what’s the biggest mistake you see publishers making now the biggest problem right now is definitely visibility and discoverability today I’m

joined by the marketing veteran with nearly 30 years in the games industry do you think there’s an abundance of good

video games still there are more good games out there these days than they used to be however there are so many

good games out there that people have never heard of we’ll dig into real world strategies developers and publishers

like Bioshock Borderlands and the Civilization series went through to market their games effectively today a

lot of the big games too have this problem where it takes some time to really get you into it attention span is

just lower than it used to be the new generation you you you lost them already what do people don’t know that they

don’t know when it comes to like marketing and PR put on a little marketing hat and think about like who

is this game for and is there a market for that do your target audience research do your SWAT analysis you

create two axes and then you look at um how do existing successful games fit

into this axis into this grid find where your game is at at the current stage of development and if it’s right in the

middle of five other games then you might want to make us a few adjustments or else you’re just going to get lost in

a shuffle from 2K Private Division and Take Two this episode’s guest Marcus Vin

marcus welcome happy to be here happy to have you for everyone at home Mark has been in the

industry for 30 plus years helped launch some global campaigns Bioshock

Borderlands Civilization and led international marketing as employee 26 at Take 2 and 2K and private division

these are all huge companies and today we’re going to get into what the transition has been going from AAA big

companies to consultant and then the practical strategies developers and publishers need to market their games

effectively today so if you want to learn more about selling more copies how to reach the right players and how to

avoid common mistakes being either a consultant or anything regarding to marketing then this episode will be for

you so Marcus I want to start with your transition so a year ago not so long ago

you only been a consultant now since uh November you were leading marketing at private division now you’re running your

own business so I want to get your update and I want to start with your LinkedIn post actually cuz I found it

very interesting so I want to read some things and then ask for what’s changed since then if you don’t mind so you’ve had six new clients travel to Lisbon

London twice going to GDC soon gave two talks at conferences then you also work late almost every day most weekends work

through a massive cold and I wanted to ask you like what’s been the biggest adjustment since going from like big

company to kind of being more solo i guess the biggest adjustment really is

that um you have to be always on when when you’re in a big company and and

even a small company smaller company when you’re an an employee even at a

leading role um there’s usually always someone that can help out like whether when you’re sick or when you’re away

when you’re on vacation um or even when you’re in a business meeting or or traveling somebody can always jump in

and help out and as a consultant as a solo consultant right now um that’s just

simply not the case you have to kind of be always on um and uh and yeah can’t

get sidetracked by silly things like a cold um if you don’t I mean you can you

always can but you always have this feeling of oh I really should be I really should be working now and I

really should be responsive especially at the beginning when you start to build a business and um and I think that’s

that’s probably also the biggest challenge right i’ve been blessed with having clients from the get-go which is

absolutely fantastic i didn’t expect that but um but you feel responsible always um to to be there and and to

deliver good service um because well the gone is the regular paycheck and uh and

you need to you need to hustle really um but that’s also at the same time very

exciting and very exhilarating because um it’s all on you and and when you

deliver something good then it it’s it’s your result and your result only and people are trusting you and people have

high expectations hopefully um that you you have to fulfill and it’s it’s it’s on you to do that and that is something

that keeps me keeps me going and and doesn’t make me worried about working long hours oh amazing and I resonate

with a lot of with what you’re saying um I had I guess my first Munique vacation when I started from April last year it

was Christmas time pretty much i had like a week of like no calls i was like whoa now I can I can reset a little bit

yeah you you mentioned that LinkedIn post and and in that LinkedIn post I asked um hey if anybody has

recommendations please post them in the comments and if you read the comments you saw that most people said oh yeah well that’s what this is um there were a

few there were a few um good good comments too but I guess everybody needs

to understand that if if they’re going down the freelance route if they’re going down the consultancy route there are certain things that you have to

really be aware of and and make sure that it’s not just you um I have a family i’ve got a wife and two kids and

we had a lot of conversations leading up to this and I had to I had to discuss with them are you okay with me not being

around as often well ironically I’m also around more because I don’t work in an office anymore i work from home but that

