How Great Key Art Can Lead to Doubling Marketing Numbers

thank you hi there and welcome to the art to key art how great QR can lead to doubling marketing numbers I'm Alex Van Lepp and I am here to guide you through this presentation I have been in the industry for over 10 years and specifically for the last eight years I've been involved with indie game marketing currently I'm the marketing director at video game publisher graffiti games and I'm also a partner at marketing agency Vim global so this talk is going to share the effectiveness of good key art and why your studio should invest in money and resources to ensure that your Banners are attracting and converting people into visits wishlist and ultimately sales I'll share examples of key art that graffiti games produced from the past year what we did the numbers that and results that we've got and then also

particularly with steam how to make sure you're doing what you can do to have a banner that really converts people into wishlist and sales everything draws from my experience uh and then also from the Data Insights that I've found from the past couple years when I had an idea to start tracking cure effectiveness so what is key art I'm sure that most of you already know what key art is but for those that don't it's a virtual representation of your game think of it as a billboard for your game often it is used for store pages so your steam capsule banners for your thumbnails for trailers for media in a press kit for your social media channels it's used in a many different ways but I think the most significant is for store Pages because that's oftentimes the first way someone sees your game and I do feel that KR is probably the most

significant marketing tool that you have because it's often the first line where someone sees your game in order to get attention from consumers media streamers first parties uh Publishers whoever you're trying to get your game out in front of particularly with stores there are tons of games launching every day thousands every year you want to be able to stand out in the store because maybe that's the only chance someone ever sees your game is through the key art and if you're not standing out you're just going to get passed by now I want to go over uh some QR Basics and to start with a good piece of cure which is this turnip boy commits tax evasion art as you can tell it's high quality it's easy to read the logo uh it explains the game some it's not exactly oh this is him committing tax evasion but it's a little tongue-in-cheek you'd see the different characters you see turnip boy uh the titular character in

the middle there with money around him and I particularly like that the focus of all the other characters and that your eye is drawn to the center where the character and the logo are that way someone right away sees what the the game is instead of having to search for a piece of logo that they can know what the game is um for this instance uh the colors are really nice and bright too it doesn't always have to be that way but I do like it for here now the main reason as I've already kind of touched on is to touch to invest in your PR is just to Stand Out Among the crowd the visibility in the store is huge because well traffic here will lead to a successful Game launch um since 2019 we've seen any time that we invested in here at graffiti games that it resulted in doubling our marketing numbers and we didn't have an

artist on staff so we always outsourced that so it was really good to to invest in that money and that time that it does take to create a cure uh ultimately you're going to increase your store availability um by converting people who see it in the store into visitors so for instance in this image here I took this from a steam Festival you can see the The Cure is what you see first in a store I like the robot in the middle I like the colors um I like how clear it is and easy it is to read and the character is cute so it makes me want to know more about this game uh and this ultimately will lead to me clicking on it um when you're in a store and you see this people are just going off of what they see first and so you got to be cognizant of that uh this is important because in the back end with steam you'll have impression numbers and that's any time someone sees your your key art so whether it's in a festival like this or

it's on a more like this in another games page whether someone's on your page or even in upcoming titles or searching there that all counts as Impressions which is great but it doesn't lead to the ultimate goal of getting wish list and sales um in the so you really want to convert people and a good key art will make people want to click and go to your page and then ultimately if they're invested in that and you have a great page you can then convert people into wishlist and sales so key art serves at that Catalyst to get people to your page and to convert them into wishlist and sales and you're not just going to be using it in the store page as I mentioned you'll use it as a trailer thumbnail on Twitter other social media channels Reddit and so you want to have that great cure that then will push people to your page in other areas too and here it is in the wild uh so in this

