"Oh Heck, I Need a Marketing Strategy for my Impending Game Release"

So, you are finishing/about to finish/finished a game, nice! The hard part is over; it’s time to take a big sip of your coffee, press the “release game” button, and sit back while your game magically finds its intended audience.

Oh, it doesn’t work that way? Also, now your game is done and has no wishlists, word of mouth, community, or even a press release. That’s like firing your game out of an actual cannon and hoping it lands gently in the waiting hands of your biggest fan. Let’s be honest here: it will just injure them significantly, but this scenario does imply you managed a physical release, so some credit is due.

Convoluted similes aside, the earlier you think about the marketing plan for your game, the better. Even better: hire a community manager during development who can start laying the groundwork for a successful launch and help research your potential audience to see what they might need or want from your title! (*wink wink* *nudge nudge* you can email us here)

Due to Threshold Games’ unfortunate shutdown in early 2024, I have a completed marketing timeline for Project Swan, a roguelike tactics game that won’t see the light of day. But! I can break down, explain, and provide insight into it to hopefully help your marketing efforts!

Let’s dive right into laying a solid foundation…

My initial draft of the Communications Timeline for "Project Swan"

The Company You Keep

It all begins with the team behind the game! Whether you’re a solo developer or a AAA company with 400 people, you’ll need to introduce yourself a bit to both the industry and your audience. This does not mean you need in-depth developer interviews or even an extensive “Team” page on your website – but it does mean giving your company a voice.

A simple blog can go a long way (and these can be re-shared or re-packaged on Discord, Steam, or even socials) to provide development transparency, showcase expertise, and communicate knowledge to fellow developers. A solid company website can also create an excellent foundation for all future communications, providing strong call-to-actions that will funnel an audience to subscribe to a newsletter or join a Discord server. Finding and cultivating talent for game development is also an important aspect to consider, and it all starts with your company website.

A strong base for company communications can also be leveraged to communicate positions your team may take. Whether switching game engines, denouncing the use of GenAI or web3, or strongly supporting causes that align with your team, a company website gives you a platform to speak loudly & clearly without getting lost in the noise, a rarity in the modern internet ecosystem.

This is also where I suggest… maybe you should make a forum. The good ole’ days of internet forums have mostly passed. Still, if it is essential to your game (perhaps you’re leaning into modding) and your team to build a strong community base that is accessible, searchable, and build-to-last, a forum could be an excellent investment to make. Plus, it can quickly branch off and expand based on community and company needs.

A solid company base will also allow you to create strong community pillars that protect your team and audience from harassment and bullying. Take Square Enix, for example. Their Group Customer Harassment policy provides a framework for empowering employees and their community to moderate and remove toxic elements. 

pov: being banned from the square enix discord (source: neogaf)

We often only think of marketing the product our team creates, but strong marketing and community foundations come from strong company governance and communications. Some great examples of companies and teams doing this work include Innersloth, Double Fine, and Fellow Traveller.

Investing in Research

Now that your company is out there and you’ve begun to establish relationships within the industry, it is time to finally start marketing your ga—wait, no, rewind. It’s time to RESEARCH. Time to make your way down the marketing tech tree and see what new things you can unlock.

You gotta invest in that Sphere Grid. (source: final fantasy wiki)

While often research in game development is primarily thought to include dev tools, support studios, and funding – this stage also includes marketing and community! A proper approach considers the games landscape, competitors, audience, and community-requested features. You’ll want to spend some time looking at what other developers have been doing and watching for their successes to emulate and pitfalls to avoid.

By looking at player personas (a topic I will delve into more in my next blog post), you can see what “type” of players will consider your title, and you’ll be able to see what their needs and wants might be. A player persona is established by focusing on what hooks grab a specific type of player. This research will help shape development and provide an outside perspective for your dev team. By including or even just anticipating and preparing for what your community will be looking for when your game launches, you communicate to your audience expertise and, even more importantly: consistency. Gamers want the game to be good but also want to know that the title will be supported for as long as they expect.

A community-forward approach can also be transparent about this research and share what your team has learned. This type of knowledge sharing is healthy for the industry and provides insight for your audience.

The Social Media Conundrum

The next step in a marketing plan is a tricky particular bugbear (especially as I am writing this in early 2025) – social media. It is, unfortunately, a mess you need to wade into. But before you slap on some waders, get into the muck and start to resemble a cranberry juice commercial… there are some things to consider.