I don’t have that much time anymore that the weekends aren’t just for family as they used to fortunately my kids are

already a little bit older so they’re less dependent on me constantly being there but um you mentioned your your

workation that’s that’s another thing um we we love to do or we still love to do family vacations and I told folks like

the family like look um we can still do this but let’s rent a a vacation home

rather than going to a hotel because if we do that then I can spend some time a

few hours each day working when we’re on vacation then I can be with you maybe not the entire time but I can also

continue my work i guess it’s all about finding that balance which is hard especially at the beginning but um on in

the long term you mentioned this it took you a while but now you are taking a little vacation here and there um and

and I think that is something that you can’t forget because you burnout is a real thing and uh and you need to be a

little bit careful there yeah for sure and like you mentioned before the call you do a lot of different stuff and

what’s helped me is try to kind of segment so at the start I was doing everything and then after a while you’re like okay now my brother does all the

outreach his department are more just helping but it does take a time to get there but I think everything happens in

season and you’re in the hustle let’s go season and I think it’s exponential like

if you did twice the work now it’s probably going to be like 5 10x the results rather than just doing 1x because all these things start to

compound so yeah um it’s a very exciting time and I can’t wait to see more of

what happens as well so I want to start with the kind of biggest mistake you’re

seeing so you mentioned you went to Gamescom and then people were kind of asking you hey what does it take to work

with you we can’t afford to hire you please you know become a consultant so we can actually work with you but what

was the biggest problem you were seeing at Gamescom and over the past six months like what’s the biggest mistake do you see publishers making now

[Music] um so the biggest there two things the biggest problem biggest mistake the

biggest problem right now um I think is definitely visibility and

discoverability um we’ve all seen the stats like 19,000 games on Steam last year mobile it’s a lot worse uh than

that and u and there’s new games coming out every day every hour and everybody

is struggling with gaining that visibility it doesn’t matter whether you’re AAA or whether you’re indie or somewhere in between um everybody is

looking for answers and if anybody had the answers they’d be a millionaire right now so there’s no there’s no easy

answer to that of course um and and the the biggest problem that is the biggest

problem the biggest mistake I think is is is just keep on using tried and true

tried and trueue uh methods in in terms of marketing there’s there’s this ongoing I I I I still see this this all

the time where people are trying to apply um marketing formulas that have

worked 10 15 20 years ago and I was there when they worked um which is like the big trailer the the the big hands-on

event and then uh and then pushing pushing the same uh the same systems

preview stage review stage oh let’s bring in influencers and we’re only influencers how do we pick the

influencers or we pick the biggest ones it’s like that’s first of all you can only do this if you have a massive

budget and even when you do um then that’s not necessarily the best approach

um if you have a budget like the next GTA will have then it doesn’t matter

then then you can be everywhere but I would argue that even even smaller

triple or double A titles these days don’t have the budget anymore to be everywhere so you need to be a lot more

selective and I think that’s something that a lot of people make the mistake of just let’s hire an agency and they’ll

figure it out um and uh because we don’t have the bandwidth to do that again outsourcing is is is a topic but when

you don’t have the internal um the the internal brains to be able to look at

what the agencies and the partners the consultants bring you uh then that’s that that that’s very risky um

influencer i used influencers before and it’s one of my my my primary examples where um influencer agencies more often

than not just say like all right this is the budget that you’re giving me um you want reach so here are the here are the

biggest uh the biggest influencers that we can buy um the content for uh with this reach which is something that is

like it’s it’s rarely going to work unless you literally have millions to spend uh what does work is you do your

own homework you know your game best you do your research and you look at and a good influencer agency will do this with

you and you look at like who’s who could be very interesting and they might not have that reach um but they have the

audience that engages with their content and as we all know um content goes viral and content goes organically grows

organically when there’s lots of engagement you can have 500,000 views or clicks on on your video and it doesn’t

go anywhere because people check it out for a little bit and then they move on um you can have 200,000 views on your

video and 400 comments because people are engaged and interested and start talking about it and then people post it

on Reddit because they’re interested um a a a practical example that I I usually

use is um at private division we worked with uh we worked on Kerbal Space Program which is this sandbox uh physics

simulation where you shoot rockets um to the moon and beyond and you have these cute little green aliens the Kerbals

um when we worked on that like there was already a lively community but what we

quickly learned is it is this is a is a niche but it’s a very big niche it’s a big niche of where that where people

play these games that are interested in STEM they’re interested in rocket science they don’t even necessarily play

video games that much um but they’re interested in the simulation so what we did was we reached out to influencers

that sometimes didn’t even cover games but they covered rocket science and and space flight and we invited a few of

them or a lot of them to our our influencer event which we held at ISA at the um European Space Agency in

Amsterdam um where they could check out real rockets and then play the game we

had uh we had an influencer there um is went by the name of Reed Captain he

doesn’t cover video games typically he did this um he had at that time he had 200,000 followers but one of his Kbble

