This is the second article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games that serves as a companion compendium for my Game Launch Readiness Scorecard. While each individual piece focuses on themes and provides tips that stand on their own, they also build on and reinforce each other, so I recommend reading them in order. To catch up, start here:

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Last week I argued that most game launches fail before the first trailer drops, and that the gap between the top 10% and the other 90% isn’t quality or luck, but rather:

1. When marketing started, and

2. Whether anyone was in charge of it

This week, we’ll dive into the diagnostic itself. The Game Launch Readiness Scorecard asks 16 questions, across six categories. Now, when you think about it, 16 questions is really not that much, so every one of them has to earn its place. In that spirit, here’s what the scorecard actually measures, why each category is weighted the way it is, and where I expect people to disagree with me.

I’m putting all my assumptions on the table here. And if you think I’m wrong, the scorecard probably still works for you… because knowing where we disagree still tells you (and me) something about your own priorities, which can itself be highly useful.

Anyway, let’s dive in!

The Six Categories, in Weight Order

Marketing Timing: 25%

This is the heaviest category, and the one that (so far) has generated the most pushback. It consists of three questions:

• What stage is the game in,

• When did marketing start, and

• Whether a written go-to-market (GTM) plan exists

The counterintuitive part (which generates the pushback) is that earlier development stages score higher. A studio in concepting scores better on timing than a studio in beta. But why? I do understand it feels backwards… until you understand what this category actually measures: not how close you are to launch, but how much of your marketing runway is still available to you.

A studio in pre-production with no marketing has ~18 months of runway, whereas a studio in beta with no marketing has maybe 12 weeks. They’re both starting from the same point on execution (namely, the starting line), but have radically different sets of options available to them.

That’s why I weighted Timing at 25%. It’s the only category where the scoring rewards unrealized potential. Every other category measures what you’ve already built, whereas this one measures how much room you have left to build it.

Community: 20%

This one also consists of three questions:

• Discord presence and size,

• Email list size, and

• Number of active social platforms

Community is the second-heaviest weight, because trust compounds and you can’t manufacture it on a timeline. A Discord you started today will not be the community that carries your launch, but it could be in eight months. Community converts powerfully and (critically) generates earned media you can’t buy, but it runs on trust that accrues very slowly.

I designed these questions to be deliberately blunt. They’re asking about infrastructure, not sentiment. Do you have the channels? Are people in them? Great! That’s the floor. The scorecard doesn’t try to measure community quality, because you can’t capture that in a self-assessment. But you can capture infrastructure, and infrastructure without quality is still better than no infrastructure at all.

The weight reflects a simple observation that the data consistently bears out: the studios that land in the top revenue tier almost always had a functioning community before launch.

Steam Page & Store Presence: 15%

Again, three questions here:

• Whether the page is live and for how long,

• Whether tags and capsule art are optimized, and

• What trailer assets exist

Your Steam page is the highest-traffic marketing asset you own. Every ad click, creator referral, and organic browse lands there. But I weighted it at 15%, not 25%, because the Steam page is a hygiene factor. Having a great one doesn’t guarantee traction, while having a bad one guarantees you lose the traction you already have.

The distinction determines how you should prioritize. If your Steam page is weak, fixing it has the highest immediate ROI of anything you could do; but if your Steam page is already strong, pouring more effort into it has diminishing returns. The 15% weight reflects that asymmetry: high downside when neglected, moderate upside when optimized.

The scorecard also accounts for studios not on Steam. If you select “N/A — not launching on Steam,” the questions adapt to your primary platform. So don’t worry, you won’t get penalized for making a deliberate and strategic platform choice!

Wishlist Momentum: 15%

This category works a little differently. Instead of fixed-answer questions, it takes your actual wishlist count and scores it against a visibility threshold. It also feeds the Wishlist Revenue Projector, which I’ll break down in detail later in this series.

Wishlists are the closest thing to a leading indicator that indie and AA studios have. They’re highly imperfect — conversion rates vary by an order of magnitude depending on genre, price, and marketing execution. But they’re the best proxy we currently have for whether the market is signaling that people might want this game.

The weight is 15% because wishlists are ultimately a lagging indicator of marketing execution, not a cause of success. A high wishlist count reflects that other things (timing, community, visibility) are working, while a low one signals that something upstream is broken. Scoring wishlists too heavily would let a studio enjoying a viral moment mask structural weaknesses in their marketing system. So at 15%, it contributes meaningfully without dominating.

Content & PR Readiness: 15%

Back to three questions again:

• Press kit completeness,

• Content creator outreach status, and

• Participation in showcase events like Steam Next Fest.

This category measures the discovery layer: the infrastructure that connects your game to the people who’ll talk about it. Press kits, creator relationships, and event participation are all lead-time activities; none of them work if you start three weeks before launch, but all of them compound if you start six months out.

This one carries equal weight with Steam Page and Wishlists, because these three categories share a trait: they’re all dependent on execution. They measure what you’ve done, not what you could do. The 15% weight means they matter, but no single one of them can carry a weak score in Timing or Community.

Marketing Leadership: 10%

This one’s just one question:

• Who is primarily responsible for marketing at your studio?

This is another one that people challenge me on. “Wait, only 10% for leadership?! Isn’t that, like, THE most important thing???”

Yes, it is… and that’s exactly why I weighted it at 10%!

My logic: leadership is a prerequisite, not a standalone contributor. Without marketing leadership, the other five categories don’t get executed — no one owns timing, no one builds community, no one optimizes the store page, and no one does creator outreach (or if they do any of these things, they do them inconsistently). But leadership by itself doesn’t produce a score. After all, having a CMO doesn’t magically give you wishlists, nor does simply having a marketing lead mean your Discord gets built.

If I weighted Leadership at 25%, a studio could score well by hiring a marketing person and doing literally nothing else. That, of course, would be a highly misleading result. So at 10%, the scorecard says: leadership matters enormously, but it matters because of what it enables, not what it is. The weight rewards having someone in the seat, without letting it substitute for the work the person in the seat is supposed to do.

There’s also a practical reason: this is a self-assessment, and self-assessments have an intrinsic problem with self-serving bias. In this case, studios routinely over-rate their marketing leadership; the founder who “handles marketing when they can” truly believes they’re doing it. A lower weight, therefore, limits the damage of an overly generous self-assessment.

What the Weights Add Up To

Here are the categories, their weights, and what they reward:

• Marketing Timing (25%): Runway and planning

• Community (20%): Trust infrastructure

• Steam/Store Page (15%): Conversion readiness

• Wishlist Momentum (15%): Market signal

• Content & PR (15%): Discovery infrastructure

• Marketing Leadership (10%): Structural accountability

Between all the categories, the assessment covers structural factors (how the marketing is organized, when it started, and who’s accountable) as well as executional factors (what the studio has shipped).

