Gamescom and PAX, as well as speaking engagements. These opportunities reached different combinations of audiences: players looking for a new experience, creators who could demonstrate the game, media seeking a story and industry partners evaluating a business opportunity. Treating all those conversations as interchangeable would miss much of the value.
One of the experiences I'm most proud of was taking Phantom Galaxies to Tokyo Game Show. The outcome was fantastic: local Japanese television, radio and print outlets produced organic, earned coverage, which was amazing for a small Western studio. It was difficult to ask a team that had just returned from Gamescom and PAX to fly to Tokyo so soon afterwards. I was personally unable to attend due to family commitments. As a mech-style game, we needed to be there. I devised a strategy that would allow us to attend without overextending our team by changing our objectives.
I turned it into a community-driven activity.
By this time, our Discord community had more than 100,000 members, including a large Japanese cult following. We put together a roster of community members who would support our Head of Community in organising and running the booth, talking to visitors, press and influencers: all in Japanese. I held regular video calls with the selected community members, our moderators and the Head of Community to put this plan together. Our community loved it! The barrage of user-generated content (UGC) and videos from participating community members was fantastic. The outcome was an influx of players from Japan, South Korea and China.
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Partnering to Reduce Event Costs
Smaller studios do not necessarily need their own stand or international event team. Joining a regional delegation, industry association or shared booth with complementary developers can reduce costs and increase collective visibility. The same principle applies to co-hosted showcases and community activities.
During my time with Blowfish Studios and Animoca, we used Australia's industry presence through Austrade at Gamescom to reduce the cost of attending a major international event. Our objectives extended beyond putting games in front of visitors. Alongside publishing and distribution meetings, I coordinated press presentations and creator introductions, while marketing colleagues could support titles such as Phantom Galaxies, Winter Ember and more.
The lesson was that a costly international event can serve several compatible objectives. Publisher meetings, industry relationships, media opportunities and player-facing promotion each justify different parts of the investment. That only works when the right meetings, materials and people are organised before the show, not when everyone arrives hoping that opportunities will appear.
Physical Partnerships and Cross-Promotions
The best partnerships extend a game's reach into an established audience with a relevant reason to care. That might mean a sport, entertainment property, retailer, hardware brand or cultural organisation. The value is not merely displaying another logo: it is giving that audience a compelling reason to try the game.
One example from my experience is Equestriad World Tour, an FEI-licensed equestrian game developed for mobile. It had a potential audience beyond traditional gaming communities because its players could also be followers and participants in the real-world sport. My work included brand direction, liaison with the FEI licence holder on marketing cooperation and wider campaign planning and execution. The challenge was connecting a recognisable equestrian property with an engaging digital experience rather than relying only on conventional gaming channels.
We also improved the game's App Store click-through rate from 6% to 13% through store optimisation and creative work. That is a digital conversion result, not evidence that an offline partnership directly produced those clicks.
Measuring the Value of Offline Acquisition
Offline discovery often converts later through online channels: someone tries a demo at a show, looks up the game at home and wishlists or purchases days later. That makes direct attribution difficult. I prefer to judge an event against the outcome it was designed for: qualified business conversations, playable feedback, creator or media coverage, community growth or attributable store activity.
Where practical, use event-specific links or QR codes, record the quality of conversations and coverage, and compare campaign periods with store and community data. A spike in wishlists after a show may be interesting, but it is not proof that the show caused every new wishlist. A publisher meeting or product insight may be more valuable than a short-term traffic increase.
One of the quickest ways to track event attribution is to use QR codes throughout your marketing collateral. A UTM-tagged URL in a QR code on posters, game leaflets and similar materials can provide useful metrics, but are you also capturing visitors at your booth? For a previous title, I instructed our booth team to encourage every visitor to enter a competition for a booth prize. The prize was a Nintendo Switch console preloaded with our upcoming Nintendo Switch game. We received 4,500 entries with verified email addresses. After the event, we allowed people to refer friends who hadn't attended the show, giving those friends a chance to enter. This generated an additional 11,000 entries in two weeks! During the lead-up to the Switch draw, we also added a small Gleam competition for other prizes, attracting another 22,000 entrants. While the focus was on the Switch, we included bite-sized mentions of other games throughout our communications. During the campaign, wishlists for our other PC games rose by 17,000! By the end of the campaign, the studio had around 40,000 new email addresses. Some of those contacts would never engage again, but the rest could contribute to sustainable revenue through a long-term marketing strategy.
Offline and online marketing can't be seen as two separate entities. Not everyone can attend live events, but those who do are often enthusiastic about games. In my experience, they can be the catalyst that sparks greater success.
Bring Offline Discovery Into the Wider Acquisition Strategy
Offline activity works best when it supports the same audience positioning, creative message and commercial goals as the rest of the campaign. A studio may use a community event to learn what resonates, a trade show to reach creators and partners, and a coordinated digital campaign to convert the resulting awareness. The objective is not to be everywhere; it is to select the places where the right players and partners can be reached efficiently.
For the wider framework connecting offline discovery, Steam, creators, paid advertising, conversion and player retention, see our Video Game User Acquisition pillar page.