Space Pro videos had more than a million views um because it just the news just spread it was good content it was

relevant content and I think that’s often uh overlooked that some of the

biggest um influencers are there to entertain and just to have fun which is perfectly fine for them but does it

really help your game uh just because they have big reach like there needs to that is that’s just one example that I

I’m sorry if going off on that but that’s something that is dear to my heart because every influencer is still

like a buzz word you have to have influencers of course you do but you have to have the right ones yeah

absolutely i’ve seen that in my own like I guess game buying habits right like if

a video is entertaining okay but if it’s I think

Batro was a very good example for me like they haven’t used influencers from my understanding that much but like when

I I saw the marketing campaign after the fact so maybe I’m not the practical example but they do some weirdass

marketing campaigns and like people engaged and a lot on Twitter and I think Vampire Survivors does this as well just

like weird stuff that people just want to talk about and then when you said like it’s engagement like it’s relevant

and then they have very big Discord communities so then you’re like “Oh I can actually like have a conversation

now.” You know let’s go somewhere it’s not just awareness like we can actually have something that then becomes either

a wish list or a customer yeah and um you just mentioned Discord so that’s another thing that um obviously

everybody knows that Discord having a Discord community is important but a lot of people still think that well this is

this this will be will just build itself throughout the campaign if people are interested it’s like no you need to be

very active there and Discord is a when you work with developers and if you’re a developer yourself like this is a

perfect opportunity to to be active and and communicate with your community

because what people crave there is authenticity um the worst thing you can do is hire a uh social media agency and

then just some random person that uh learned a little bit about the game is then your community manager and answers

questions like people smell that very quickly oh yeah and smell that it’s not not authentic um the um Discord or or

Reddit uh are just like perfect examples of thriving communities where yes they

can be critical and some people uh some developers shy away from interacting there and we all we’ve all seen examples

of people trolling there as well but I think it’s always worth to take the risk

because if you don’t do it then then you’re missing out um it’s also something that allows you um to to build

momentum without having to spend a lot of money you have to spend a lot of time though that’s that’s very true um but if

if if you’re a developer if you’re self-publishing if you’re if you’re looking for a publisher um publishers

are more and more derisking um their investments and one of the ways that um

help them believe in the success or potential success of a game is if there’s already traction there and and

and a community is something that is always um is an element that that every

publisher is now taking a a keen eye on and it’s a bit of a conundrum for a developer right because this is

something that the publisher used to do this used to be the responsibility of a publisher and now um they’re being asked

to deliver that themselves as a developer I can understand that they’re saying “Wait a minute.” Um isn’t how can

I build a community when a game is not really there but um these days it it is

worth like sacrificing a um a bit of the surprise element by announcing a game

that nobody has ever heard of by teasing uh certain elements of that game and start to build a little bit of word of

mouth and you can see very quickly if if you have something new that people are interested in or whether you still need

to uh work on that and and feed them content that they’re interested interested in in in talking about but

when they are it can gain momentum quickly and then that really helps yeah for sure um literally my last episode on

this podcast was with the CEO of company called Leveler and they do discord um

integration where it helps you like kind of especially with LLMs now you can like track the sentiment in your community

and like pull together the tickets it was very interesting and he was mentioning how some publishers and

developers know they need to do it but then don’t because they’re like ah scary but then when they look at the ones

actually are doing it like a developer or three has a few hours of their week dedicated to it and it doesn’t have to

be that expensive and exactly what you said when I asked some people who some who’ve been on the show like at least in

this market you need to have something where you can present like okay what do you have great a vertical slice let’s

say but What’s the sentiment but if you have like a number on Discord like look real

people see this is you mentioned a vertical slice and this is super interesting how this evolved over time

um 20 years ago um you as a developer if you had a cool game idea you would go

out and pitch it and sometimes that PowerPoint presentation was enough i was like well yep cool you got the team you

got the idea you just go um then publishers became more picky um

rightfully so because more and more games came about and and and the risk got risk was growing um I was I was

literally a I was literally a gamer at an age where basically a new game would interesting game would come out like

once or twice a month and that was it there were months where there were there were no good video games this month and

now everybody has this abundance so of course do you think I’m curious do you think there’s an abundance of good video

games still okay that’s a very funny because I had

the reason I bring this up is someone said “Yes there’s 19,000 games on Steam last year but that’s because it’s so

much easier to make games where the standard of the good games year probably hasn’t increased that much.” That was

the comment sup super interesting topic um I think there are more um there are

more good games out there these days than they used to be however there are so many good games out there that people

ne have never heard of um because again visibility okay the 19,000 games per

year or last year by the way that’s a bit of a red herring um because Steam a

few years ago has implemented um something where the visibility of the games is greatly reduced um if you don’t

fill certain elements um like having achievements um and and having other

elements in the game which effectively means out of these 19,000 games there’s only last year there were only a good