Leadership is weighted lightest for the reasons I laid out above: it’s a prerequisite, not a point-scorer. But that doesn’t make it less structurally important; if anything, it makes it more so. The two heaviest categories, Timing and Community, only produce results when someone is in charge of them. Leadership is, therefore, the low-weight category that silently determines whether the high-weight categories function at all.

That’s the scorecard’s thesis, in one sentence: structure determines execution. A studio with good timing, a strong community, and clear leadership will eventually produce a good Steam page, healthy wishlists, and effective creator outreach. But a studio without those structural foundations will struggle to execute… no matter how talented the team is.

Where I Expect Disagreement

Two places:

First, Wishlist Momentum at 15%. Some people think wishlists should be the heaviest category, because they’re the most directly tied to revenue. That’s reasonable, but I think it confuses the metric with the cause. Wishlists measure demand, they don’t create it. Weighting them too heavily would only encourage studios to optimize for wishlist count (well, more than they do already!) rather than for the upstream activities that generate real interest.

Second, Marketing Leadership at 10%. Studio founders especially tend to think this should be higher, usually because they want credit for being the person who does it all. But the Scorecard’s job isn’t to validate how hard you’re working, it’s to diagnose whether your marketing system is built to produce results. If you’re the sole marketing leader and the creative director and the project manager, the scorecard isn’t going to reward that, because that’s not a setup that scales to a successful launch.

Try It Yourself!

The whole point of showing you my methodology is so you can take the scorecard with full context. You know how it’s weighted, you know why, and you know how my opinions inform it. Now, you can interpret your results with that framing instead of treating the score as some kind of verdict from an oracle.

Four minutes, 16 questions, always and absolutely free:

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

Next week: we go deep on Marketing Timing: the heaviest category and the one with the most counterintuitive scoring. We’ll also unpack the 411-day problem, and why more time on Steam doesn’t necessarily mean more sales (at least, not by itself!).

Press Start,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

About this series. Case Study № 01 in an ongoing collaboration between Spawn Point Marketing (Jay Rooney) and Game Studio Unlocked (Sebastian Cardoso), examining notable indie and AA games through twin lenses of marketing strategy and studio operations. Co-published on both Substacks.

For this installment, we examine how a two-person team with no publisher, no plan, and a $600-a-month burn rate built one of the decade's most successful indie platformers… and what it actually teaches us about how games find their audiences.

The Question (Sebastian)

Pizza Tower is one of the most successful indie platformers of the last decade. Two people, no publisher, no marketing budget, built in public over five years, and all funded via Patreon. It sold 100,000 copies in its first month, generated an estimated $50+ million in gross revenue, and currently sits at a mind-blowing 98% positive on Steam with 70,000 reviews, ahead of seminal games like Celeste and Super Meat Boy.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the developers simply got lucky. You know: great game, right place, right time, passionate community. Lightning in a bottle, if you will. And it’s not like none of those things are true. But Jay and I kept coming back to the same question from our respective corners: what exactly happened here? How did this incredible Cinderella story come to pass? We kept noticing product development and marketing patterns that typically require formal systems and significant budgets, happening somewhat organically in a two-person team with a $600-a-month burn rate and no plan.

So we dug into it together. Jay through the marketing lens, Seb through the product development one.

The Stakes (Jay)

“Just make a great game” is not a strategy. Not in a market where over 20,000 games launch on Steam each year. It’s a coping mechanism to avoid having to seriously think about how players actually find your game. And every time Pizza Tower gets cited as proof that marketing doesn’t matter, that you can just put your head down and build something good and the audience will materialize, another indie dev gets permission to skip the work that actually moves the needle… with potentially catastrophic consequences when their game launches, conversions are flat, and the team has to disband.

Because the truth is, Pizza Tower didn’t skip that work. Developers McPig and Sertif did all of it! They just never called it “marketing.” And if you walk back through the five years before launch, you find a story not about luck, but about marketing so deeply embedded in the development process that it became invisible; even, by all appearances, to the people doing it.

That’s what we want to unpack here. Not because we want to take anything away from what the team accomplished, but because the principles are readily applicable and replicable. Not the exact path they took, but the underlying principles. And once you can see what was actually happening, you can stop hoping for lightning to strike and start building a lightning rod to draw the charge.

Phase 1: Origin & Concept

2018 · PRE-PATREON · SOLO

SEBASTIAN — PRODUCTION

McPig, the lead developer at Tour de Pizza, started with a horror RPG. That apparently went nowhere, so he pivoted to something closer to a Wario Land–inspired puzzle platformer. That wasn’t quite right either. The game he eventually shipped was neither of those things, and the journey from one to the other is probably the most educational part of the story.

At its core, game development is an act of creative and artistic discovery. The best games very rarely emerge from a fully formed vision document at the concept-discovery stage. They get found throughout the journey. Teams that stay intimate with their genre, honest about what’s working and what’s not, and flexible and humble enough to listen to what players have to say about the work-in-progress tend to end up somewhere compelling. McPig’s arc from horror RPG to one of the decade’s most critically praised platformers is a case study in what healthy creative iteration actually looks like when someone cares deeply about their craft and is willing to iterate in pursuit of a great experience.

The technical choices were pretty clever, too. GameMaker and Aseprite: lightweight, accessible tools, a good fit for the actual size and capability of the team. Not a bespoke engine, not Unreal Engine 4 for a 2D platformer, not infrastructure built for a studio ten times the size. Choosing tools that fit your capacity is a production decision whether or not it’s made consciously, and in this case, it paid off in rapid iteration in search of the fun.

JAY — MARKETING

The first marketing decision McPig made was one he probably didn’t even think of as marketing: he chose to build a Wario Land spiritual successor.

Wario Land had been a dormant franchise since 2008’s Wario Land: Shake It! dropped on the Nintendo Wii. This meant an audience of fans had a specific itch they’d been waiting fifteen years for someone (anyone!) to scratch, and since Nintendo had no apparent interest in scratching it for them, whoever stepped up with a backscratcher would become very well-positioned indeed to reap all that pent-up anticipation.

By picking that specific genre and that specific lineage, McPig made not only a creative decision, but a positioning decision as well. He identified an underserved audience with built-in demand and pointed his game directly at them.

Marketers have a name for this. We call it “fishing where the fish are.” (Wait… was that originally a marketing term? No matter, we still say it, so I’m going to claim it. My analysis, my rules.) McPig probably called it “making a game I’d want to play,” but functionally speaking, it’s the same thing.

McPig’s second decision was about platform strategy, which is (surprise!) also marketing. He started posting about the game on Tumblr, but then moved to Twitter because, in his own words, that made it easier to get noticed in the indie scene. So he made a deliberate choice about where to invest his attention, based on where his target audience was most likely to find him. I could see a AAA CMO take an entire week just to write a memo about something like this, but McPig figured it out in an afternoon and then just did it.