blue fire example top left you see it as a trailer thumbnail uh and that's even to get people to view your trailer because oftentimes people just see that first thumbnail and that makes them decide whether or not they want to click on the game on the bottom left you have Twitter background Banner again to create that community and on the right is a steam small capsule which is really important and I'll touch base more on it later because with this small capsule it's red at such a small size you really want to make sure your art is high quality legible and clear and can present the game it's a bit tougher because it's smaller to show a good representation but it's really really important that you work on it um and you have a good piece of art and we'll touch on it more and it isn't Just Launch where you need to work on your key art I recommend after launch uh updating it to let people know about sales promotions DLC

events let's say you're leaving early access you're at 1.0 you're going to you know 1.2 or whatever you want to call it uh it's really important to let people know that hey there's something different with the game and this blue fire example here on the right side we were featured as a steam daily deal and so we knew we were going to be on the front page and we wanted to convert our wish list but also attract new customers so what we did is we added a little Banner at the bottom to call out the 35 off 48 Hours uh in order to catch people's eyes did a different color same kind of font but that different color pops up really really nice um against it and in the steam back end it's great in the graphical asset section you can actually uh do an asset override so instead of having to replace every piece of CR you do an override where you upload your new key art you set the schedule for instance this was 48 hours we had it set for 48 hours and

then once it the sales over or whatever promotion is over then it automatically reverts back to the original key art so it's no not having to replace it and then replace it again it just automatically does it and if you want to keep at it you know you can you can do as many overrides as possible as far as I've seen I have not done more than a handful but it is a really good tool that will help save you time now I'm going to go into some do's and don'ts before we even go into our results because I think it's really important to understand what makes great QR what doesn't make good key art and you know what you can do to make sure you're producing really high quality art so as I've been mentioning you'll want to find a focal point uh ideally around the center uh with a logo with the main character for instance in this bluefire

example the the logo and the character Umbra uh they are together and your eyes kind of drawn there through the action of the rest of the characters but also that he's front and center uh I recommend investing in your cure whether you're hiring an artist to produce it for you or you're just doing the research you know research other key art that you like other banners that you think are good and that's going to help you form a direction you want to go and you doesn't have to be from video games either you could take it from movies you can take it from any artwork that you think is really cool and would fit within your game for blue fire we actually were inspired by Star Wars posters as a way to create this poster and ultimately We Came Upon This theme and then that research will help you with an artist too because if you hire someone it helps give them Direction it helps uh

do mock-ups and it'll make the process go a lot more smoother and a lot faster um I know people don't always have artists on staff and so they have to hire an artist such as us but it's really important that you do and that you don't skimp out because like I said it's really important to have good key art that will attract people's attention and it will pay you back like I said with us we saw our numbers double time and time again whenever we invested in good key art uh and as I showed you on the last slide update your key art in this instance we started giving out a free soundtrack to coincide with a sale and so we brought that into the banner uh it's just always good to keep the community knowing anytime you have DLC or any other update and then lastly think about Banner sizes because uh you're gonna have to create quite a bit of them and I'll touch on that in the next couple slides and then for the small capsule I always recommend

creating original art because it's not really good to take your main cure and scale it down and again I'm going to touch about on that a little bit more in the upcoming slides foreign so when you're looking to create a key art think about the horizontal and vertical Dimensions uh when we were updating the key art for Graffiti's upcoming game Nera we made this graph error to show okay this is what would be in the vertical and this would be in the horizontal images what you can this gives you an idea because okay I know I can move elements around with the store Pages some of them might actually have you do both vertical and horizontal Dimensions do you want to be able to move elements easily one it helps save your time and two uh then with your artist it helps keep the theme overall

so here you can see uh we did a horizontal position and we have open space on the uh for the vertical position all we have to do is just move around some elements such as the llama on the right the totem on the left and it can all fit in within that vertical because we kept that Center the same and that's what you want to do you want to keep that Center essentially the same and just be able to move around items because again not just with store pages your care is going to live in other areas uh for instance on Twitch it's always great to have an image there that's a vertical image so if you only create a horizontal image it's not going to work uh you're gonna have to try to crop it and it may not work out very well here's what it looked like the image looked like in the actual steam page so this is the horizontal image there um you know move the totem a little bit there to to work within the sizing on Steam but overall really good and then here's what it looked like with