4,000 I think 4,500 or so that had a certain level of visibility the rest of

them you would actually have to find know the name in order to find that is something you don’t see in all the

headlines which is like that’s actually a lot more sizable right 4,500 games how many of those are good it’s even yeah

it’s even in the graph if you look at the if you if you look it up on Steam the graph actually shows the those those

more visible games it’s never in the headline yeah however 400 games is still

375 games a month so there’s there’s still a ton and and that still means games new games every day also those

Those 4,500 games doesn’t necessarily mean they are great games they just mean it just means they fulfill a certain

element that makes it clear that there are no shovelware and not AI generated at least to a certain degree it’s still

are there are there that many good games out there i think I think the last

couple of years actually there were less great AAA games out there because well we we suffer from postcoid uh a lot of

games got delayed a lot of game like AAA is so hard to make these days that um

that there are now fewer games for the first fewer AAA games for the first time in quite a while at the same time

there’s more indie games than ever there’s there’s smaller games u more smaller games than ever i just played

and the the last week I binged weekend I binged through a game that I had never heard of by pure coincidence which was

an absolutely fantastic game that mixes um it’s basically looks like 16 bit Zelda but it’s a bullet hell game where

you shoot it’s called minioot adventures advertisement play this game um it’s created by two French people uh I think

brothers even anyway it’s a fantastic game um it has all the charm of the early Zelda games but it also has very

moder modern um twin stick bullet uh bullet hell kind of gameplay i would

argue that 10 game 101 15 years ago this game would have gotten a lot of attention because it’s unique it it it

blends um popular genres uh it looks great and it’s just a lot of fun um I

don’t think they sold more than a few thousand copies um because well again visibility I so to a very long winded

way to answer your question i strongly believe there’s as many good games as ever if not more um than ever before but

it’s very hard for people to find them i will say there’s more there’s less on the on the on the upper echelon on the

AAA side but there’s still more than enough out

there i’m curious because you’re making me think now like yes that game would have got more attention 10 years ago but

in today’s market like the topic of the old game problem comes up on podcast

where you have player time going to Hearthstone in my case or like Fortnite

and it’s just staying there you know and then actually year on year you have these players which would take years to

like kind of migrate and then play something else so when we say that game is objectively good but is that

commercially viable today even if it’s enjoyable now I’m not saying every

studio needs to make millions and millions of pounds but I think a lot of people make games with that hopeful

ambition of selling thousands and like millions of copies there’s a question coming so if there’s a lack of a huge

marketing budget my question is more on I guess

market validation right like surely they knew that game unless I’m being naive

here would not perform if they if it sold a thousand copies in my head even

if they threw all the marketing at it there’s a topic of like can that be

validated before that gets released um so my question is like on market validation like where do people get it

wrong what is something they can consider so super interesting topic because I I

agree um to me the scariest uh stat last year was not the 19,000 games or the

what the 400 games the scariest stat was that uh what was it only 16 or 18% of

the games uh that people spent time on on Steam were released last year and everything else was to your point the

Fortnites the Minecrafts the the um um the Hearthston world and there seems to

be this trend of uh games as a hobby where people just play this one game i

mentioned Kos I mentioned Kerbal Space Program there if you look up the reviews for Kerbos Space Program on Steam there

are people who played this game for 3,200 hours 2,800 hours it’s like yeah that’s your game that’s that’s your

hobby that’s your hobby is not video games your hobby is that game um we’re not going to solve that um because there

is no way to solve it um the we as an industry have educated so it’s another one of my

favorite topics we in in our industry we have educated the consumer to do things

that we as an industry hate which is bizarre but it’s it’s our fault number

one is we educated the consumer to never buy a game at full price um because uh I

remember 20 years ago when a game was discounted by 20 30% six months after release there was an outcry as a people

like well they’re ripping off the people who bought it at day one um because the game is now $40 instead of $60 six

months after launch today that happens first of all it happens at launch

there’s a launch discount uh then it happens like the game doesn’t perform up to par six weeks later eight weeks later

the game is being discounted um now why on earth would I buy a game on day one

unless it’s the game I’ve been waiting for half of my life GTA 6 um very very

few games do that anymore or it’s a big franchise that um that I just want eagerly want to play it on on day one

but that was only the beginning we started that doing that so nobody buys a game at full price anymore

then I shouldn’t say we because that’s just one or two players in this industry but they included uh that they started

they started Microsoft started game pass where it’s like hey guess what you don’t have to pay for games at all you just

pay the platform holder um and then of course PlayStation introduced PlayStation Plus so that’s the that’s

the other topic there’s a lot of people out there um who don’t buy games at all anymore period because they

have their game pass subscription and there’s hundreds of games on there why would I ever um buy new ones same with

