'Steam is a supermarket, and your game is beans' - A guide for reluctant marketers
At Develop Brighton, marketing experts gave tips to promoting your game even if you don't have any interest in it
What even is marketing?
That's the question Hannah Flynn, Izzy Jagan, and Lou Jones started their talk at Develop Brighton with.
In a conversation with the audience entitled 'What games marketing actually works in 2024?', the trio explored different aspects of the craft.
Jagan, global PR manager at Square Enix, posited that no one really knows what PR and marketing is because it's such a broad topic. She added that it's a lot more creative than people assume.
Jones, senior campaign manager at Yrs Truly, concurred, saying the job can go from admin and stats to "absolute creative joy."
"There really is a lot of joy in marketing because you're speaking to people and people are inherently kind and happy, most of the time," they said. "And that's what you really want to speak to. So I think any conception you have that it's dry and that it's sort of unreachable, leave that out of the door. We don't want that. We're all about the people here!"
In a segment of the talk, the speakers addressed people in the audience who needed to self market their game, and in particular those who are doing so begrudgingly.
Consistent messaging
"If I was to share one thing especially to devs that are reluctantly marketing; I know it's the last thing you want to be doing," Jones said. "You know, no one sets out to make a game [saying], 'I can't wait to market this, I'm so excited'.
"Often I get devs coming to me and they're like: how much should I spend on influencers? Should I be going to events? Should I do all this? These big great ideas of what marketing stuff they need to do. And the question I ask them is: do you know what your game is? Do you know how to talk about it? What's one sentence that will summarise your game? And a lot of the time they don't have that foundation because you almost skip that step, because the other stuff looks so flashy.
"But if you don't have that foundation of messaging, all of that other stuff is going to be wasted effort on your part because it's gonna fall apart."
They highlighted that it's an issue if you're starting to talk about your game in one way at one event, but then present it differently to influencers or at another event, and don't have that structure in place that helps present a unified messaging.
"The one thing I would say to you is, before you do any of the big flashy stuff, any of the outreach, any of the talking to people, sit down with yourself, sit down with your team, get a whiteboard out, just start throwing things at the wall, see what sticks.
"What is your game? Can you summarise it to me in ten words or less? Do you actually really know if you look at it? What I often say is get your mum to play it. What does your mum think your game is? Get people who aren't so ingrained in the development of it to sit down and play your game."
Having that messaging sorted and locked "might take time, will take time, and should take time," but is worth the effort, they continued.
"If that's weak, the rest of it is going to crumble and it's not going to be worth your time," they said.
Flynn, marketing manager at Failbetter Games, doubled down on that aspect, adding that once you've got that messaging locked, you need to pay attention to how people react to your game.
"The first time you take it to an event and you've said that [messaging] 50 times, and you've experienced what people have responded to you with, they will say something like 'Oh, it makes me feel (blank)'," she said. "And they'll say the same word over and over again and you just take that and put it in [your messaging]. And then the next round, it will be even better.
"Something that people who haven't done a lot of marketing conceive it as is a finished and finite thing, but it is as iterative as game development."
Embrace ego death
Jones, following up on their point about having people outside of the core development team play the game during development, touched upon the fact that game creators often will have a very "strict" idea of what their game is, which is not always a good thing.
"Allow yourself to be surprised, and allow yourself to be creative," they said. "Oftentimes, the game will decide what it is. It will kind of take its own life and take its own form."
Jagan concurred, going into the emotional aspect of marketing your own project.
"When you start marketing something that you've created, it is a certain level of ego death," she pointed out. "You do, at some point, have to swallow what you think that you have made and market it in a way that appeals to other people.
"And that might not necessarily be the way that you dreamt and intended it to go out into the world, because unfortunately we do live and exist in very kind of algorithmically-driven, short attention span times. And I think the way that you feel about your game has to evolve with the way that you speak about things."
Jagan said that the foundation of that is knowing what you've created, knowing how to talk about it, and which language to use, looping back to Jones' earlier point.
"How do you refer to certain elements of it? Are you using the same words to refer to certain elements of this game every single time? What are the cornerstones?," she listed.
She also noted how useful it can be to have a 'brand bible' – rules and guidelines about your studio and project, how to refer to it, and communicate around it.
"It's such an effective tool [and] you do have to swallow your pride a little bit but then you see the results of that at the very end," Jagan continued. "But to some extent whilst you're figuring that stuff out, it can feel a little bit daunting and it can be a little bit disappointing to have to talk about your game in not necessarily the way that you would want to at this stage, but it is all for the benefit of the end product."
Flynn added: "You have to kind of think: Steam is a shop like a supermarket, your game is like a can of beans. People want to know: is it beans? They want to know how it tastes. So like, think about boiling down your precious baby into like the briefest description."
To describe a game, she likes using the phrasing of 'This game is a [genre] that will make you feel [emotion]', for instance.
Polish your Steam page
Following up on that, Flynn also talked to the importance of your Steam page.
"The thing about any storefront is, as I said, it's like a supermarket. And the really heavily bang-for-buck thing you can do is spend a bunch of time on your Steam page," she said.
"Specifically things that work that you can do today [are]: review your short description, make sure it involves genre and see if it involves feeling as well. You don't specifically have to say a word like 'This game will make you feel cool' . You can say whatever it is in a way that when you read it, it reads as 'you will feel cool'. Get a copywriter if that doesn't make sense to you," she laughed.
"When you start marketing something that you've created, it is a certain level of ego death"Izzy Jagan
She also advised to double check your tags, and make sure you've used the Tag Wizard. She also encouraged people to look into Valve's YouTube channel for developers, called Steamworks Development, for more tips about the store and discoverability on Steam, and follow the work of people like Simon Carless and Chris Zukowski.
Our own Academy section has a wealth of guides dedicated to Steam, and one in particular about making the most of your Steam page.
"The first three thumbnails of your game on Steam, they become a gif that's shown elsewhere on Steam when you browse the store," Flynn continued. "So, make sure they tell the story of a single interaction in your game, or like three extremely different, very cool moments from your game.
"Don't be precious about spoilers. Nobody remembers what's in the trailer. Put the best stuff in your trailer, put the best stuff on your Steam page. And lead your Steam page with a gameplay gif. That is a huge thing; people skip past the trailer a lot."
More GamesIndustry.biz Academy guides to Selling Games
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