a small capsule again another horizontal but still I had to move some elements around and then for twitch uh it was a vertical position and you can see that the elements are basically the same just some items moved we even took the Llama out of the vertical just because it didn't fit within it but it doesn't take away from the game now some don'ts so graffiti has not always been the best at creating key art uh whenever someone's starting out you're not gonna be Masters at it and it takes time and especially you got to find the right artist to produce great key art so big thing don't have illegible texts you know and and characters and graphical elements uh too small blurry especially with the small capsule it's gonna make your life um horrible because people aren't gonna click on it or see it you know don't use low res always make sure your art is high-res don't have too many visual elements um you know it's just hard to decipher I

like to keep small capsule elements between two and three for that reason and I like to be more on the minimal side as long as it tells a story when you start adding too many elements people's eyes start to wonder you never have a physical you know focal point that uh people will see and then don't limit your logo to one place uh that's a really really big one because when you're resizing for the different stores as I mentioned you're going to have vertical you're going to have horizontal it's gonna make your life a hell because you are going to then have to move every single graphical element in order to make sure that the banners look well and don't do that to yourself make it easy you don't have time for it especially if you want to update your your key art for sales or promotions after lunch you just want to make your life easy um and like I said it's just a mess this example here bite the bullet

uh this was one of our games and its piece of art was not good when we first created it one the logo text is really difficult to read uh I can't tell you how many times someone said I bite the bullet seen this because they thought it was The Game's name even though it's bite the bullet the logo is stuck in the one spot because you have so many graphical elements around it you if you move it just a little bit up a little bit left a little bit down you're going to be blocking one of the characters and then there's just too many characters in it so you your eye just kind of wanders all over it's not really good um luckily we did create some new art for launch that helped out now I keep talking about small capsules and it's because it's something I think is really important and I feel that people often don't think about and graffiti didn't think about so much in the past either these are four great examples of of cure that we've done and

I'll dive a little bit more into why it's great to have good small capsule here which of all your care I think is the most important because it's often what people will see in a store so I keep talking about creating original QR for the small capsule and that's because it's really hard to take a 16x9 here and reduce it to a small capsule a lot of times people do this but it doesn't work out because that TR is meant to be seen at a larger size when you shrink it a text becomes illegible you can't really see the elements and so people just kind of see colors when they're going through don't use only text for a small capsule because you're trying to give an impression of what your game is so when it's only text no one has any idea what your game is um unless you're some huge title and you can just say your name and people know what you are but chances are that's not your game

that's not our games um so you need to give a little bit elements so again clear and readable legible uh that's what the main key are small capsules too and then as I mentioned before limit the graphical elements uh I like to keep it to around two or three with a logo there's no real set rule it's just my personal preference and what I think has worked out well for us um and I think it would work out well with you too and you can take uh elements from your main key art in order to make a small capsule I'll show you how to do that so here we took an existing turn of boy commits tax evasion vertical key art we actually made a vertical and horizontal so we had two original ones not everyone's going to have that luxury but we did and I noticed that when looking at this there was an empty space next to turnipway because we were trying to come up with a new small capsule so I thought hey if we take that put the logo next to

it because turnip boy running with some money and you see the logo nice and easy uh him community tax evasion that tells you a story he's running away uh it's clear it's readable and then when we made this we saw a really good click through increase so that's one way you can make a small capsule from your existing art another way is just to move around elements as needed in order to fit for a good small capsule and then here's kind of what our small Capital the evolution of it was so on the top left you had our original one which had a great cast of characters there but when you see it in a small version in the steam page it's really hard to read the logo and some of the characters you're not seeing as well so because of that then on the upper right we just did the logo with the character but it doesn't really tell a story sure the name alone tells you a lot about