PlayStation Plus not to the degree but still so that’s something that we educated our our our audience and then

to your point uh the games as a hobby thing have gotten bigger and bigger and

bigger and the and and for a very long time it was the the the biggest um topic

is was to how to retain the players how do you make how do you make sure that they stay on board um first we had

regular games then we had games with DLC then we had games with life service then we had games with subscriptions and that

leads to the a whole generation of players just playing one game or two

games because there’s so much content in there that even if they wanted to they didn’t really have the time the first

such game I would argue is World of Warcraft um and I can say that because I

I had a serious addiction to this game um to the point where I feel it almost cost me my marriage um and it certainly

lost me some friends and my version was Runescape i had 370 days on Runescape of

my life like over a year logged in not as much but I have 160 or so on on World

of Warcraft and um so this was I’ve always been a very avid gamer and having been part of the

games industry for so long back when people still spend money on games i didn’t have to because I was like hey I

trade you within the industry you would trade your games at the new release you you ring up the PR manager of another

company is like hey uh want to against whatever game and that always

works so I always played a ton of games and then World of Warcraft came along and after a while I realized I missed

out on all the big releases of this year because I not because I wasn’t interested i even got them for free from

my industry friends but they were just sitting there because I didn’t have or I felt that I didn’t have the time i was

only playing this one game um and I had to had to stop doing that for various reasons my wife being the biggest one

but um I remember when I when I stopped doing that and started playing my pile

of shame I discovered man I missed out on so on so many games but there are so

many gamers these days who don’t even go through that who don’t play a game for a

year or two but they play a game forever and every game that comes in between is

just a little snack um in between and there you go it’s it’s all and and it’s

not going to be easier quite the opposite and I see this every day with my son my son is 11 now and he grew up

in video game heaven um because he had access to a ton of games he also grows up in video game hell because his

parents actually know that there needs to be certain limits and so he’s uh he

has to deal with that now he can play like my library is massive both on Steam

on on PlayStation Xbox he has everything he ever wants um he plays three games um

he plays Minecraft i guess them yeah yeah you go i spoiled the first one so we got Minecraft i’m gonna say Roblox

mhm okay third one 11 years old fortnite yes

only just started uh or recently started because we also look at age ratings but um but yes so those those are the three

he’s still a big um he grew up on on Switch uh so he and and I’m a big uh

Mario and Zelda fan so he has all of these games he spends he spent hundreds of hours on on uh on Breath of the Wild

and uh and uh and uh Tears of the Kingdom um but

he he liked these Nintendo games the most because they were open and you could try different things um I I see

that he has little interest in in linear games uh he has zero interest in story-based games it’s all about like

with playing with his friends uh UGC of course user generated content is is a thing uh he builds the craziest

contraptions in Minecraft um Fortnite is is is a little less creative there but

you can you all got Lego Fortnite i was playing that with my brother over Christmas like they got such a big game

that they’ve now made the game into a freaking games platform and it’s like how are you going to compete with that i

uh I have um uh the neighbors boys who are who are a little bit older and during co um I I I saw them online all

the time on Fortnite and I I said to them “Look um wow you’re playing a a ton

of Fortnite.” And they’re like “Well most of the time we’re not playing we’re just using the chat and we’re just using

the lobby and hang to hang out with our friends.” Um so to your point it’s like the gs turn into platforms it’s the same

with Roblox like um and then Roblox actually um is another topic or or puts

a spotlight on another topic games have become more and more realistic and and the graphical fidelity is incredible but

there’s a whole generation of gamers that could not care less um my son being one of them like he plays games like I I

look at those and like dude you have I can we can play Uncharted and we can play um the the greatest looking games

out there um and he plays Stickman and uh and and and games that look I have a

rumor a theory why because okay I had been playing Runescape for a long time

then they revealed old school Runescape and there’s something about always knowing your game’s going to be reactive

and it’s just things are going to happen and I feel like at least with the current tech I experienced this with Red