The third decision McPig made was the most pivotal one, as it gave the other two legs: in 2018, before the Patreon launch, before Sertif joined, and before any “marketing” infrastructure was in place, McPig released two free public demos. In marketing speak, this is a textbook instance of both product sampling and demand generation. In English: you give people something tangible and let them experience the thing instead of just hearing about it, letting the product’s quality speak for itself. It’s among the riskiest possible marketing moves, because the product has to actually be good… but if it is, no amount of marketing copy (no matter how polished) could ever generate the same amount of trust. Two strangers playing your demo and telling their friends is worth more than every paid impression you could ever buy.

By the end of 2018, McPig had a positioning angle, a platform strategy, and a sampling program. Together, these formed the three load-bearing components of Pizza Tower‘s marketing system. None of this was on a roadmap, nor was he tracking any of it against KPIs. But he was implementing all of it, and most importantly, it was all working.

Phase 2: Community & Early Momentum

2018–2019 · PATREON LAUNCH · SAGE

SEBASTIAN — PRODUCTION

At SAGE 2019, something happened that I believe is fundamental to how good games get made: the team received feedback that contradicted what they thought they were building, and they changed direction accordingly. Before that event, the game was slow(er) and puzzle-heavy. Nothing was getting cut, because there wasn’t yet a clear enough creative filter to decide what to double down on and what to throw out. Players at SAGE provided that clarity. They showed McPig (and later Sertif, the game’s programmer) that the game wanted to be about speed, not puzzles. And to their credit: the team listened. They recognized that this was an important insight, rebuilt everything around it, and anything that didn’t serve speed eventually got chucked out.

While that sounds simple, the ability to listen to your audience doesn’t grow on trees. A remarkable number of developers receive player feedback and let it bounce right off them. The game is too precious to revisit, or the delta between what the feedback says and what was intended feels too wide to cross. McPig and Sertif crossed it. That willingness to listen to what the audience was actually saying, and then act on it, is just plain old good product management. It’s the kind of hypothesis-testing and course-correction that formal product processes are specifically designed to enforce. I believe Tour de Pizza was doing it instinctively.

What they built around that feedback, from 2018 onward, was a continuous iteration loop that would behoove most established studios to seek to replicate. The Patreon launched in late 2018: monthly builds going out to roughly 500 paying backers, which meant the team had to ship something functional every single month. No going dark for a year, no extended radio silence while you figure things out in private. And what came back from those builds, combined with roughly 30 playtesters of varying skill levels (that last part being a remarkably sophisticated nuance that many studios don’t really act on deliberately) and a Discord community that grew throughout development, was a constant stream of data about what was working and what wasn’t. Backers flagging broken mechanics, playtesters revealing how the game felt at different skill levels, Discord surfacing consensus around specific systems.

While perhaps informal at Tour de Pizza, this was fundamentally an inspect-and-adapt model of agility: generate hypotheses about what the game or features should be, put it in front of real players, observe what happens, adjust. The iteration started endogenously (McPig working through the game largely alone, following his instincts) and matured into something community-driven as the audience grew. More eyes, more feedback, faster course-correction. A playtesting infrastructure, built from a Discord server and five-dollar-a-month Patreon tiers, at near-zero cost. It’s hard not to be impressed.

JAY — MARKETING

That same Patreon Sebastian just walked you through? It wasn’t just a funding mechanism or a feedback loop. It was also the most important marketing decision McPig made in the entire timeline (yes, even more important than the decision to pivot to a Wario Land spiritual successor), and yet almost nobody talks about it that way. Until now.

When McPig opened that Patreon in December 2018 with a compellingly simple value proposition ($5 a month for access to in-development builds) he built a paid beta community of 500 people who would spend the next four years playing the game from top to bottom and left to right, breaking it every way they could, becoming fluent in its mechanics, theorizing about its lore, and most importantly, becoming true Pizza Tower fanatics. They formed the kind of deep attachment every developer dreams of inspiring from their players, and which you cannot manufacture nor purchase. By launch day in January 2023, these players were Pizza Tower experts. They were ready to write glowing reviews on day one and spread the gospel of Pizza Tower to anyone in their orbit who asked what they were playing.

If you’re keeping score: that’s 500 people doing the work of a launch PR firm, for four years, for free, all because they were already inside the tent.

Then, in September 2019, SAGE 2019 became as much of an inflection point for marketing as it did for development.

SAGE (which is short for the Sonic Amateur Games Expo, by the way) is an annual fan event run by Sonic Fan Games HQ. It’s a labor of love, made by and for people who love retro 2D platformers in the Sonic (and Wario) lineage. McPig submitted a Pizza Tower demo. Within days, Vinesauce Vinny, a Twitch streamer with over half a million followers, picked it up. He played the SAGE demo on stream, and then he kept playing every subsequent build for the next four years, for exactly the kind of audience who’d want to play a Wario Land spiritual successor.

This was a pivotal moment for Pizza Tower; the game’s entire trajectory changed from here on out. But I want to be very careful about how I frame this, because it’s easy to look at this moment, conclude that Vinny “discovered” Pizza Tower, and that ergo, the rest is history. That’s not what actually happened. The truth is that McPig positioned Pizza Tower for this discovery by submitting it to a venue specifically built for the audience most likely to fall in love with his game. Vinny didn’t find Pizza Tower in the wild, he found it at an event specifically designed to surface exactly this type of game to exactly this kind of audience.

That’s the principle I want you, dear reader, to take away: SAGE, in this gaming love story, played the role of matchmaker. McPig just had to show up with a game worth matching to SAGE’s audience.

When Sertif was later asked what drove the fandom, he gave a simple answer: the demos, the Patreon builds, and livestreamers like Vinesauce. Three channels, all set up via intuitive decisions, that in any formal marketing org would be lines on a strategy doc with quarterly KPIs attached. Here, there was no strategy doc, no KPIs, and no marketing budget. But it worked anyway.

Phase 3: Building

2020–2022 · SERTIF JOINS · YEARLY BUILDS · TWITCH

SEBASTIAN — PRODUCTION

When Sertif joined in 2020 and the build cadence shifted from monthly to yearly, the accountability structure evolved but didn’t disappear. McPig was streaming development on Twitch, the Discord stayed active, and the community could see progress. Less formal pressure than monthly deliverables, but the underlying dynamic was still there.

The make-and-scrap cycle that defined the next two years looks, from the outside, like an undisciplined team without a plan. But what it actually looks like to me, now that I’m paying attention, is lean development in practice: eliminating waste by discarding anything that didn’t serve the core philosophy; amplifying learning by continuously adjusting in response to what the game and the community were telling them; delivering as fast as possible by putting builds in front of players or playing on Twitch. Those are some of the underlying principles of lean development, just happening organically. What’s different is that the agile and lean frameworks were not written down or introduced deliberately; at least, that’s my assumption. They lived in two people’s shared instincts rather than a process document. Hard to scale, but evidently effective when the team is small enough and aligned enough. Be still my heart.