what the game is but you still need a little bit more and then on the bottom as I showed you that's what we ultimately came up with and I really like it I think it's a good representation and as I said uh it really did a great job of uh increasing our click throughs on Steam and I really believe because the game performed really well at launch being a top 10 steam game for about two and a half weeks part of that is because people saw that small capsule on the steam homepage in the new and trending section and just kept clicking on it because they kept thinking oh this is I really like this all right this is cool it's already a trending game and so it can help continue that momentum from launch and keep you going and going we didn't anticipate to be in that section for two and a half weeks but I do think the key art was at it was a good source of that now I know as I said not everyone's going to have an artist on staff and so when you are Outsourcing your key Art

here's some guidelines or some tips to help you so first determine your budget again don't skimp it's not gonna do good you're not gonna get a good result you will want to invest your money into producing key art and so with that once you know your budget you know who you can afford and then who do you find well ask your network that's what we did uh when we found our artist we just asked developers we knew we asked other Publishers we asked friends partners and it they gave us options and then from there we went with the people who we thought were really good and matched our aesthetic for our games obviously you can find someone who's a great artist and they do great key art but if it doesn't match what your game is and feel maybe it's not the best fit you can also search sites such as art station that's where we browsed our artists portfolios beforehand to see if it would be a good fit and then you can check social media there are people there too

and as I mentioned you want to start early because one it takes a while to find an artist because you don't know people's availability um you know when they might have other jobs coming up so you know you might be able to start it and then have to pause and then start again and it just takes time um with bluefire I showed you it took us two months to revise that QR because people's availabilities feedback it just takes time to do it and if you do it right it you're gonna spend quite a bit of time and then have a direction and an idea I talked about that before but it'll help the artist then come up with a couple of mock-ups and then from there you can give them feedback and start getting in the right direction of what you want your character to be but examples really help uh and then an idea of like okay what kind of story do I want to tell what do I want to convey when people see this and then down the line when you

finalize your key art make sure that you get the needed file sizes from them uh you can't get every single one because it's difficult you never know what certain stores might want down the line but for steam you have those guidelines you can see what you'll need but that's why you want to also obtain the source file because by doing that you can make any updates later on you know alterations resizing for different stores editing for marketing purposes you know I told you about the post launch um and also if you just want to Tinker around with it a little bit you know do trial and error and see what works and what's getting people to click and go to your page that source file is going to be helpful because you don't know what someone's availability is to do it again work on it again later and it just saves you time and energy so here I'm going to dive into our first case study which is blue fire it launched this year in January and it was a top 10 Steam and eShop game and I

really feel that the key art played a big factor in this uh and it just is really awesome here and I think based off of the numbers you'll see where it came from and what it is what it ended up being really the key art played a role so just to give some background about the game it initially was announced as a Nintendo Indie World title it was actually the first game shown during the event in March of 2020 so we started out with some great comedian consumer buzz but unfortunately part of that event we couldn't actually launch the steam version it was Nintendo only and so we had all this awesome uh coverage and consumer attention but no real place to send people nowhere to besides Discord and Twitter and that only increased so much uh ultimately a few months later we were

part of IGN summer of gaming events and that's where we launched the steam page and so we actually start off with a really good numbers uh to start our campaign um but ultimately the numbers decreased they slowed down and went pretty stagnant and I think part of that was because of the Cure when we were pushing organically on social media on Reddit it just wasn't getting people there and people weren't clicking on it in the store itself and so because of this I was like we need to update our key art because a game with this much media and consumer attention should not be having this much of an issue getting people to wish list and even just getting visitors to the page foreign so with the art uh on the top left you can see what the old main key art used to be and it's okay it's not amazing the problem is is that it's just not very clear readable it doesn't really

present what the game is about the characters seem blurry part of that is our problem because we wanted to to be mysterious but by doing so you don't actually know what's going on everything's kind of in silhouette and it just doesn't really tell you hey this is blue fire this is what the game is about you're fighting these monsters these characters so you know ultimately it needed changing and then the red for a game called blue fire that kind of confused some people too um and that's why on the bottom left we created this new key art which is a great depiction of blue fire you can see the main character there Umbra he's got his swords out and an action pose there's lots of action going on from the other enemies from the characters or just even reading a book there he's in some an action pose everything gets pushed to the center where Umbra is and the logo is so people know right away what the game is