Dead Redemption 2 i had a maxed out PC uh the graphic wasn’t maxed out but like I had 128 gigs of RAM and an okay Nvidia

card and Red Dead Redemption was like an old game at the time and I was like I actually want to play this on the lowest

setting cuz I just don’t want to lose a frame because I’m just so used i don’t want to have to feel anything if I had a console it would be less of a problem

but yeah like the games I play are just you know balletro because it’s just nice and easy i can see I can see what’s

happening and then kind of to your point I don’t I care more about the feeling and like what’s my experience going to

be and yeah and the idea that I spend as a developer millions of pounds making it

look good when that in my opinion could be a negative unless you’re GTA 6 yeah

it’s a I think it’s the reason like we got indie games coming out and then making some money rather than like the triple

AAA big gambles and I I think this is this is a a remnant of of an industry t

trend that had been going on for decades really ever since the 80s when the first or 70s but the 80s really when the first

video game consoles came about every new game had to look better than an older game and every new games console

generation and every new graphics card on the PC had to significantly significantly improve the graphics not

necessarily the gameplay but it was all graphics driven um and and this over

time has diminished i remember uh when the PlayStation 2 came out and I made

the jump from PlayStation one to PlayStation 2 mindblowing the way the graphics evolved i remember putting in

the first 3D graphic cards into my PC and all of a sudden all the all the hard

cuts were gone and I was like this is amazing this is absolutely incredible playstation 3 to PlayStation 4 um still

big difference playstation 4 to PlayStation 5 i don’t know uh some games

you have to uh you have to really look into like zoom in to see to see the details and yet every time uh not every

time a lot of times in the industry especially in AAA it’s all about the graphics and the graphical fidelity that

and and then you add open world to it and then that blows up in that blows up your dev cost and your and the teams

that you need um completely out of proportion meanwhile people play Roblox

and Vampire Survivors and and enjoy it um to no end um so I think as an

industry there needs to be this this we need to put more emphasis on on on the

core what makes games fun uh funny enough last week I attended um Defcom Leadership Summit in Lisbon and uh the

the the keynote speaker was Sean Leaden who used to be the CEO of or the president at Sony um Sony America and

his whole keynote speaker was uh talk was about we need to find the fun and we

need to go back to the basics and it sounds like a Captain Obvious thing

right i mean games are always about fun aren’t they but that was my whole rant right now is that sometimes we lose that

sometimes we we we think that um we just need to have technical achievements uh

but that’s not really what the players want that’s not what the gamers want the gamers just want to have fun and finding

the fun is is key does that solve the problem that games have turned into a hobby no um and this this goes back to

the the the old thing like if I had an answer for that like be I’d be rich uh because everybody’s looking for that

answer but I don’t think the answer can be okay forget about it now we all need to develop a game that can be a forever

game uh because that’s never going to work uh we need to build alternatives that um that at least drag away people

uh for for some time and and that constantly happens i don’t think people will play Bellatro forever and I I

seriously don’t think people will play Vampire Survivors forever but it’s those games that you can return to all the

time in between other games and and have fun and I think that’s uh there’s something to be said about that my

favorite not forever game but game that I’ve played for five six years now is Slate Aspire um it’s an indie game

turn-based um card uh rog light card battler um I now have I looked it up

recently 400 something hours and that’s not because I I never play anything else quite the opposite but it’s my go-to

game if I have half an hour and I don’t want to start a new game or continue a massive session I just play one one run

and then I’m good and I think that is something that a lot of these games have in common because sticking with those

examples that you used Batro Fortnite um Vampire Survivors you can jump in play

it for half an hour and have a satisfying experience you can also play it for three four hours at a time and

enjoy it too but a lot of the big games too have this problem where it takes

some time to really get you into it and I think that is actually something that

is something that is a concern again having kids and teenagers I can see that the attention span is just lower than it

used to be and if you have a have start a game and the first 20 minutes is mainly CGI intros and uh and you

occasionally push a button before the reaction starts the new generation you you you lost them already um that’s a

tough cell so that is something that uh I think everybody needs to keep in mind

like getting getting to the fun quickly um yeah i think we’re looking at a design

challenge here i guess the thought I’m having here I had um Alexander Brazie on

on the podcast and he we talked about Balatra and we did a bit of roleplay and

he mentioned one thing that Batra does really really well is when you finish a game of Bellatro the restart button is

just like like boom I’m back in snackable enjoyable and you use the word satisfying like I’m reflecting on Red

Dead Redemption 2 i couldn’t get satisfied unless I played an hour plus which meant I couldn’t play it on like

five of the seven days of the week because I had work in Jib so it’s just like ah even though I’ve paid the $60 so

it’s like I couldn’t I don’t reflect on Red Devil D and thinking wow what an amazing game because it’s just the ramp

up time took too much and that’s just someone who you know had a bit of time at the time what I want to do now sorry

minus oh just one add on to that because I think that’s a very very important

point and I think we can all learn from the mobile games industry a little bit there and that is that that that

retention loop and that satisfaction that you can have because it’s I mean sometimes it’s it’s done cheaply but we

all like the shiny new thing vampire Survivor you start this game and you play the first two five 10 runs you get

an achievement every time you unlock something every time over time it gets harder um to do something new but you

get this instant gratification of “Oh man I died but I look at what I got i

want to try this out i got to get I got a new weapon i got a new character i got a new game mode i want to try that.”