Not every team should draw the same lesson from this. The conditions that made it all work in this case are pretty contextual and unique. Two people means near-zero coordination overhead. A burn rate of roughly six hundred dollars a month means almost no financial pressure to ship before the game is ready. Both of them were fast, so iteration was cheap. If you remove any of those conditions at a different studio, the model may no longer hold. Larger teams looking to draw lessons here would do well to be mindful about what they’re actually trying to replicate.

I also want to highlight two product decisions from this period that show what listening to players looks like when it’s translated into game direction. First, they removed the health system entirely: no lives, no death, difficulty expressed through score and rank instead. What that actually did is widen the audience without diluting the game, which is a much harder thing to pull off than it sounds, and frankly rarer than you’d think. Second, the P-rank structure (at the end of each level, a timer kicks off and you have to race back to the start while a giant pizza chases you; your final score and rank depend on how fast you move, how many enemies you hit, and so on) gave the game forty to fifty hours of replay value without requiring forty to fifty hours of content. Pizza Tower is a six-hour game that people sink days into. VCs terrified of the infamous “content treadmill” would rejoice. Both decisions came from the same underlying instinct: trust the player, reward mastery, build depth rather than volume. That kind of game direction is hard to teach.

JAY — MARKETING

When Sertif joined the team in early 2020 and the build cadence shifted from monthly to yearly, McPig started streaming his work on Twitch.

If you’re reading this through a conventional marketing lens, that yearly build cadence should have ended in disaster. Conventional wisdom states that you need to maintain regular touchpoints with your audience, or else attention drifts elsewhere. An entire year between builds is, in today’s attention economy, practically an eternity.

But the opposite actually happened. As builds got rarer, anticipation for them grew higher. Each new build became an event. Folks who’d been on the Patreon for years would clear their calendars whenever a new build dropped, and Discord servers spiked with new activity. The wait itself became part of the relationship.

This is how scarcity is supposed to work. As an artificial constraint, it can backfire hard. But it’s a different story when scarcity is just a natural consequence of true craftsmanship taking the time it needs. McPig and Sertif weren’t slow-rolling the builds to manufacture hype; they were taking the time they needed to make the game right, and the players could tell (as they always do). The hype wasn’t deliberate, it was a neat little side effect. But it was real, and it compounded over time.

Meanwhile, McPig’s Twitch streams turned into what was essentially a content marketing program; indeed, it was functionally indistinguishable from a deliberately designed one. He was making the game on camera, talking about decisions, and reacting to feedback in real time, generating a continuous stream of free, authentic content that deepened the existing community’s investment while giving new players an organic on-ramp into the project. Every stream functioned as an ad for the game… but it didn’t feel like an ad, because it wasn’t really one. It was just the work McPig was already doing, only made visible.

And we haven’t even touched on the user-generated content yet.

In June 2019, months before Sertif even joined, a Team Fortress 2 fan animator made a short film called Pizza Pootis, riffing on Pizza Tower’s art style and manic energy. It eventually generated over 3 million views before the game even launched.

3,000,000 VIEWS… FOR A FAN TRIBUTE TO AN INDIE GAME THAT HADN’T EVEN COME OUT YET

You cannot buy this kind of hype. Nor can you manufacture it. But you can create the conditions for it to emerge and grow organically, which is exactly what McPig did. He gave the world something distinctive enough to riff on: a unique visual language, sense of humor, and personality. The world riffed in return. All of the fan art, mods, crossover content, SiIvaGunner remixes, and inside jokes that propagated across Discord servers and Twitter feeds worldwide is earned media in the term’s truest sense, all of it directly downstream of choosing to build a game with a strong and recognizable creative identity.

Most “no marketing” stories are actually stories about marketing that wasn’t recognized as such, because the marketing so seamlessly blended in with the game’s development. Pizza Tower‘s three years between SAGE and the Steam page going live is the clearest example I can think of. From the outside, nothing was happening. From the inside, audience growth and investment was compounding, the product was getting better, and the relationship between the two was deepening every single day.

Phase 4: Launch & Beyond

JANUARY 2023 ONWARD · STEAM · 100K COPIES IN 30 DAYS

SEBASTIAN — PRODUCTION

The Steam page for Pizza Tower went live in early December 2022, roughly eight weeks before launch. The standard product playbook here would call for six to twelve months of Steam page visibility minimum: time to build wishlists, establish awareness, let the algorithm do its thing. Eight weeks is a significant departure from that, and in most cases it would be a mistake.

The reason it worked is because of everything that came before. By the time the page appeared, four years of community investment had already done the awareness-building work: monthly Patreon builds, eighteen public demos, Twitch streams, a Discord that had grown to tens of thousands of people who knew exactly what Pizza Tower was, had followed it for years, and were ready to convert immediately. The audience already existed.

The production insight has more gravitas than the timing. Steam’s algorithm rewards velocity in the first forty-eight hours: sales, reviews, and wishlist conversions all happening at once, telling the platform that this is something worth surfacing. Tour de Pizza had that velocity because of decisions made in 2018, 2019, 2020. By the time the Steam page went live, the launch outcome was mostly set. My read on this, for indie developers who think of launch as the moment their game’s fate gets decided: what actually happens on launch day is that you find out what the previous years amounted to. The decisions that determined the outcome were made much, much earlier, and they look nothing like launch preparation.

Post-launch, the team kept working the same way they always had. Community-informed updates shipped when they were ready. The Noise update, the Halloween update, the Switch port. No external deadline, no publisher schedule, each one done when it was actually finished.

JAY — MARKETING

Sebastian is right that the Steam-page timing looks wrong on paper. By conventional standards, eight weeks is a textbook mistake; you want at least six months, and ideally a year, to build wishlists before launch. But the timing wasn’t actually the strategic question. The strategic question was: what is the Steam page for?

For most indie games, the Steam page is the top of the funnel: it’s where you go to generate awareness. For Pizza Tower, the Steam page didn’t need to do that job, because four years of Patreon builds, demos, Twitch streams, and Vinesauce coverage had done it already. By December 2022, the awareness existed. The Steam page just needed to convert all of it into a structured pre-order funnel. That’s a much smaller job, and an eight-week window is more than enough.

The launch numbers speak for themselves: roughly 100,000 copies sold and approximately $3 million in gross revenue in just the first month alone. Within about a year and a half, it netted over 70,000 reviews at a 98% positive rating, putting Pizza Tower ahead of Celeste, Super Meat Boy, and Katana Zero on Steam’s all-time platformer leaderboard.

That review velocity is the single most important number in this entire story. The Steam algorithm is famously sensitive to early review activity; it uses the first 48 hours to decide how aggressively to promote a game in its discovery surfaces. But most indie games can’t generate that kind of velocity, because most indie games launch to an audience that’s hearing about them for the first time. Those players need to buy the game, play it, form an opinion, and then write a review. All of that takes time, and by the time the reviews start trickling in, the algorithm has already moved on.