The first: team-size and bandwidth. If you are a small team just trying to put something cool out into the world, you could go all-in on a social media approach. We’ve seen great successes come from platforms like Twitter and TikTok, but the landscape has changed since some of those early successes. We are seeing more and more that the leadership behind some of these major platforms are just… well, let’s not pull all of our eggs in one basket because that basket is now full of nazis, and now Easter is awkward.

pov: making an omlette (source: grcade)

Going all in on social media is a gamble that could pay off, but I encourage a strong foundation to fall back on. This is why we build our community spaces and communication platforms early. Newsletters, forums, Discord (sort of), a blog, even a booth at a show – these are places where you have more control over your messaging and who sees it. If TikTok vanishes tomorrow (and for you Americans, it might), you don’t want to be scrambling to recover.

We’ve also all heard (and if you haven’t, please remember) that a community manager is not your social media manager. This is often true because of the lack of resources or knowledge on the part of leadership. I have worn both hats simultaneously myself (and many others), but these roles do require different skill sets and approaches. I’ll even go a bit further and say your social media audience is not your core community.

When you think of community, what comes to mind? It is a meeting between people with similar interests to talk, debate, share, and otherwise engage with each other in a friendly way. A good community has your back, can support you through rough times, and helps us hold ourselves up and be better people. Now, does social media do… any of that? Social media can lend itself to discussion and be an avenue for player support. However, by its very nature, it does not seat everyone at the same table. 

We are all chasing engagement on social media as we’ve always been told that it is the most critical metric, but I’d argue that social media should act as an introduction to your community and not the main event. It is a clever street sign, a poster on a telephone pole, or a classified ad in the paper. It should convey and support your community pillars, but getting someone to rip off a phone number tab from a poster doesn’t mean they’ll actually call that number.

In today’s landscape, I’d argue that social media does require investment, but we can’t hold it up as the one-size-fits-all one-stop shop for games marketing. A measured approach is needed. Social media can still bring in new players and engage an audience, but it shouldn’t take away from the work that proves essential to a long life span for your community.

Creating a Community Space

Now that we’ve discussed social media, let’s create an actual space for our community. This often means multiple spaces, as your audience has its own idiosyncrasies, preferences, and ecosystems that shape how they engage with video games.

The traditional approach is a Discord server. Ubiquitous at this point (over 200 million daily users), it is the go-to for many games, studios and publishers. It shouldn’t be ignored as it includes strong moderation tools and many ways to engage your community through its various channels, forums, announcements, games, and other bits and bobs that encourage players to stay within its ecosystem and interact with each other. Thanks to bot development as well, many unique tools can be added to Discord servers that expand its functionality.

While a Discord server has drawbacks (including accessibility), it can and should serve as the nexus for your community. Of course, as we’ve learned with social media, Discord could turn into a Soulslike toxic swamp that will slowly drain you of life, so we want to support alternatives as well.

there's a metaphor here (source: whatculture)

Good ole’ forums, a subreddit, wikis, livestreams, and even a Tumblr account could serve as alternate community spaces. These are places where the community can engage with the developers and their fellow players. The earlier these can be built, the better, as your marketing campaign must provide strong call-to-actions from day one. We also need to consider these spaces as dynamic and be willing to grow and change them as the community grows and changes. I’ve seen too many sprawling Discord servers that try to be everything to everyone from day one.

Good ways to grow your community early include exclusive reveals, contests, and traditional fan engagement like personality quizzes and playlists. Approach developing your community like a fan: What would get you to engage with a game that has yet to be released? One solution could be transparent development that takes audience feedback early on, or another could be rewarding early fan engagement and promoting engaged members within the community. 

By creating a solid foundation for your campaign early on with the prior steps, you can also better create a space that reflects the values of your team and your game. By establishing these spaces with clear guidelines, you’ll be in a better spot to tackle toxic behaviour or problematic community members later.

Alphas, Betas, Demos, and Early Access

Now, you’re finally ready to have people play your game! But hold your horses there, Billy; you must playtest that game before launching it. Playtesting can and should be a community event! It is an excellent opportunity to get feedback, tweak your game, and grow your audience. While Closed Alphas and Betas aren’t public, they are the first step to establishing your community.

You should be thinking about your community from day one and leveraging everything during your campaign to welcome new users to that community. Discord can be an excellent place to run your closed testing periods, centralizing your early audience and giving them direct access to at least some of the development team. This is a great way to plant the seeds for future community growth. These early playtesters can become some of your greatest ambassadors and sources for feedback, but developers should strive to compensate and recognize these early efforts adequately.