and we did keep one character in the Middle top a bit blurry and mysterious because that's the main boss so we want to keep some sort of elements of mystery still in it and what you can do as long as you make everything else clear and easily defined once we did that man our numbers increased a ton and I'll go into those results in the next couple pages on the right side you can see the before and after of the small capsule now that first one on the top there just the logo with a blurry background that as I said text only does not work personally I wouldn't click on this because it doesn't tell me anything about the game and it's just not clear either even just with the logo it's still kind of blurry and uh I would just skip over it and so we came up with the the one on the bottom right as our small capsule we took the Umbra pose so because you have that action and then we made it more readable more legible uh

we've moved the logo a bit so we cut it into two instead of it being just straight one and that fits where you can then add a you know one graphical element with the Umbra there and then have the bluefire logo and then you can see there's a bit of a background too and all that really works well especially when you're seeing it at a smaller size because in a store Page this would probably be half the size a third of the size so you really want to make sure things are clear and legible now I want to go into some numbers and then this is comparing a random week during before and after we did the key art change so the chart on the left that's before the Cure change and the chart on the right is after the Cure change and I chose two weeks that didn't have any marketing beats that didn't have anything else going on there were no other changes because I wanted to compare when it's organic searches so people what they see through Steam and social media Reddit

those areas and the numbers from it so you can see on the left we had a pretty good click-through rate uh from our Impressions but it wasn't really translating into wishlist per day so we were getting nine per day which for a game that had a lot of consumer buzz and media attention it didn't really make sense and so I again I think people just weren't clicking on it even if they were seeing in the store they weren't clicking on it or they just were seeing the the then me main key or after clip clicking on a capsule cart and then just being like yeah this game's not for me on the right you can see the impressions are virtually the same but our click-through rate doubles and we had an awesome 60 um and our wishes per day increased to 25 so almost three times as many afterwards are visitors more than doubled too and that's to me showing people were seeing this image this key art and they were clicking on it at a higher rate especially in the store to

see what bluefire was like and then ultimately they were converting into visitors and wishlists and at lunch then into sales so it you know it's really important to have that good cure because as you can see here you're we're doubling our numbers and that's what you want you want those numbers especially your wishlist numbers to increase and here's a chart that shows our visitors from when we launched the steam page until the end of November as you can see in the very beginning that's when we had the IGN event uh and we started off pretty good but then things stagnate for a bit except for a couple little marking beats here and there but then we change the art right around early October just prior to the steam Autumn festival and the mix October event and you can see our visitor numbers just increase a ton and then also the fact that we had way more

visits during those marketing beats and afterwards and we had previously had with any of our marketing beats even our beat around November 11th that had basically the same amount of visitors as our IGN event and that was featured on IGN's homepage and other and their YouTube whereas this marketing being around November 11th was a lot minor but had much more impact because of our cure and even our average days where we had nothing going on was still double and higher than the regular days from before so you can definitely see that that big boost and then these numbers actually then going into launch increase immensely but I just wanted to take that time frame from when uh we had the original key art and then when we updated the key art and again I truly believe that the revising our care played a big role in getting these numbers higher so here are some of our results uh

overall we doubled our steam marketing numbers 150 percent for our daily wish list 120 for steam click-through rate um visitors went up 145 percent not that much of a daily impression increase only 11.6 but again because all the other numbers are higher it shows me that the here really did convert people into wanting to check out the game and going to the page because if the impressions are about the same but everything else is going the only thing that's changed is the key art that's what it is and it isn't just uh your store here where we saw a difference so here we use the QR for the thumbnail on the left for a trailer and on the left we use the generic thumbnail uh at launch time we were fortunate enough to have Nintendo put up two trailers for the game on