Pizza Tower didn’t have that problem. The hundreds of Patreon backers and thousands of Discord members who’d been part of the community since 2019, and had been playing the game for years, already had their reviews half-written in their heads. They knew exactly what they wanted to say. So when the Steam page went live, the launch army was locked and loaded, ready to deliver the velocity the algorithm needed to amplify Pizza Tower‘s launch beyond its initial audience.

This is when the compounding effect really paid off. Four years of community building converted, all at once, into precisely the type of outcome that makes Steam launches succeed. It may not have been scheduled or orchestrated, but all of it was earned, year by year, by McPig’s decision to build the audience and the game in parallel.

If I’m being completely honest, I think Pizza Tower‘s launch was the least interesting part of its marketing story. By January 2023, its outcome was already largely determined. Everything that truly mattered had happened in the years before.

Conclusion

FUNCTIONS OVER FORMS · PRINCIPLES OVER PATHS

SEBASTIAN — THE PRODUCTION TAKEAWAY

McPig set out to make a horror RPG. He shipped one of the most critically acclaimed platformers of the decade. The creative and production journey between those two points is what the process actually looks like when it’s working, rather than being tortured into a preplanned outcome by a spreadsheet.

The production principles running through this story are not specific to Pizza Tower. Short feedback loops, tools and scope matched to actual capacity, continuous iteration, willingness to scrap, staying close to players and acting on what they tell you: these keep showing up across different studios, different budgets, and different methodologies because they’re responses to the actual demands of making a game, not responses to any particular process. I believe McPig and Sertif likely arrived at them through instinct and necessity rather than a textbook. But that doesn’t matter. The proof is in the pudding.

The lesson I would humbly like to offer indie developers from all of this isn’t about copying the specific conditions of Pizza Tower’s development. It’s about understanding what good product development practices are actually for. Any strategy, framework, process, or standard exists to serve a small number of functions: understanding what you’re trying to make, staying close to your players, challenging your preconceived ideas, maintaining the ability to iterate quickly, and knowing at any given moment how the game is actually doing. Whether those functions are served formally or informally is almost beside the point. What matters is whether they’re being served at all. If they are, you’re in better shape than you probably think.

JAY — THE MARKETING TAKEAWAY

Sebastian and I are landing in nearly the same place from opposite directions, and I want to put a fine point on that before I close out my half. His argument is that good production practices serve functions, and whether those functions are served formally or informally doesn’t really matter; what matters is that they’re served.

My argument is the exact same thing about marketing. So let me be careful about what I am, and am not, arguing here.

I’m not arguing that you should build in public for five years and hope for the best, because building in public only works if what you’re building is worth watching. In this entire story, game quality is the most foundational variable; if Pizza Tower hadn’t been a truly excellent game, none of the marketing dynamics I described above would have mattered. Marketing only amplifies signal, it does not create it. If the underlying product isn’t there, isn’t good, or isn’t a good fit, then no amount of community building, platform strategy, or creator outreach is going to save it.

I’m also not arguing that you can replicate Pizza Tower‘s exact path. McPig had specific intuitions, perhaps downstream of certain personality traits (though this is largely speculative on my part), and was blessed with specific timing advantages that you, I’m sorry to say, almost certainly do not have. Every game and every team is different. Trying to copy his playbook beat for beat will only lead to frustration at best, and failure at worst.

What I am arguing for is following the principles underneath what McPig did. Those are universal, and available to any developer willing to take them seriously.

Marketing is not a phase that begins after production is finished, or after the trailer is commissioned. It’s a discipline that should run alongside development; indeed, in the most successful cases, it becomes indistinguishable from development itself. The decisions you make about what to build, who to build it for, where to be visible, and how to involve your audience in the process are not separate from the decisions you make about gameplay and design. They’re the same set of decisions, viewed from a different angle. They always have been.

McPig did this intuitively, which is admirable but also very rare. Most developers don’t have those instincts… but the good news is, they don’t need to. You can learn these principles, you can plan from them, and you can deliberately integrate them into your development process.

So if you’re an indie dev reading this and wondering what to take away: don’t try to make a Wario Land spiritual successor because McPig did it successfully. Don’t pin all your hopes on a viral Vinesauce moment. And don’t open a Patreon expecting 500 paying fans to materialize out of thin air.

Instead, ask the questions McPig was asking… and answering, without even realizing he was answering them:

1. Who is the audience for this game, and where do they already gather?

2. What is the smallest, most playable version of this thing I can put in front of them?

3. How do I enable the people who care to come closer, stay involved, and feel like they’re a part of what I’m making?

4. What spaces (events, communities, creator ecosystems) exist specifically for the kind of game I’m making, and how do I show up there with something worthy of their attention?

You don’t need a marketing budget, or even a full marketing team, to answer those questions. But you do need to take them seriously. Answering them correctly can make the difference between recouping your development costs or shutting down your studio. Treat them with the gravitas they deserve.

At the end of the day, Pizza Tower’s real lesson isn’t that marketing is optional. It’s that marketing, done right, doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels like making the game.

❦

Sources: Wikipedia · Game Developer’s interview with Sertif · Benjamin Glover, “Why Pizza Tower is Popular” · TCRF prerelease timeline · SteamSpy · GameSensor · Know Your Meme

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Of the more than 20,000 games that hit Steam in 2025, almost half got fewer than ten reviews, while over 2,000 got zero.

Zero. Zilch… nada… nothing.

This is what folks in the industry call “the discoverability crisis.” Except… this is not actually a discovery problem, because it’s not a Steam (or console/mobile store) algorithm problem. Rather, this is a marketing readiness problem… and by the time those studios hit launch day, it’s already far too late to fix.

What most studios don’t realize, until it’s way behind them, is that your launch doesn’t fail on launch day; it fails 18 months earlier, in pre-production, when someone decides marketing is something you’ll just “figure out closer to release.”

The Default Model: Marketing as a Launch Cost

Many studios treat marketing like it’s a phase:

1. Pre-production is for scope and prototyping.

2. Production is for building.

3. Pre-launch is for marketing.

4. Launch is for celebrating!

5. Post-launch is for patches (and, if you’re lucky, DLC).

That sequencing feels intuitive, but it’s also what kills indie studios far more reliably than bad code, bad art, or bad game design. Here are three reasons why:

I. Trust compounds, and you can’t catch up on compounding. Audiences simply do not convert on first exposure. The reader who sees your game on Steam today and then buys it on launch day is nothing more than a fantasy. The real conversion path for your average player is something like: saw a devlog 14 months ago, wishlisted 10 months ago, lurked the Discord for 8, played the demo during Next Fest, and then finally bought it at launch. Every week of pre-launch marketing is a week of compound growth. If you start at launch -3 months, you’ll find you already missed most of it.