That is something that the mobile games uh industry has done and is doing incredibly well and I think that um that

should happen more often yeah for sure that stackable gameplay i think personally I actually don’t play games

unless they’re rogue likes anymore i just decided because I just know that if

it’s a rogike it’s designed in a way where it’s going to be fun even if I don’t get good because like the start is

still a challenge that’s another thing um cool i want to think of the listener

here who potentially is maybe one of your clients so could you walk me through like what

happens when a developer comes to you they have a game coming out they know they need help with marketing strategy

like what is the first thing they could do to kind of like self- order themselves like just to like where am I

at like what what I’m looking for here is like what do people don’t know that they don’t know

when it comes to like marketing and PR i think one thing that is really

underestimated is because sometimes developers don’t really like marketing

or don’t want to want don’t want anything to do with that because they feel it’s something that the publisher or somebody else needs to do for them i

feel they need to look at their game from the very beginning from the ideation and and put on a little

marketing hat and think about like who who is this game for like who’s what’s my what’s my target audience the a

common trope for a very long time that I hear still to this day from developers is like oh we’re creating games that we

want to play that’s cool but then that like who else wants to play them and is

there a market for that and that is something that I feel is often overlooked like you have to go through

these notions of do elements of the marketing plan but do them when you start thinking about what the kind of

game that you want to make do your target audience research do your um do

your SWAT analysis um create that um a lot of people may have seen this it’s

like this competitive grid where you look at you create two axes and then you look at um how do existing successful

games fit into this axis into this grid and then find where your game is at at

the current stage of development and and if it’s right in the middle of 500 five other games then you might want to make

a a few adjustments or else you’re just going to get lost in a shuffle um it’s it’s it’s a obviously you you need to

bring in marketing experts when you want to before you want to announce the game and obviously when you want to launch

the game and all the way in between but I think it would be very um beneficial

for a lot of developers to bring in an expert very early on and take a look at their game design document rather than

uh and the game itself of course if there’s something playable there um to to get a a thorough analysis of is there

a market for the game and obviously nobody has the 100% answer for that but

over time you get a certain feel for it and when it’s early on there’s still an opportunity to make adjustments when for

an hour a year and a half into development and then you realize oh man

um this mechanic isn’t really there’s the train has moved on the audience is there’s no audience for that anymore you

you can throw away six months of development and start something something new but when you’re early when when you’re that early on there’s

there’s still an opportunity there so I I I would say either find someone who can help you early on with marketing

expertise or or put on put on your marketing hat there’s tons of there’s tons of uh information out there uh in

order to analyze games and how to create a marketing plan and whatnot do that but not for your finished game do it for

your early stage got it yeah i had a CEO of rank one on the podcast they have a

tool where it’s a self-input platform where people put

the games they like to watch and then I think they like to play and just I think they’ve got over like a million just manually inputed stuff and then as a

developer it’s free to use um you could see which games players of which game

like other games so if there’s a successful game going on but then they also like these type of games then you

can see ah this genre and this genre maybe I should put something in there so that’s one tool I know that people could

kind of look to make that grid and I wanted to ask you a question on bring a

marketing expert in early i’ve spoken to people who’ve got burnt right like you

mentioned there’s some marketing agencies who come in and god bless some agencies but

sometimes the incentives don’t align right like there might be an incentive to you know do it in this marketing way

because that’s where my expertise is where actually we should go under the niche influencer route or we should go

under the make a trailer that’s going to get viral on Tik Tok and then funnel into a Discord route like these are very

different skill sets in my head so how do you go about finding that external

help that you know this is going to be relevant for your game because I feel like it’s a hard ask to say “Hey developer you know put the marketing hat

on when okay when it comes to the time you need a marketing expert like what questions am I supposed to be asking?”

