A True Patrner

For Game Studios

Marketing that works with production, revolutionary - we know.

We believe that’s pointless and what’s broken about games marketing

You’ve all heard them say “A great game sells itself”, but they are unable to help the studio when their game needs to be aligned better with the market. There’s no expertise, no understanding of development or the fundamentals of making games. You’ve made a game, but it may not suit the market.

Because of this, we understand how marketing can sometimes become a distraction to development teams. Our approach is different. We integrate seamlessly into your process, providing strategic guidance that strengthens your product without slowing production.

Other marketing agencies

Focus on campaigns, content creation, and advertising spend
Brought in after key product decisions have already been made
Measured by deliverables and billable hours
Completely disconnected from development realities

What Makes Us Different?

vMarketer, a real market partner

Help shape games for market success from the earliest stages
Identify friction points, churn risks, and player experience issues
Provide independent feedback through the lens of long-term commercial viability
Guide creator, community, and streamer-friendly design decisions
Reduce reliance on expensive marketing by building stronger player advocacy and organic traction

"Ash has done some amazing things for us. He’s kept our community engaged, guided many cross-discipline teams and improved how marketing interfaces with the various companies. His knowledge of the games industry and how to acquire new users - and keep them - is just incredible.

He’s my right hand man helping to drive the Undeads brand to new heights"

Leo Kahn

CEO, Undead Games / Suzeal

Traditional Video Game Marketing Agencies Can Be Helpful, But They Just Don’t Understand Your Game

I’ve been where you are now. You’re a few months away from launching your game, you’ve started looking for a marketing agency, and you have no idea where to start or how to judge which agency is actually right for you.

Well, that was me a long time ago. In fact, there have been a few studios that brought me onboard really late in the game. Sorry about the pun.

What I’ve found is that many game marketers working for agencies tend to follow a cookie-cutter checklist. That checklist might vary slightly between role-playing games (RPGs), cosy games and first-person shooters. I’d certainly hope so. But the underlying formula is often the same, with many agencies doing broadly the same things.

You also have to remember how the agency model works. They need to maximise billable hours, sell add-on services and get as much done as possible within a relatively short period of time.

I also doubt many are writing all of their own messaging and strategy anymore. Good old Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok have increasingly become part of the team. The problem is that much of what these systems learn from comes from the same information already freely available online: old guides, tutorials, blog posts and marketing playbooks.

The result is an increasingly homogeneous pool of output.

In some of my recent projects, where I’ve helped smaller studios establish their marketing foundations pro bono, I’ve seen more and more of this convergence towards AI slop. Don’t get me wrong, AI can be extremely useful, but the old technology saying “Garbage in, garbage out” is very relevant in the current AI landscape.

As game marketers increasingly use AI to write copy, taglines and messaging hooks, there’s another problem: audiences are becoming much better at recognising generic AI-generated content, and discovery platforms are increasingly focused on rewarding content people actually engage with.

People generally don’t want to read obvious AI-generated content. They want an opinion, experience, insight or perspective that feels like it came from an actual person.

Why Not Understanding Game Development Hurts Your Game

If you’re like me, you’ve probably worked with marketing inside a production environment before. Some relationships are great. Others are frustrating, disconnected and all over the place.

I’ve attended meetings where production and marketing are finger-pointing, blaming each other, not getting along and ultimately going nowhere.

The complexities of developing a game, or multiple titles simultaneously, mean game marketers can’t operate like marketers in most other industries.

They need a strategy for understanding what the development team is producing, the limitations they’re working within, how technical debt affects the product being released, and the complexity involved in delivering individual game features. And that’s only part of it.

Marketers also need to understand the impact their own requests have on the production schedule.

Adding new demands and asset requirements ad hoc can put producers, creative teams, designers, developers and others under even more pressure, sometimes at crucial milestones or in the middle of important sprints.

Then you hand your marketing over to an agency that might be dealing with five, ten or more other games and, in many cases, producing broadly the same outputs for each of them.