II. Positioning calcifies in production. By the time the game is feature-complete, you’ve made a thousand decisions that shape who your game is for: art style, tone, length, difficulty, monetization, platform strategy, and many many more. If those decisions weren’t made with a clear audience in mind, the launch window becomes an exercise in retrofitting a position onto a product that already has one, whether you wrote it down or not. And unfortunately for you, that retrofitting rarely works.

III. The high-leverage free channels require lead time. What do Steam Next Fest, press relationships, creator outreach, and community have in common? Every one of these has a minimum lead time that’s measured in months, not weeks. Show up three weeks before launch, and none of them are available to you.

Steelmanning the Other Side

In the interest of fairness, let me give the launch-day-marketing model its fair hearing.

The logic goes: don’t market until you have something worth marketing, don’t burn attention on a game that might get delayed or canceled, don’t spread yourself thin, and keep your powder dry.

And sure, that logic works… in film and TV, where you have a finished, fixed product and a known release date. But games are different. Games have extended development timelines, soft launches, early access, demos, Next Fests, and beta programs. Your “something worth marketing” already exists in pre-production, long before you commission the trailer. You only need a one-sentence pitch and a mood board to start a Discord, while a teaser trailer and capsule art are more than enough to stand up a Steam page. Meanwhile, a demo is enough to pitch creators.

So the argument isn’t whether to market early — you should absolutely, resolutely, 100% be marketing early! Rather, the question is what “marketing” means at each stage. And here, I’ll tell you right now:

1. In pre-production, it means defining your audience and seeding your community.

2. In production, it means optimizing your Steam page and building your wishlist.

3. In pre-launch, it means running ads and press/creator outreach campaigns.

Conflating those stages into a single launch-month sprint is the big mistake studios make.

What Do the Top 10% Actually Do Differently?

The studios that crack the top 10% of revenue aren’t smarter, or luckier, than the rest. So what do they do differently? To put it simply: they treat marketing as infrastructure that gets built alongside the game, not as a campaign that gets launched after it.

They hire or partner with a marketing lead in pre-production, pick a target audience before locking art direction, put up a Steam page when they have a vertical slice (not when the game is gold), and start a community as soon as they can describe the game in one sentence.

None of that is expensive, and in fact, most of it is free! But all of it requires deciding, very early on, that marketing is a function of the business instead of a thing the founder will panic-execute in launch month.

Houston, We Have a Marketing Leadership Problem

There’s another area where most indie studios get stuck:

Founders become accidental CMOs — the founder who wrote the design doc is now also running Discord, drafting press releases, editing capsule art, and negotiating with creators (all while growling “Become a game dev, they said… you’ll focus on making games and not selling them, they said…” through gritted teeth). Meanwhile, the art director who should be finishing UI is writing Twitter threads, while the narrative designer who has to lock bark by midnight is instead scripting trailers.

“Everyone does a little marketing” is a slogan that studios use to feel good about not having a marketing lead. But this often leads to disaster, because it means nobody owns outcomes. It means no real decisions get made about channels, audiences, or beats until something breaks (and something will break, sooner or later, for one reason or another). And it means every marketing task competes with a production task, and production always wins…1 until launch, that is, when production’s done and suddenly marketing has three weeks to deliver what should have been built up over two years.

The studios that successfully market their game ultimately share just one structural trait: somebody on the team owns marketing as their primary responsibility, whether this is a full-time hire, a fractional CMO, or publisher partner… the legal structure varies (and is honestly fairly irrelevant). But what doesn’t vary is that there’s one person on the team whose calendar and accountability are entirely organized around one simple question:

“How do we get people to know and care about this game before it ships?”

If no one on your team can answer that question without deferring to someone else, then congratulations, you have a marketing leadership problem! And marketing leadership problems are the root cause of roughly every other marketing problem I’ve ever been asked to fix.

What Does It Mean to Be “Launch Ready”?

Now, at this point, you might be asking yourself: “Well, what does launch readiness actually look like?” Which is where the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard comes in. I built this nifty little tool, because studios kept asking me the same question in slightly different words:

Are we doing enough? Are we doing it right? Are we going to land this?

The Scorecard is the diagnostic version of that question. It consists of 16 questions, across six categories, all weighted by impact:

• Marketing Timing

• Steam Page & Store Presence

• Community

• Wishlist Momentum

• Content/PR

• Marketing Leadership

It takes roughly four minutes to complete, and it gives you a score out of 100, a readiness tier (Fog of War, Flying Blind, Behind Schedule, On Track, Launch Ready), and the three highest-leverage moves you could make right now based on where you’re weakest.

It can even present specialized recommendations for games that have already launched but aren’t converting, as well as games that aren’t launching on Steam!

Now, I want to be very clear on something: this is NOT a replacement for strategy. A score is a data point, not a plan — which is a much longer conversation. But this is the fastest way I know to surface where a studio’s launch is actually fragile… and funny enough, the answer is almost never where the founder thinks it is!

Often, they discover their wishlist problem is merely a symptom of the real problem: timing. Or they think they have a community or store presence problem, only to learn that’s actually downstream of a leadership problem. But the common thread running through all those failure modes? Not knowing whether you’re actually “Launch Ready” or not, and to what degree; studios who think they’re “on track” often find out they’re Behind Schedule, with only a 90-day window to fix it (eek!).

What’s Coming Next in Ready Check

This is Part One of a 12-week series. Every Monday, I’m going to take the scorecard apart category by category: the research behind the weights, the common failure patterns I see across studios, and what it actually takes to move your score. We’ll dive into the infamous “411-day problem,” we’ll do the math on wishlist-to-revenue conversion, and we’ll walk through why Steam Next Fest is the single highest-leverage free event (that way too many studios still skip).

Next week, we’ll dive deep into the methodology: how I chose the six categories, why Marketing Timing is the heaviest lift at 25%, and why Marketing Leadership is deliberately weighted lower than you’d expect. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not what I reckon most of you would guess!

If you want to find out where your studio sits before the series goes deep, take the scorecard! Four minutes, absolutely free:

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

And if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing for free game marketing tips, case studies, and industry analysis, delivered straight to your inbox each Monday, for free:

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GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

Hey, wanna see a neat party trick? Ok… hold my beer, I’m about to make every Western AAA executive spit out their coffee:

Per Newzoo’s latest forecasts, China is now expected to have passed the United States as the world’s largest video game market by sales, with an estimated $53.2 billion in revenue in 2025. The same year, Chinese self-developed games booked roughly $20.45 billion in overseas sales, up double digits year-over-year. China’s domestic market itself also hit a record $49.8 billion with 683 million players.

This means that, in terms of video games, China’s not “catching up to” to the West, but passing it… if not already passed.

Meanwhile, back in the Western AAA heartland, the industry has shed roughly 45,000 jobs since 2022. The 2025 pace finally slowed from 2024’s catastrophic ~14,600 layoffs, dropping to somewhere around 6,200 to 9,700 (depending on who you ask), which is “less brutal” only in the sense that a slower-moving bus still runs you over.