their YouTube channel and then you can see here that the trailer on the right that uses our key art it had almost half a million views and it has three times as many views as a trailer with a generic thumbnail on the left and it also has about three times as many likes so you can really tell that it's not just in the store when you're using it for your thumbnail or or even social media you can also increase your numbers quite a bit and that's the important thing is getting those marketing numbers up so you can then convert people into wishlist and sales because ultimately you know you're not going to have 100 conversion your conversion rates are going to be probably pretty low into actually getting into sales but anything you can do to get those initial numbers up then you have more people to to then convert into sales so here's another case study and this time it's for Adventures of Chris uh

it's a game that we launched last year and it really played a difference when we updated our key art here I'm personally a big fan of it and I think what the result is is night and day compared to the original cure so here's the before and after uh on the top you see top left is the original main key art and then on top right is the original uh small capsule uh we'll start with the original here on the left here so it had a kind of cartoonish 90s Vibe they didn't have an artist who could do something really high quality and so they went and fed into what the game's aesthetic was but here it has a great it has action so you're seeing bit you're seeing some characters um but your eye doesn't really have a focal point so you see the logo on the left kind of that's where my eye goes first and I kind of miss everything else the main character there in the middle

he's punching an enemy but they kind of blend in together and actually the enemy is a bit bigger and that's not what you really want um and it just needs to be more um modernized and then with the small capsule on the right again it's just text on a map doesn't tell you anything about a game at smaller size it's pretty unreadable and so when we went about modernizing it with the key art we produced down below uh we really laid into the action elements of the game bringing in different enemies so the left you see there's there are four enemies you have some humor still in there with the balloons you have some cookies there in the middle focal point is the main character and the logo so you see that right away especially the main character is a focus here all the enemies are looking at him everything feels with multiple Dimensions so you feel like the character on the bottom right they're a

bit forward everyone else is you know different depths and it plays really well and then we took that middle image of him and then uh put that with the logo to create the small caps on the bottom right at a small size it's really legible readable again a couple graphical elements and a logo really clean really nice and that's what I I like about what we did here so this time instead of comparing a standard week I'm gonna compare the three months prior to the change to the three months after the change so here you can see that our wish list per day on the chart on the left this is prior to the carrot change uh it was really low two a day that's not anything to write about and and say hey look at this awesome work we're doing instead um afterwards you can see our numbers increased dramatically now our click-through rate was lower but I think

that's because we had way more Impressions because that here was showing up in more areas thanks to its revision uh people were seeing a bit more we maybe just in the upcoming title section and our visitor numbers doubled there you can see uh and then our wish list per day increased tenfold compared to before and ultimately you know that's what you want you want those higher numbers and you want those visitor numbers to increase too you know here almost three times the visitor number a daily visitor numbers than before and I truly believe the Cure played a big factor in that uh and then our results so 900 increase in Daily wish list 141 in Daily visitors and 220 increase in Impressions so our Impressions increased a ton even though and so I think that's what kind of decreased our click-through rate but not just that we were also converting more people going to the page through our

trailers our um organic efforts on Reddit on social media Discord because we have this better key art that would attract people's eyes because before people just were not interested in that 90s aesthetic we did some market research and it just wasn't fitting so when we modernized it we were getting more and more visitors to the page which was awesome and that's where I think we see those higher impression numbers and because when someone goes directly to your page from Twitter it doesn't get counted as a click through we were seeing way many Impressions and I think that's why that's a little bit skewed okay so I want to thank everyone for joining me during this talk today um you know I hope you learned a lot about great key art and I hope that seeing our numbers where we increased our doubled our numbers tripled our numbers even tenfold as with the last case study that you got a lot out of this case and you know if you want to reach out to me you can hit me up at

contact graffitigames.com I'm also going to be doing a live q a session after this so feel free to join that and I can answer here questions try and help with finding an artist um anything you know talk about the numbers we saw and just other tips and tricks that you can do again thank you for joining me and I hope you have a great rest of your GDC foreign