Discord
Chat and voice platform that grew out of gaming communities. It publishes safety transparency reports, including a report on child protection under Brazil's ECA Digital law.
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How to Run a Mailing List Without Mailchimp’s High Fees
This analysis evaluates the viability of using Revue as a cost-effective alternative to Mailchimp for independent game developers managing mailing lists.
- Email lists significantly outperform social media for game marketing, yielding click-through rates of 20–34.2% compared to just 0.5–3% on Twitter.
- Revue offers a free alternative to paid services like Mailchimp, which costs at least $120 per year for a list of 2,000 subscribers.
- While Revue is effective for basic newsletters, it lacks advanced features such as automated welcome emails and custom fields required for distributing beta keys.
What Are Your Game's Pre-release 'Story Beats'?
Effective game marketing requires a strategic balance between consistent community engagement and high-impact promotional milestones, referred to as story beats.
- Focus marketing efforts on three to four high-impact 'story beats' to drive wishlist growth and broad press coverage, rather than relying solely on ongoing community nurture activities.
- Launch the initial announcement 6 to 24 months before release, ensuring it includes a functional Steam page and a trailer featuring actual gameplay.
- Schedule a public demo or Steam Festival appearance 3 to 9 months before launch to gather player feedback and expand the game's audience reach.
How to Use Twitter to Market Your Game
Twitter serves as a specialized networking environment for the video game industry rather than a direct sales channel for consumers.
- Twitter is ineffective for direct-to-consumer sales, as link click-through rates typically range from only 0.25% to 3%, even when posts go viral.
- Twitter should be treated as a B2B networking platform—a 24/7 virtual game developer conference—rather than a direct marketing channel for average players.
- The primary goal of Twitter marketing is to attract 'aggregators'—publishers, journalists, streamers, and platform holders—who then amplify your game to the broader public.
The Diary of a Modern PR Campaign: How to Plan Your Game's Promotion
Successful game promotion requires a transition from passive awareness to a structured sales funnel that guides potential players from initial interest to long-term advocacy.
- Successful promotion requires transitioning from passive awareness to a structured sales funnel that guides players from initial interest to long-term advocacy.
- Developers must build direct communication channels, such as newsletters and Discord servers, to maintain audience engagement throughout the pre-launch phase rather than relying on unpredictable store features.
- The promotional lifecycle follows a rigorous five-phase process, starting with peer-tested pitches and high-quality asset creation, and concluding with strategic post-launch support.
Data Dive: Anatomy of a Steam Game Launch
The launch of the winemaking simulator Hundred Days serves as a primary case study for analyzing the relationship between pre-release marketing and initial sales performance on Steam.
- Steam discovery algorithms are highly sensitive to user sentiment, as evidenced by a drop from 2.5 million to 300,000 page views when the game's rating shifted from Mostly Positive to Mixed.
- A wishlist-to-sales conversion rate of 16% during the first week of launch aligns with current industry medians for indie titles.
- The winemaking simulator Hundred Days achieved 60,000 wishlists by launch, with the final 10,000 acquired in just six days after reaching the Popular Upcoming chart.
Gaming Deals Activity Report Q1-Q3’2021
Video game dealmaking in the first three quarters of 2021 reached record levels despite signs of market turbulence.
- The video game industry saw $57.7 billion in closed deal value across 667 transactions in Q1–Q3 2021, representing a 2.5x increase in value and 46% increase in deal volume compared to 2020.
- Mergers and acquisitions were the primary growth driver, contributing $27.9 billion (48% of total value), headlined by Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of ZeniMax Media and ByteDance’s $4 billion purchase of Moonton.
- Public offerings generated $21.2 billion, led by Krafton’s $3.75 billion IPO, though the market experienced a cooling trend and increased share price volatility during the third quarter.
Gaming Spotlight 2021 Review
Mobile gaming is now the main engine of growth in digital games consumption, and cross-platform play is reshaping how the market competes.
- Mobile gaming is the dominant market force, with 2021 spending projected to be 3.1 times higher than that of home consoles.
- Global game downloads reached over 1 billion per week in Q1 2021, a 30% increase over pre-pandemic levels, while weekly spending grew 40% to $1.7 billion.
- Cross-platform functionality is a critical success factor, as evidenced by the performance of titles like Roblox and Genshin Impact that prioritize cross-play and cross-save features.
Gaming Spotlight 2021: The Year in Review
Mobile gaming is now the primary engine of growth in digital games, and cross-platform play is reshaping the wider market.
- Mobile gaming is the dominant market force, with 2021 spending projected to reach 2.9 times that of PC/Mac and 3.1 times that of home consoles.
- Pandemic-driven engagement peaked in Q1 2021 with over 1 billion weekly game downloads, a 30% increase over pre-pandemic levels, and weekly consumer spending rising 40% to $1.7 billion.
- Cross-platform play and real-time social features are now essential for engagement, as evidenced by the success of titles like Roblox and Genshin Impact.
5 Things You Need to Do Before the End of the Steam Winter Sale
The primary objective of this guidance is to provide independent game developers with actionable marketing strategies to maximize sales and community engagement during the Steam Winter Sale.
- Steam does not send cart abandonment reminders to users, so developers must proactively notify fans that the sale is ending to convert shoppers who have added games to their carts.
- The period following Christmas is a high-conversion opportunity because users have received Steam gift cards and are actively looking for games to purchase.
- Developers should send a final 'last chance' reminder exactly 24 hours before a sale concludes to leverage the fear of missing out and drive final conversions.
Signing Off on Another Year in Video Games: 2020
This analysis provides a retrospective on the video game industry in 2020, a year characterized by significant market growth and shifting business models amid global volatility.
- The video game industry experienced significant growth in 2020, driven by pandemic-accelerated trends including the rise of user-generated content and the emergence of the metaverse.
- Major console manufacturers pursued divergent strategies: Nintendo prioritized hardware sales, Sony focused on exclusive content, and Microsoft shifted toward a service-oriented business model.
- Corporate consolidation and investment surged in 2020, highlighted by Discord reaching a $7 billion valuation and Tencent acquiring Leyou for $1.5 billion.
Switch Cracks Down (Further) on Extreme Discounting
Nintendo has implemented stricter policies on the Switch eShop to curb the prevalence of extreme discounting strategies used to manipulate platform sales charts.
- Nintendo has implemented a $1.99 minimum price floor for games on the US eShop to prevent developers from using extreme discounting to manipulate sales charts.
- Promotional strategies involving 100% discounts on the Switch eShop no longer qualify titles for placement on top-selling charts.
- The current Switch ranking system prioritizes sales volume over revenue, incentivizing developers to use low-cost tactics to artificially inflate visibility.
Case Study: Making Core Defense a Solo Dev Success
Solo developer Mario Kaiser shares a postmortem of Core Defense, a tower defense game with light deckbuilding elements released on Steam in mid-2020, as a guest post in the GameDiscoverCo newsletter.
- A standalone pre-launch demo on Steam was the most effective marketing tool, generating approximately 3,000 wishlists prior to the full release.
- Community-driven development via an extended beta on itch.io and Discord allowed for iterative product refinement, which proved more impactful than traditional marketing.
- Core Defense achieved $20,186 in gross revenue during its first week of release in 2020, growing to 2.5 times that amount within the first year.