On a more macro level, EA is restructuring into two franchises amid a Saudi PIF-led buyout, while Ubisoft has torn itself into five “Creative Houses” after 1,200 employees walked out on strike.1 Embracer went from 15,701 employees to less than 7,000 while closing or divesting 44 studios, and Warner Bros. Games hasn’t had a games division president for over a year.

And in the middle of all that carnage, a debut studio from Hangzhou called Game Science dropped Black Myth: Wukong on August 20, 2024, moved 10 million copies in 83 hours, hit 2.4 million peak concurrent on Steam, and went on to sell over 25 million units to date. That’s just one game from one studio, clocking the kind of debut performance most developers can only dream of, all built around a distinctly Chinese mythology of the kind that Western publishers spent years telling each other “wouldn’t travel.”

Oh, but it traveled, all right. It traveled very far indeed.

And then, on March 19, 2026, Seoul-based Pearl Abyss shipped Crimson Desert: a seven-year, $133 million open-world action-adventure that moved 2 million units in its first 24 hours and crossed 5 million within one month. Now, this was a different type of game in a different (if somewhat adjacent) genre than Wukong, made by a different studio in a different country, operating under a different design philosophy. Nevertheless, it told a similar story (you could say it was simply the next chapter in said story): an Eastern team made the game they wanted to make, at the scale they wanted to make it, and the global audience showed up for it in droves.

(I wrote about Crimson Desert‘s reception a few weeks back, and its sustained post-launch numbers continue to vindicate my read. Far from an outlier, Pearl Abyss proved that this is, without a doubt, the new normal.)

So, what is actually happening here? And no, it’s not simply “China is rising”; that’s the lazy take, and it glosses over the most important lesson for the indie folks reading this newsletter.

Eastern Studios Figured Out What Western AAA Forgot

The easy explanation is that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean games are winning because they’re cheaper to make, their development cycles are shorter, or their studios are backed by their respective governments. And sure, some of that’s true at the margins… but it’s not the real story.

The real story is that the biggest Eastern hits from the last three years were built by people who still believed the game itself was the marketing’s main driver.

Game Science didn’t win because they had a bigger UA budget than Ubisoft, but because they spent six years making a more visually and mechanically compelling game than all of Ubisoft’s recent catalog put together, so much so that a single trailer in 2020 drove more wishlists than most AAA launches manage across an entire campaign.

Similarly, it’s not like Crimson Desert sold five million copies in 27 days because Pearl Abyss executed a particularly inspired performance marketing campaign; they ultimately did it because they spent seven years of patient development creating a world players wanted to live in, which provided the fuel and the foundation for its marketing to do the work (indeed, their pre-launch marketing arc and post-launch community management were both impeccably well-executed, and they certainly accelerated the game hitting its sales milestones so quickly!).

Finally, Hoyoverse didn’t conquer global mobile with just a clever funnel (though they certainly employ one!); in order for that funnel to work, they needed to make Genshin Impact feel like a console RPG your friends actually wanted to talk about, while also building a well-oiled operational engine that constantly ships new content — at a cadence Western live-service teams still can’t match.

Oh, and let’s not forget Japan — long one of gaming’s most economically significant and culturally influential markets, towards which gaming communities worldwide still feel a deep reverence and affinity for — which had its all-time record year in 2024 at ¥2,396.1B (~$16.2B), and the 2025 data so far indicates its momentum remains strong. Capcom, FromSoftware, Square Enix’s internal teams, and Nintendo all kept their hands on the craft, which their sales figures reflect.

Oh, and speaking of Nintendo… did you know that Nintendo of America promoted its top marketing executive, Devon Pritchard, to President? Stop for a second to think about what that means: a marketer now runs Nintendo of America. Now, contrast that with Microsoft completely eliminating the Xbox CMO title and fragmenting marketing across four reporting structures. The Japanese company treats marketing as strategic leadership, while the Western company treats it as a line item to restructure… with predictable consequences in both cases.

Meanwhile, the Western AAA playbook drifted to a grim and ugly place over the past decade, and especially throughout the past five years. Far too many Western publishers spent the 2010s and early 2020s optimizing for quarterly earnings calls, chasing live-service unicorns, layering monetization onto games that didn’t need it (and whose players didn’t want it), and building 400-person teams that couldn’t ship a coherent vision because nobody owned one.

As a result, playtime in the six major Western markets is down in 2025. Free-to-play playtime fell 8.1% on PC, 4.3% on PlayStation, and 11% on Xbox year-over-year. Even Call of Duty playtime dropped 59.4% (!!!) on PC.

Something is deeply, deeply wrong here.

A Disconnection Most Structural

If you want my honest read on the deeper issue, it’s that Western AAA is struggling because it became structurally disconnected from the people who play its games, whereas Eastern studios, for a bunch of reasons (whether cultural, organizational, or just happy accidents of geography), stayed closer to their players. Just ask Hoyoverse’s community teams, who are legendary for the depth of their signal processing. Or consider how Japanese studios run on a director-centric model, where one creative voice carries a game from pre-prod through post-launch… or, for that matter, the way Korean MMO teams live and die by their guild-level feedback loops (in case you didn’t know, Pearl Abyss was originally an MMO studio, hence why they were able to patch Crimson Desert‘s control scheme, AI art issues, and difficulty curve — all in direct response to community feedback — within days of launch).

Western AAA, by contrast, built layers upon layers on top of more layers, with a few extra layers on top of those layers. Western productions became a Kafka-esque amalgamation of research agencies, focus groups, and just about every flavor of consultant imaginable for each conceivable function (and more than a few novel ones, for good measure). Leadership erected siloes for publisher marketing, platform marketing, first-party marketing, and so on and so forth, while outsourcing community management to three different vendors. I could go on, but you get the idea.

With each added layer, the people making the game pushed themselves farther and farther away from the people playing the game. And when you’re that far away from your audience, you simply stop hearing what they’re actually telling you. Instead, you start hearing what your deck says they should be telling you, thinking it’s the same thing.

When you strip everything down to its most fundamental level, that’s really why so many post-launch live-service corpses litter 2023, 2024, and 2025. It’s why Concord even happened to begin with, as well as why Highguard shut down before it ever had a real chance — indeed, as Highguard taught us, good marketing can’t save a bad product-market fit. If anything, it accelerates failure when the product is fundamentally disconnected from its audience. And Western AAA, as we’ve just examined, has spent the better part of the last two decades building the most efficient audience disconnection machine in entertainment.

Can it get better? Sure. But the question is… who will do it, after so many people got cut?

Because unfortunately, and no matter how much we’d love for it to be, 2025’s slowdown in layoffs is most likely not a recovery signal, but the endpoint — the grim aftermath of companies having already cut everyone they were going to cut. The structural damage is already done; the 45,000 jobs lost since 2022 represent around 100,000 years of accumulated industry experience walking out the door, per the estimates Amir Satvat has been tracking.