Okay so this sound this might sound again very obvious but you’d be

surprised how often that’s not being asked like don’t like how much of a gamer are

the people that you’re hiring like the marketing experts are they do they truly understand games do they truly

understand your game uh and and and your area when you bring in the marketing expert early let me put it the other way

around you bring in the marketing team at the at the tail end you already have momentum you already know that there’s

an audience for that you can bring in I would argue almost any marketing um

agency with certain expertise um they know they know the how to pull the levers they know how to create the ads

they know how to reach um how to uh how to which audiences to reach fairly easy

if you do this early on you need somebody who who truly understands games um and who also understands how

development works because um there’s no point in uh making uh bring someone

early and then they they they they create um a plan for you that um doesn’t

really work with what you have what what you have in terms of resources and and the skill set that you have you need to

have people who who need who understand both sides both the development side and the marketing side it’s very um the

earlier you come in uh the more you need to understand the process um back again

20 years ago in AAA um I had a constant fight with our then VP of production who

refused to even internally who refused to give the marketing team early builds of the game of the game that he was

working on and I’m like “Come on we need to understand the game in order to properly market it.” Like what are you doing why do you think he was doing that

why do you think that well he he told me he said “You guys don’t understand game development and if I give you an alpha

build then you’re just going to complain about the the the bugs and the graphics and you will not be able to like was he

right was he right?” You know what i I hate to say it but for some people of the team that was the case um he got

burnt by showing a game early and then um this was this was back at 2K where we

had a lot of games and he said I showed a game early on and from then on I was the ugly stepchild because people felt

that this game is not going to be a success not going to say which game it was because it turned out a big success

um but people didn’t believe in it at least certain people on the marketing team because I showed them the game too

early so now I’m only going to show you the game when it’s beta or whatever and looks great wow which put us on the back

foot because then we the marketing team was brought in too late but there was this common consensus back then that the

marketing people are the the suits they are the ones who only think about numbers and business and don’t really

understand games and I think this has changed um I I rarely to speak to people

on the marketing side who are well nobody’s clueless about games or else they wouldn’t be here

usually they have a good understanding but often it’s an understanding as a consumer as a gamer and that’s good but

if you want to talk talk shop with developers at the early stage of their development you also need to understand

how to a degree how I’m never going to be a game developer but how game development works how milestones work

how the different stages of of pre-production production and so on work or else you will give bad advice um so

that’s that’s certainly something to take into consideration and that’s something you you you have to learn like

there’s like if if you’re a gamer you understand and and you understand games that’s great you everybody can do this

over time you you engage uh with the hobby and and over time you grow your

experience but game development is a different story um and lots more to unpack there yeah awesome and that’s a

good like checklist to have I guess mentally fantastic so wrapping up here

in terms of just things that you want to kind of I guess tell the tell the world I guess

is kind of the way I’m going to be phrasing it now but I usually ask at the end is like what do you want to tell

people that you don’t think is being said right now what is a common thing that you feel like you have to repeat yourself um when it comes to what you do

i think the one thing I want to say right now is I’m I’m an eternal optimist um and and there’s a lot of doom and

gloom right now in the games industry and of course a lot of it is deser a lot of it deservedly so um we see we still

see layoffs every other week um but the games industry is is very resilient and

I say that as somebody who’s been there since the 90s and I was there in 2007208

when when the internet bubble burst and every everybody all the investors pulled

the money out of tech and games and everybody thought it was the end of the world it’s not like people compare this

the situation now to that and say it’s it’s so much worse now it’s actually not it’s the industry games industry was was

much smaller then so the layoffs the numbers were smaller but the percentage of people affected was was almost if not

as high as it is now and the the games companies and the games industry has

come back and it will come back here too people will always play games they will change how they play games and I

understand that the last hour what we talked about a lot of it was negative and uh and was lamenting over the trend

the the the trends in the industry but um people are always interested in in

fun ways of um getting enter becoming entertained and we just need to continue

to reinvent ourselves as this industry has always done um and and see this as

an opportunity which sounds um sounds brutal when you probably just lost your

job is like see this as an opportunity but there is the number of new studios that are being founded right now is

staggering and some of them are founded out of necessity because well people people need to band together and find

something new but I’m absolutely sure that a couple years from now we will going to see a resurgence of new

starting as indie studios and then growing with a whole new generation of games then that hopefully will uh keep

the interest going and then I say hopefully but I know it will be because people will always play games yeah I’m

definitely in agreement there i think there’s always opportunity and chaos and we highlighted yes the things that are

more difficult but we also mentioned the explosion of Indie and then also the delayed effect of all these studios that

came up which I then we’re going to probably see in 26 um 2027 as well so I

I definitely echo that uh Marcus thank you so much for the conversation where can people find you uh thank you for

having me uh people can find me on uh LinkedIn of course Marcus Wing but also

um on my website beyondthewall.game fantastic Marcus thank you so much thank

you