Yes, trailers, store pages, social posts, influencers and other marketing assets are part of games marketing. But they are only a small part of it and a long way from being a complete marketing strategy that can actually be executed alongside production.

Working collaboratively in any environment can be challenging enough, but game development is particularly complex, and every studio operates differently.

Game marketers and game developers can feel like two very different tribes of people.

But they can work extremely well together.

I know because I got there.

How Shaping Your Game Closer to the Market Brings Your Game Closer to Success

If you’ve started searching for a marketing agency early, first of all, smart move.

But you can still run into the problem of marketing effectively being bolted onto the game towards the end of the development cycle.

Across my 26 years in games marketing and development, I’ve learned that successful titles are heavily influenced and shaped by the market. They don’t come from following the old “build it and they will come” mentality.

Some of the areas where I help developers improve their market readiness include the following.

Identify Friction Points, Churn Risks and Player Experience Issues

Games are interactive experiences.

A bad experience leads to bad reviews. Bad reviews reduce interest. That affects wishlists, sales and word of mouth.

Normally, a games marketer doesn’t work deeply in this space, but I made it my mission to stay true to one of marketing’s most important responsibilities: being the voice of the player.

My job is to understand the player. I want to know where they are likely to encounter frustration, where they might become bored, what could break their engagement and, ultimately, what might cause them to churn out of the game.

Playtesting and community involvement are incredibly important, but advocating for the player also needs to be balanced against technical constraints, production pressures and the wider impact changes can have on the project.

When it comes to playtesting, many marketers, particularly inexperienced marketers or agencies without production experience, don’t understand how the questions they ask can influence the outcome.

Loaded or heavily skewed questions produce skewed data.

That data then finds its way into reports given to development teams, potentially sending the project in the wrong direction and pushing the game further away from its audience and the market.

Poor data interpretation is one of the biggest failures I’ve been seeing lately, but it certainly isn’t the only one.

Why Games Marketers Need to Actually Play the Games They’re Marketing

I’m not kidding.

I see marketers inside game studios who don’t regularly play their own game. Agencies can be even worse, sometimes giving gameplay little more than lip service.

I personally love playing games throughout production. You get to experience the evolution of a unique form of interactive storytelling.

Every time a build is deployed with new content, updated mechanics or significant changes, I replay it.

When areas of a new build create wonder, excitement, tension or a genuine thrill, depending on the genre and our objectives, I take note. Then I explore those moments further with the game designers, gameplay programmers and anyone else involved in creating them.

Having a real, deep understanding of the gameplay elements players are actually going to enjoy is critical for marketing.

It also gives you much stronger material to work with than high-level messaging like “Immersive Battles” and the other generic phrases already being used by a thousand games in the same genre. A video game marketing strategy should be built around the actual player experience, not just a feature list, trailer brief or store page.

Provide Independent Feedback Through the Lens of Long-Term Commercial Viability

A less obvious part of my marketing strategy is staying impartial and at arm’s length from internal production politics and disagreements.

Developers like you are working hard, day in and day out, to get your game to market. You live and breathe the project.

That passion is great. Passionate game makers drive this industry.

Unfortunately, being so close to a project can also make it difficult to objectively evaluate its long-term commercial viability. Many developers also understandably don’t have a background in business, marketing or commercial strategy.

This is where I see the role of a game marketing partner being very different from simply hiring an agency to promote a finished game.

There Is a Lot More to Marketing Than Advertising

Commercial viability, sustained revenue generation and product catalogue strategy are ultimately more important to a studio’s long-term success than any single game launch.

My involvement can start as early as project conception and then grow into evaluating the project’s viability within the market it will eventually launch into.

And importantly, I’m not only looking at the market as it exists today.

I’m looking at where that market may be when the game actually releases, which could be a year or more down the track.

Being able to provide real, honest and professional advice from an independent position helps avoid one of the biggest problems development teams face: becoming so close to, and emotionally invested in, a project that it becomes difficult to objectively see its weaknesses, risks and commercial opportunities.