Game developers on small teams — and those working alone — rarely have the luxury of a dedicated marketing department. When your team members are already wearing many hats, it can be hard to know where to even begin with marketing. You’re creating a game, and you have to make sure it reaches its audience? 😨

We created this workshop for Rad Studio, an incubator for game development students, to help demystify the marketing process and point our emerging developers in the right direction.

What does this workshop cover?

Foundational Concepts: Marketing concepts non-marketers should know.
Goals, Strategies, and Tactics: How to determine marketing goals and make plans to reach them.
Marketing Your RS Project: What we expected from Rad Studio 2021 students.

This workshop was intended to give our cohort a basic understanding of marketing for game devs, share some tools and resources for creating effective video game marketing, and discuss our requirements for Rad Studio projects.

We can break things down into three key questions:

What is your game?
Who is it for?
How will you reach them?

The first portion of this workshop will walk you through these guiding questions and introduce their impact on marketing.

The first step in developing your marketing strategy is understanding your game and what sets it apart from competitors. Knowing how to describe your game concisely, in an intriguing way, lays the foundation for your marketing plan. Without knowing your game on an intimate level, you won’t be able to “sell it” in any convincing way. Before you move forward with your marketing, make sure you’ve established your hook, goals, and tone.

The Hook

Your hook is a one-sentence summary of the game — you can think of it as the pitch you’ll share with potential players, press, or publishers. It should capture the essence of the gameplay and experience and be interesting enough to make your game stand out.

A good hook is…

Unique and memorable
Focused on what sets the game apart, rather than relying on genres or buzzwords
Intriguing enough to make someone want to hear more
Clear and understandable to non-gamers

Even if you haven’t thought about it with intentionality, you probably already have a “working hook.” It’s important to workshop the crap out of this sentence to make sure every word is as useful as it can be.

Hook-building exercise by Victoria Tran

Please read the article I ripped this from — it has so so so much great information: The $0 Marketing Game Guide by Victoria Tran. There’s a link in the “further reading” way at the bottom of this post as well. (Author’s note: if you’re at all interested in games marketing or community management, join Victoria Tran’s newsletter! She’s a freakin’ genius when it comes to this stuff and is sharing her insight for free, right in your email inbox. Sign up here.)

VTran suggests two approaches to workshopping your hook:

1 - “Remove your game name (and all proper nouns) from the description. Replace it with a game that is a competitor/similar to yours. Is it basically indistinguishable? Then you need a better hook.”

The example she provides:

“What game is this? The thing is, you could probably fill it in with any number of games. Boyfriend Dungeon, Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, The Messenger, etc. They’re all viable games you could use to fill in the blank.”

2 - “Take out everything you would usually use to describe your game and try to describe it again WITHOUT THOSE WORDS. (E.g. no using the words story-driven, puzzle, narrative, mystery, action, metroidvania). Does it still sound interesting enough to play?”

For instance: as a hook, “A story-driven adventure that brings together roguelike systems and deckbuilding strategy” becomes pretty much useless when you remove the buzzwords — and it’s near meaningless to a non-gamer. This hook could be elevated by focusing on what makes the game unique rather than the genres that it can be slotted into.

For an example of a stellar hook, we can look to Boyfriend Dungeon for some inspiration:

Date your weapons! Romance swords, daggers, and polearms to level them up in this “shack-and-slash” dungeon-crawling adventure.

Notice the specificity, the clarity, and the clever wordplay. By coining the phrase “shack and slash,” you immediately get a sense of the two main systems in the game. The full game summary takes this a step further:

“Plunder the dunj as you fend off dangerous monsters and take your weapons on romantic dates. Woo your weapons in this flirty, playful, and welcoming world filled with mastery in the procedurally generated dungeon. Serving up a dose of summer-time fling nostalgia, take your dates out as you uncover their stories and level them up. Embark on blossoming relationships with your weapon cuties as you capture their hearts in friendship and in love. In this light-hearted, fantastical shack-and-slash filled with adventure, improve your skills and fend off the monsters together because the couple that slays together, stays together.”

A masterclass, tbh.