Growing these testing efforts by bringing in more interested players will also support future word-of-mouth marketing. Take a success story like V Rising, where early feedback and a strong testing ecosystem provided a stable foundation for their initial launch. Working collaboratively with your community pre-launch can help avoid many common pitfalls that games face during Early Access or 1.0 launches – especially in console ecosystems that wall off the player base more than a storefront like Steam does.

pov: you turned on the big light (source: v rising, steam)

Test periods can also be an early start to establishing relationships with content creators. Doing the proper research to identify the right creators for your project correctly could lead to a deeper relationship with said creators. Not every streamer or video creator will have the time or interest in early access or in-development products, but by approaching these folks in a way that recognizes and appropriately compensates their time and expertise, you kick these conversations off in a way that they will appreciate. Even if they aren’t interested or don’t have the time, it’ll be easier to collaborate on content in the future.

Demos are also a boon to the right team and game. If the budget allows it and there is development time and space, demos can be powerful marketing tools. Thanks to the various Steam Festivals, PC demos are especially integral to that ecosystem, supported by Steam’s storefront discoverability tools. Despite a crowded environment, many teams see a lot of success with demos when done correctly.

More narrative-focused games can use a demo as a sort of “prologue,” giving just enough away to intrigue a player to see the rest of the story in the full game. Games with solid gameplay hooks can use demos to showcase and refine the strongest verbs or actions that comprise their core gameplay loops. JRPGs, in particular, often use demos as almost a mini pre-launch, giving users access to an early portion of the game that allows them to import their saves into the full release. This powerful hook provides a strong CTA and path to a full game purchase.

pov: you're a hook (source: flinthook)

Finally, there is Early Access to consider. This endeavour could (and might) get its own blog post to fully dive into. Still, there are at least two considerations to make around Early Access that affect your marketing campaign and community growth—support & community infrastructure and transparency during development.

The latter addresses common conceptions and a “preciousness” I’ve heard from other developers. The claim is that showing too much of the game or its story will damage or hurt the experience of actually playing the game. We all know those movie trailers that seem to spoil the whole movie, but consider that games often have… so much more content than a movie. While there are always parts of a story that should be held back for narrative impact – your marketing efforts should not be hamstrung by a preciousness around sharing content. You never know which part of your world, characters, story, or gameplay might resonate with a potential audience. More so than any other media, games often change and take on different forms throughout their playtime. We also have to consider that between social media, Discord, websites, press coverage, and other platforms, a lot of your audience won’t see everything you share. 

The former consideration, the community infrastructure, is an essential part of an early access launch that should be given the appropriate time and resources to develop and maintain. Success during an early launch resides in community support – utilizing tools and platforms to create a flow of information between the player base and the developers. Your audience should feel that their thoughts and opinions about an unfinished product are heard and acted on. Your development team should be open about development and be able to participate in the community without significant issues. This infrastructure can look different from game to game and team to team, but here are a few suggestions to consider in creating a solid early access community foundation:

  • Weekly or biweekly blog posts or videos that detail upcoming game changes and additions, community events & initiatives, and highlight community content (ex. TWID, or “This Week in Destiny”)
  • Patch notes that highlight and credit community contributions and bug reporting
  • A community representative program that elevates and, promotes & rewards community members who go above and beyond in supporting the title
  • Regular promotion and dev participation in content creator streams and videos
  • Robust player support and bug reporting that is accessible in-game, in-browser, and is appropriately searchable by users (oh hey, another reason for forums!)
  • Strong community pillars & rules that create spaces for the community to grow in but that have boundaries that don’t leave room for toxic behaviour (the ole’, “if you let one nazi into the bar, it’ll quickly become a nazi bar”)
  • Community events that encourage participation and recognize fandom
  • Creating space and recognition for community resources like wikis, guides, fan art & fiction, tips, and any user-generated content like mods
  • Creating a roadmap for future game content and updates that highlights community-requested features and additions

A Good Campaign is Like an Onion: It Has Layers

With all that planning, research and prep out of the way, you’re done with your marketing campaign! Except… let’s make sure we dot our “i”s and cross our “t”s.

The effectiveness of your campaign relies on how layered it is. That doesn’t necessarily mean depth, but it does mean that all the disparate parts and ideas come together to form some sort of marketing Voltron that supports each other. By breaking down your game into parts, you can leverage your different platforms to expand on these aspects and reach a wider audience. Let’s, for example, say your game is an action role-playing game that is inspired by the classics of the genre. One significant aspect of your game will be its combat, and a coordinated effort can showcase this part of the game to various players. (Blizzard is doing an excellent job of this with Diablo 4, and live service titles can offer a lot of insight for games that don’t necessarily reside in that category)

the best marketing plans have swords (source: gifer)

A long, in-depth, developer-led livestream can go into the weeds with details and offer a detailed look at mechanics and gameplay that would thrill an enthusiast but would prove too much for a casual player. These streams could also take audience questions and provide more insight into design decisions. A Discord server could also support this stream, offering a place for commentary and questions handled by a community manager. These livestreams can then be broken down into a blog post, repackaging this information in an easier-to-skim-through way. This blog post can be broken down and streamlined even further into newsletters or social media posts, highlighting the more significant changes and additions that would interest a casual player. 

