Epic Fail: Game Studio Marketing Mistakes

ChatGPT Sent You Down The Wrong Path. It's Ok Let's Fix It.

You thought you’d save on marketing and ask ChatGPT or other AI how to market your game - come on be honest, you did - but all you got back was useless over-simplified nonsense. 

ChatGPT would have spat out variations of these extremely useless statements like:

“Determine the age range, gender, geographic location, and other demographic factors that are most likely to be interested in your game. Consider factors such as income level, education, and occupation if relevant.”

Into overly generic and poorly grouped section headings:

• Understand Your Game

• Identify Target Demographics

• Analyze Psychographics

• Research Gaming Behaviors

• Identify Influencers

• Conduct Market Research

• Create Player Personas

• Refine Your Marketing Message

• Choose the Right Channels

• Implement and Monitor

And then a fantastically useless closing statement like

Adjust your strategy as needed to optimise results.

What? How do I “adjust” when I don’t know why it doesn’t perform… 

What’s Wrong With These Sections?

Nothing, they are valid topics but they are not in any ‘real’ order and the details given by ChatGPT will send you or your team deeper into frustration and waste a lot of time.

What’s Missing?

To the uninitiated, it might look complete, but there’s less “information” than a first-year Marketing 101 textbook. It is also extremely generalized and doesn’t really help with games marketing.

Stop asking ChatGPT if you want to succeed 

Let’s look at the most extremely common mistake:

❌Understand Your Game❌

• ✅ You’re building it, you understand it. Know what makes your game compelling to players. 

• ✅ Understand where your game sits in the market compared to your CLOSEST competitors. Understand what draws AND repels players from competitor’s games. 

• ✅ What aspects of your game are similar to competitors that players would like to see or expect in your game.

• ✅ Understand your unique features - not what you think is unique but what players would find unique or interesting.

• ✅ Learn how to educate stakeholders on the key factors about your game - this includes other staff in the studio, at the publisher, at trade shows, and everywhere.

• …

🎉 Look at that, you’ve started a perceptual map/matrix thingy marketing uses to base everything on 🎉

In future newsletters, I’ll go through more of these in greater detail. No one wants to read pages upon pages of text.