Inventory of Goals

Ask yourself and your team why you are bringing this game into the world. Is it…

To share a story?
To build hype for a longer project?
To make a lot of money?
To put a shining star in your portfolio?
Something else?

Any answer or combination of answers is valid here. Different team members might have different opinions, but you should collaborate to figure out at least one priority that you agree on.

Understanding why you want this project to reach an audience will help you figure out who that audience is and how you will connect with them.

Player Experience and Tone

Tone of Game = Tone of Marketing Materials

By zeroing in on the intended tone of your game, you also establish the tone of your marketing materials. Think about your intended player experience, and do your best to convey that same feeling through your marketing.

Examples of tone that can be evoked by both gameplay and marketing materials: whimsical, mysterious, aggressive, futuristic, cheeky, cheerful.

The mood should be consistent from your posters to your gameplay to your Instagram, and marketing materials should give the audience a sample of what they will feel in-game.

In marketing, tone comes across through visuals and word choice. Let your intended tone drive most of your creative choices.

The two tweets to the left highlight vastly different tones. Notice how the posts share a similar topic — thanking fans for reaching a milestone — but the general vibe of each tweet echoes the tone of the game it’s referring to.

Tone is also an important factor in choosing a game-specific account on social media vs. one for your studio, because your studio might make two games with very different tones. Other factors here include resources (do you have enough people on your team to run five different social strategies?) and brand recognition (established AAA companies like Nintendo don’t need to worry about whether new accounts will gain traction and followers, while smaller indies don’t want to risk starting from scratch for each new title).

Guiding Question 2: Who is your game for?

Once you have a clear idea of the game you’re making, you can move on to the next guiding question: who is this game for?

Target Audience

Deciding who your target audience is will help you tailor your marketing to them. For instance, if your game is an educational game for toddlers (so the target audience for your marketing would be parents of toddlers), you’re going to approach marketing very differently than if your game is a rated-M shooter.

The process of defining your target audience is known as Market Segmentation. Check out the infographic to the right (from Intellspot.com) for some examples of traits you can use to define your target audience.

Typical traits to identify a target audience include age, gender, and lifestyle categories.

Also known as “psychographics,” lifestyle segmentation identifies your target audience by their interests, personalities, and beliefs.

For games, this could look like “console gamers,” “fans of cozy games,” or “people who play games on public transit,” as well as more universal psychographics like “blue-collar workers,” “antifascists,” or “people who practice mindfulness.”

Psychographics and socio-economic status are used to create models like the Claritas “Prizm” model that break consumers into persona categories. Prizm, for instance, defines 68 consumer groups based on age, income, location, and social group. These can be a good starting point for defining your audience.

While many traits that can be used to define your target audience can be applied across all industries, there are a few that are specific to games, like playstyle and your intended ESRB rating. Expand the accordion below for more details on some of these segmentation categories.

Players have different motivation & approaches to gameplay. There are a few models that seek to categorize these approaches. The most famous is Bartle’s Taxonomy, which presents 8 types of players — four quadrants broken into two subtypes each.
Achievers:
Planner - They set a goal and aim to achieve it.
Opportunist - They look around for things to do, but they don't know what these are until they find them.
Explorers:
Scientist - They are methodical in their acquisition of knowledge.
Hacker - They have an intuitive understanding of the virtual world, with no need to test their ideas.
Socializers:
Networker - They assess other player's capabilities.
Friend - They enjoy their company.
Killers:
Politician - Their aim is to get a big, good reputation.
Griefer - Their vague aim is to get a big, bad reputation.
What age group is your game intended for? Do you plan to include content like violence or language that would impact its rating? Is your game meant to be fun for the whole family, or does it have mature themes that wouldn’t be appropriate for kids or young teens?
Learn more about the rating system here: https://www.esrb.org/ratings-guide/
Is your game slow and relaxing, or do you want your players to fight for the top spot on the leaderboard? Do you expect players to commit long hours to grinding and figuring out the “meta,” or do you want to create a game that doesn’t demand much of your player? Asking yourself these questions can help you figure out what types of players would be drawn to your game — these are your core audience.
Is your game singleplayer? Couch co-op? Is it a party game? If your game features online matchmaking, do you expect players to maintain contact through friend lists and in-game chat, or are their encounters brief and impersonal? Consider the social vs. solo elements of your game, and target your marketing towards fans of whichever path you’ve chosen.