Press interviews, content creator streams, and community initiatives like contests, in-game events, and testing sessions could also support this marketing beat. Streams could showcase combat in a more player-familiar way, and press interviews could reach an audience who haven’t engaged yet but keep an eye out for updates and content that might just get them off the fence.

Whatever you do for your campaign, ensure it aligns and is supported by every part of the community infrastructure and ecosystem you create for your game.

Have You Considered Making A Second Game?

what about a tabletop game? (source: giphy)

As we reach the end of our long marketing journey, let’s throw you a curveball. Have you considered making a tabletop game?

Making a game often means you end up with a lot of worldbuilding and art that often doesn’t make it into the final product. Whether it’s in-depth lore documents, concept art, or cut content, there is work that can be re-purposed and expanded on.

This approach doesn’t make sense for every game, but you can use the tabletop medium to do many things!

  • Repurpose and share concept art that might only ever live in a blog post or art book.
  • Colour in the corners of your world that might not be explored in your full video game.
  • Give players their own agency in creating and expanding on the world you’ve made.
  • Share your world and story before your video game even releases; you can even use tabletop as a prologue for the inciting events of your story.
  • Expand on the symbiotic relationship with your community, especially during the testing process, and take player feedback on lore and characters.
  • Establish early relationships with press and content creators.
  • Sidestep the “lack of content” problem that often arises post-game-reveal but pre-launch.
  • Give space to alternative writers and game designers that come from a tabletop background.
  • Open up the possibilities of collaboration and cross-promotion with existing tabletop creators and SRDs (System Reference Documents).

RECOMMENDED SRDs

BLADES IN THE DARK
CALTROP CORE
TROPHY

With game budgets ballooning and funding getting hard to find, it is becoming essential to explore alternative revenue streams and to use as much of what is created during game development as possible. A great example of a game exploring this concept is Citizen Sleeper, a game that uses tabletop mechanics for gameplay and hints at a larger world ripe for exploring in a setting that encourages player agency, like say… a tabletop game.

The Tail End of Your Campaign

With everything ready to go, you might think: well, now we’re ready to launch. But oh no! What will you do about post-launch support?

Your marketing and community efforts have tails to them, and leveraging these properly can ensure your game sales also have a tail to them. Who doesn’t love Tails?

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with your marketing campaign is the fear of repetition. As previously established, your audience is spread across a variety of platforms. Games are also expensive to make. Don’t be afraid to repeat or revisit content, especially later on on new platforms, as the audience there might never have seen what you originally posted. It also helps to revisit content to compare and contrast changes made throughout development.

Your community can also help support marketing beats and keep them relevant over a long period. A great example of this is mod support, most recently done well in Baldur’s Gate 3. By expanding and creating an accessible support system for in-game mods, the lifespan of both the game and this marketing beat was extended. Larian recently announced that mod downloads have surpassed 10 million, proving that the complicated technical work done to support these mods is paying dividends. By giving more life to your community initiatives, you are giving back to your audience by letting them put their trust in you. The community around Baldur’s Gate 3 thrives even this far from launch because the dev team recognize that trust & buy-in from fans is worth the effort.

Marketing often lands flat when developed in a bubble and doesn’t reflect the humans making it or the people it is trying to draw in. A community-forward approach recognizes and respects your audience, who will respond in kind, and it is a more modern approach that also supports a changing landscape. The internet has become more open but much more toxic in recent years, and people are looking for smaller communities to participate in.

By being confident in your game, creating a space people want to be in, being open about development, being a genuine fan of the genre you’re in, and recognizing those who support you along the way, you can find the audience for your game and keep them.

Additonal Resources

Project Swan / Comms Strategy Overview

This is the original comms strategy for Threshold Games' "Project Swan".

The GameDiscoverCo newsletter

An incredible dev resource from Simon Carless and co. A great place to start your research.

Future Friends Games / Helpful stuff

The very cool folks over at FFG have a great trove of resources including GDC talks, templates, and more!

SAY HELLO

ABOUT

Astro Scout is a community-focused marketing venture based in Toronto, Canada.

We do not work with AI/web3 tools, and we identify as queer – so if either of those concepts bother you, jog on.

This venture is a sole proprietorship, and the work reflected within represents various clients, contract work, and other employment.

Copyright © Astro Scout (2024)
All rights to the images, music, clips, and other materials used belong to their respective owners.