More than video games marketing. A partner inside your development process
Traditional agencies are usually brought in to promote what already exists. By that point, the biggest decisions about the game, audience, positioning and production roadmap have often already been made.
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Our role is different. vMarketer works as a video game marketing partner alongside your development team, helping connect what you are building with what the market is most likely to understand, value and respond to.
That can mean challenging the positioning, identifying player friction, improving how the game is presented, helping prioritise marketing assets, shaping creator-friendly opportunities or simply giving the team an independent commercial view of the product. The objective is not to create more marketing activity. It is to help make the game easier to position, easier to explain and easier for the right players to choose.
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Because we understand production, we also understand the cost of every marketing request. New trailers, screenshots, feature changes, demos, capture sessions and campaign assets all compete with development priorities. Our job is to work within those realities, not create more chaos around them.
Why a Marketing Partner Should Understand the Game, Not Just the Campaign
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.
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Other marketing agencies
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Focus on campaigns, content creation, and advertising spend
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Brought in after key product decisions have already been made
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Measured by deliverables and billable hours
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Completely disconnected from development realities
What Makes Us Different?
vMarketer, a real market partner
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Help shape games for market success from the earliest stages
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Identify friction points, churn risks, and player experience issues
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Provide independent feedback through the lens of long-term commercial viability
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Guide creator, community, and streamer-friendly design decisions
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The complexities of developing a game, or multiple titles simultaneously, mean game marketers can’t operate like marketers in most other industries.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Games Marketers Need to Actually Play the Games They Market
This sounds obvious, but I still see marketers inside studios and agencies who do not regularly play the game they are responsible for marketing.
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I play builds throughout production because the strongest marketing ideas often come from experiencing the game rather than reading a feature list or design document. When a new mechanic, progression system, weapon, encounter or visual moment creates genuine excitement, I take note and then work with the people who built it to understand why it works.
That gives marketing much stronger material than generic claims such as ‘immersive battles’, ‘deep progression’ or ‘an unforgettable world’. Those phrases can describe thousands of games. The more useful question is: what happened in this build that made me want to keep playing, tell someone about it or see what happened next?
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A good marketing partner should be able to identify those moments and turn them into positioning, Steam assets, creator opportunities, campaign hooks and content that actually reflects the experience players are going to receive.
An Independent View of Commercial Viability
Developers live and breathe their projects. That passion is essential, but being close to a game every day can also make it difficult to judge how the product will be understood by someone seeing it for the first time.
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One of the most useful things I can provide is an independent commercial perspective. I am looking at the game through the market, the audience, competing products, changing genre expectations, production constraints and the studio’s wider business objectives.
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That perspective can influence how the game is positioned, which features receive marketing attention, where investment should increase or decrease and whether the current go-to-market plan still makes sense as the game changes.
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Sometimes the answer is more promotion. Sometimes it is better positioning. Sometimes it is a different audience, a stronger Steam page, another round of playtesting or additional development time. The point is to identify the real problem before spending money trying to solve the wrong one.
A Marketing Partner Should Be Thinking Beyond the Next Campaign
A studio’s commercial future is bigger than a single launch campaign. Sustainable revenue, catalogue strategy, community health, player retention, future updates and the market position of the studio itself all matter.
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That is why my involvement can begin before a public announcement and continue well beyond launch. Early on, the work may focus on market fit, positioning, player motivations and product risk. Later it can shift toward Steam, creators, PR, advertising, launch operations, LiveOps and long-term growth.
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The advantage of working with a long-term game marketing partner is continuity. The person helping shape the positioning understands why those decisions were made when the trailer is produced, when creators receive the build, when the paid campaigns start and when launch data begins coming back.
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Instead of repeatedly handing context from one supplier to another, the marketing strategy can evolve with the game.
Need a Marketing Partner Who Understands Production?
If you are looking for more than an outsourced campaign team, tell me where the game is in development, what is currently working and where you feel the gaps are.
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I can help you work out whether the problem is positioning, market readiness, Steam conversion, audience definition, campaign execution or something inside the game itself that is making the marketing harder than it should be.
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You do not need another layer between marketing and development. You need both sides working toward the same commercial outcome.