Your target market is usually similar to your target player, but can sometimes have slight differences, especially when young children are your target players. In the case of games for younger children, your target player and target audience are different; your target audience for marketing is the one with the purchasing power (ie: their parents, caregivers, and other adults in their lives).

Buyer Personas

The next step after determining your target audience(s) is developing buyer personas. This is a concept that is widely used in marketing — definitely not games industry-specific. In the nonprofit sector (like running Rad Magpie) we use this concept constantly. This is how you get into your audience’s head. Use your target audience and build a character (“persona”) around it. Tell a story about them. What are they like?

Questions you can ask yourself to develop a buyer persona:

What social media do they use?
What do they do for fun besides gaming?
What consoles or platforms do they use?
What influencers do they follow?
Where do they like to shop?
What does their household look like (ie. children, roommates)?

Creating a buyer persona allows you to check your marketing against your audience.

Let’s say one of your personas is named Paul. You can look at your marketing campaign and specifically ask yourself how “Paul” would respond. If it doesn’t work for them, why are you making that choice? It will also lead you towards overall strategies, like choosing a social media platform to focus on.

Buyer’s Journey

This is the process that takes your player from first learning about your game, to purchasing it, to becoming a loyal fan. It’s made up of four stages:

Awareness: How they first learn about your game.

Consideration: Deciding whether they want to buy.

Action: Hitting that mf’ purchase button.

Loyalty: Engaging with the community and becoming a repeat customer. The loyalty loop also feeds the audience back into the awareness phase as they will become brand advocates who want to keep up with your projects. This stage is sometimes left out when you look at old models, but it’s becoming increasingly important in the digital/influencer age.

(image at right is from Blue Corona via The $0 Marketing Game Guide)

Why do we use the buyer’s journey as a tool?

This tool is useful because it helps you ensure that you’re going to meet your potential players where they are, and it gives you an opportunity to support their decision to pick up your game at any stage of the process.

The specifics of the buyer’s journey can look different for different types of consumers, so be sure to consider your target audience/buyer personas. For instance, where do they normally hear about new games?

The timeline above provides an example for each phase of the buyer’s journey. A player might first learn about your game while watching a streamer with early access showcasing some gameplay. As they decide whether they want to pick up the game for themselves, they come across an AMA on Reddit where your team answers community questions about the project. This helps to solidify your player’s interest in the game, but they haven’t purchased it yet. The next day, they see a tweet in which you shared the Itch.io link to your game. You made it easy for them, so they click through to download the game on Itch. When they scroll through your Itch page, they find your newsletter signup link. Through this newsletter, they learn about your next project, and the journey begins again.

Try to map out all of your marketing plans to see where they align with the buyer’s journey, and make sure you reach your audience at each stage of the process.

Guiding Question 3: How will you reach your audience?

By now, you know what your game is, why you want to bring it into the world, and who you expect to play it. This brings us to the final guiding question: how exactly are you going to do that?

Goals, Strategies, and Tactics

These are foundation of a marketing plan. The image to the right shows a standard visualization of these three concepts — it’s often presented as a type of funnel. Your goals and objectives should drive all of your efforts, and you can get more granular and specific as you move toward the “tactics” level.

Goals…

should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Time Bound) and include a metric for measuring success.
This is the objective of your marketing plan — the desired outcome and the reason you’re putting together a marketing plan in the first place.
Goals for game marketing might look like “500 new Steam wishlists in July” or “gross $1,000 from in-game microtransactions by the end of the competitive season.”

Strategies…

are the overarching plan of attack to reach your goal.
You might have several concurrent strategies for any given goal.
Strategies are made up of many specific actions, called tactics.

Tactics…

are the “nuts and bolts” daily actions that make up a strategy.
You might have many tactics that support any given strategy.

Example

GOAL: Have 1,000 Twitter followers on the @OurGame account by August 1.

STRATEGY 1: Run a Twitter campaign during the month of July that prioritizes new audiences.

TACTICS for Strategy 1:

Create a content calendar to schedule 3 new tweets per day.
Run a giveaway that encourages followers to tag their friends.
Create a style guide to keep assets visually consistent.
Pitch the game to streamers/influencers who are active on Twitter.

Below is a visual example from Xola.com:

PR and Earned Media

Public Relations (PR) is all about getting other people to do your marketing for you. PR is really helpful when you’re an indie because, by definition, it’s freeeeee.

In our industry, PR manifests mostly in three ways:

Pitching Content Creators/Influencers
Pitching Games Journalists
Guerrilla Marketing and Publicity Stunts

Pitching is when you send info about your game, plus a press kit (more on that later) to someone you want to talk about your game. This can help you secure a streamer showing off your early access prototype, a review in a games magazine, or a mention on a high-profile Twitter page. The process is pretty similar between press and influencers, you just have different goals.

Guerrilla marketing (like the Resident Evil 5 example above) involves creating a buzz that’s so hard to ignore that the press, influencers, and everyday gamers start talking about your game, even though you haven’t asked them to. From wild and wacky publicity stunts to viral memes, there are many creative ways to generate hype about your game that don’t involve an advertising budget.

Choosing Social Media

Think about your audience when you choose your platform(s). Which platforms do your target audience spend the most time on?

When you’re building your following, focus all your effort on just one or two platforms that best fit your goals. This way you don’t spread yourself too thin.

Style Guides

You’re probably familiar with this concept in regards to your game art. It serves the same purpose in marketing: keeping all the visuals consistent and maintaining your intentions.

Style guides for marketing include:

Fonts
Hex codes
Design templates
Logos & logo use rules
“Voice” and writing style for posts
Tone and mood
Pretty much anything you want standardized

For some examples of style guides, check out this listicle with links to a few iconic brands’ documentation.

Content Calendars

Content Calendars are a tool you can use to plan out all of your social media content ahead of time. This will help your artists know about any asset needs with sufficient lead time and will allow your marketing-person to write and schedule posts in bulk.

Facebook’s internal publishing tool and programs like Buffer can queue your posts for you, so you can make a whole bunch of posts at once and they’ll publish over time on the schedule that you set.

Rad Magpie uses a Monday board for our content calendar (left), but you can just as easily use a spreadsheet (right). Your posting schedule is up to you, just try to stay consistent.

You know what your goals are, and you’ve even thought about some tactics that will help get you there. All that’s left is putting it all together into a marketing plan. As a game developer, you know how important documentation is — and your marketing plan is the ultimate marketing doc.

Marketing Plan

Just like a design document, this is used to keep the team on the same page. In a big studio, or if you’re pitching to a publisher, it’s also used to prove market viability.

Marketing plans include:

Game hook & elevator pitch (high level summary)
Target audience & buyer personas
All goals, strategies, tactics
A timeline or calendar of important campaign dates
Measurement plan (how will you know if you were succesful?)
Branding and style goals

If you want to go the extra mile:

Additional asset list/needs from artists
Budget, if applicable
Press and/or influencer contacts
Key messaging
Market research

We don’t require students to have a marketing plan for Rad Studio, but we want you to know how they work in case it ever comes up, or if you’re hype to market this project and want to go the extra mile. This template is based on your current situation: no designated marketing expert, small team, no budget, no investors/publishers asking you for this documentation.

Press Kits

Press Kits display how you would like to be regarded. If you’re reaching out to any journalists or influencers, you should have a press kit put together for them. Even if you’re not reaching out to journalists, it’s nice to have a press kit as a downloadable .zip on your website in case someone wants to learn more about your game.

Press Kits can include:

Splash art and marketing assets that can be used online
Screenshots or videos of gameplay
A press release
A summary of the project
Bios of all the devs (on a small project like yours)
FAQ about the game
Studio/game logos
Contact info and social handles
Release date, platform, and price
Basically, any art or info that would help someone write a killer article about your game

Gamedev Rami Ismail created a tool called presskit() that can help streamline your press kit creation process. I haven’t tried it myself, so use at your own risk, but it appears to be really useful!

Check out an example press kit, courtesy of Kitfox Games, here: http://www.kitfoxgames.com/press/sheet.php?p=boyfriend_dungeon

The last thing we covered in this workshop is what we required/expected of students in Rad Studio. The main marketing deliverable that we required was an Itch.io page where their game could be hosted, so we spent some time talking about the main components of an Itch page.

Itch.io Page

Components of an Itch Page

Description
Genre, tags, and custom noun
Screenshots
Tagline
Cover image
Theme

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion by Graffiti Games is a stellar example of an Itch.io page that goes above and beyond. There’s some screenshots below, but you can head to https://graffiti-games.itch.io/tbcte to see more. Notice the way this studio incorporated their art and branding into the theme of the entire page, from the purple background to the section headers. There’s also plenty of in-game screenshots and snippets of gameplay.

Tagline & Cover Image

Your tagline and cover image are used “whenever itch links to your game from another part of the site.” There’s a few examples in the screenshot below.

For both of these components, showcase the ~vibes~ of your project.

Think of the cover image as the literal box-art cover of your game. What will grab attention off the shelf?

For your tagline, use those hook-writing principles we talked about earlier.

Description & Screenshots

These make up the bulk of your game’s homepage.

Your description should be thorough (talk about your concept, the gameplay, and context for the incubator) and engaging.

You should upload 3 to 5 screenshots that highlight your visuals + diverse elements of the game. The screenshots should work together to tell a story about what gameplay looks or feels like.

All of the marketing elements we talked about before, like tone and target audience, absolutely apply here.

Genre, tags, and “custom nouns”

Next, we shared the rules on genres, tags, and nouns from the Itch.io documentation. We pretty much shared it verbatim from their website, so check it out for yourself here: https://itch.io/docs/creators/getting-started

I snipped a few examples of “custom nouns” — find them in the picture to the right. Your custom noun can be as creative and eye-catching as you want (like “anti-adventure”) but you can also use the default setting to list it as a “game.”

Trailer

Lastly, we discussed requirements for trailer videos. We required a 5-minute-max trailer from each team that could be shared at our End of Summer Party. These trailers were meant to capture audience attention and showcase the hard work our students did over the summer. Check out their final trailers below!

With that, I sent the students on their way to put their new marketing knowledge into practice!

Open in Google Slides to see speaker notes!

A video recording of the presentation will be shared here when we have completed our editing process. Don’t worry, you’re not missing any content in the meantime: all of the information has been transcribed into this blog post. However, we intend to share recordings of each presentation for those who would prefer to listen along. Check back soon if you’d like to watch the video.

This blog post is based on a portion of the 2021 Rad Studio Online curriculum. Rad Studio 2021 was a fully online summer program for game development students, and the information above was shared with the cohort of emerging devs during a workshop session. We’re making this information free and available to anyone who’s interested in it. You can learn more about Rad Studio and this initiative here.

Rules of Use:

Feel free to share this information with others! We ask that you cite Rad Magpie (and any relevant linked sources) if you use this for your class/workshop/etc.
If you find this useful and are financially able, consider making a donation to Rad Magpie. We’re a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and rely on the generosity of our community to continue producing resources like this one. Learn more about Rad Magpie here.

“The $0 Marketing Game Guide” by Victoria Tran: https://medium.com/kitfox-games/the-0-marketing-game-guide-e649a5ac83f4

presskit() by Rami Ismail: http://dopresskit.com/

“Bartle Taxonomy of Player Types” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types

“51 Market Segment Examples” by Silvia Valcheva on Intellispot: https://www.intellspot.com/market-segmentation-examples/

“Guerrilla Marketing: Games PR with Little Money, Much Insanity and Maximum Impact” by Thomas Reisenegger from the GDC Vault: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023809/Guerrilla-Marketing-Games-PR-with

“19 Outstanding Brand Style Guide Examples” by Orlee Gillis: https://elementor.com/blog/style-guide-examples/

This blog was written by Maggie DeCapua.

Marketing for Game Devs