That’s not something you can just rebuild in a fiscal year… or even a fiscal decade.

How the Western Industry Can Start Adapting (If It Wants To)

But as you know, I don’t try to be a doomer. I fundamentally believe that every situation, no matter how grim, is solvable. The right solution may not be easy, quick, or pleasant, but a solution it still is.

So, what’s the solution here?

Well, first off, I’m not going to pretend I have a specific, comprehensive turnaround plan for EA. Because I don’t. But the way I see it, the overall playbook for a Western AAA recovery isn’t actually a mystery, and it’s really quite feasible. It starts with the following steps:

I. Cut layers, not headcount. The knee-jerk response to a brutal market is layoffs, and the Western industry has done plenty of those. But what it hasn’t done is flatten the structural distance between studios and players. Ubisoft’s Creative House model is an attempt at this... we’ll see if it sticks.

II. Put creative leads back in charge of their games’ identities. Marketing works when it’s downstream of a clear vision, and flounders when it’s a committee trying to reverse-engineer a narrative for a product nobody owns.

III. Stop chasing the live-service lottery. The live-service graveyard is overcrowded and deep, with a brutal hit rate. And most tragically, the opportunity cost of every failed live-service attempt is the single-player or co-op bestseller you didn’t make instead.

IV. Take Eastern studios seriously as creative peers, not just as licensors or competitors. Wukong, Crimson Desert, Genshin, Elden Ring, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Stellar Blade, and Monster Hunter Wilds are not regional anomalies. The studios behind them have become gaming’s new center of gravity.

After that, it’s execution all the way. We can disagree on the details there. But I’m very hard-pressed to see how any attempt could land or sustain itself long-term without starting from all of the above four principles.

What Should Indies Do?

Now, finally, we’ve arrived at the good part: advice for the people I work with every day.

If you run a 15-person indie studio, Western AAA’s marketing credibility collapse is your biggest opening since the indie path first became viable. Players are practically starving for games made by people who actually seem to care. The bar for games “made with love” is lower than it’s ever been because there’s just not a lot out there (relatively speaking) to compare against, which is quite sad for the industry at large but potentially great news for you... if you play your cards right.

Here are a few things I’d have every indie team internalize right now:

1. Your proximity to your players is a competitive moat. You’re not EA, which means you can actually read every Discord message, respond to every forum post, and truly talk to the people playing your game. DO IT. That’s a massive structural advantage that Western AAA has all but softlocked itself out of.

2. Wishlist velocity still matters more than total wishlists. and every serious analyst will tell you (correctly) that the shape of your wishlist curve in the 30 days before launch is the single best predictor of your game’s opening-week performance. As far as marketing problems go, that’s surprisingly straightforward to move the needle on, and it starts with a little pre-production discipline.

3. Study Eastern studios’ patience. Game Science took six years on Wukong, while Pearl Abyss took seven on Crimson Desert. Hoyoverse similarly spent several years building internal tools before they could ship at their current cadence. The surest path to a great launch starts in pre-production (which, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, is a drum I beat every week for a reason).

4. Don’t confuse a marketing budget with a marketing strategy. Western AAA is a cautionary tale about what happens when you have plenty of the first and none of the second. Indies have the opposite problem, which is actually easier to fix.

5. The “it won’t travel” excuse is dead. Whatever genre, setting, mechanic, or cultural specificity you’ve been told is “too niche for the global market”? Wukong buried that argument with Chinese mythology, Crimson Desert salted the grave with the type of open-world fantasy that gaming pundits declared was fully played out, and Stellar Blade poured concrete on top with fanservice-tastic character designs that Western publishers would’ve killed in pitch (and which Western games media actually tried to kill before launch). Make the game you actually want to make, and find the audience that actually wants it. Everything else is noise.

Listen, I know I’m hard on Western AAA in these pages, but I’m actually not rooting against them. Some of the best games of my life came from those studios, and a lot of talented people are paying the price for disastrous decisions they didn’t make.

But we do need to understand, with clear eyes, this new reality we now live in: China is now the world’s largest gaming market, Chinese studios are exporting $20 billion a year in games, a Korean studio just sold five million copies of an open-world RPG in less than a month, and the industry’s biggest breakout titles are increasingly coming out of studios most Western executives couldn’t have named three years ago. It’s clear as day that the center of creative gravity has shifted, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone (least of all yourself, if you’re a Western AAA exec who happened to read this article).

The good news, if you’re an indie or AA studio founder reading this, is that this shift is in your favor, regardless of where you’re located. Players don’t actually care where your studio was founded or operates; they’re simply hungry for the types of experiences that AAA has systematically neglected, and as a result, they’re rewarding craft, responsiveness, and honest ambition more than they have in a decade.

The Eastern studios figured that out first… but you can be next.

Press Start,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

Matthew Ball’s State of Video Gaming in 2026 dropped a couple of months ago (so apologies for being slightly late to the party), and like everything he publishes, it’s very much worth reading in full — yes, all 164 slides of it. Tons of great insights backed by meticulously sourced data, all adding up to a detailed and clear snapshot of where gaming is at and where it’s headed. This man does the work, and the gaming industry is much better for having him in it.

The report’s headline takeaway is, by now, everywhere: gaming is losing the “war for attention.” The Mature Market 8 (the US, Japan, South Korea, UK, Germany, France, Canada, and Italy), which once drove over 60% of global gaming spend, is now seeing player participation drop. The US is down 2.5 to 4 percentage points since before the pandemic, while South Korea has lost a staggering 15 percentage points compared to its 2017-2019 average.

Oh, and it gets worse: an Ipsos survey from January found that 46% of Americans say they play games less than they used to, and that number jumps to 59% among 18 to 45-year-olds. Meanwhile, Americans now spend 122 million more hours per day on social media than they did in 2020, with TikTok alone accounting for 39 million of those additional hours. US mobile game installs hit a 12-year low, while PC and console software sales in the Mature Market 8 shrank by 8% from 2021 to 2024 — a $4.2 billion annual loss.

There’s clearly a huge structural shift afoot, and Ball is right to flag it.

Nevertheless, I feel compelled to push back, because I think framing this as “gaming is losing to TikTok” misdiagnoses what’s actually happening, and that misdiagnosis has huge implications for how we address the industry’s current struggles.

First, TikTok is not new. It launched in 2016, and hit mass adoption during the pandemic era — which means it’s been a dominant force in the attention economy for at least five years.

Second, TikTok is not intrinsically more compelling than gaming; as proof, consider that during much of that same period when TikTok ascended to social media dominance, gaming was also setting all-time record highs. People were not too busy scrolling TikTok to play games in 2020, 2021, or 2022. They were doing both, and gleefully so. And the collapse in gaming participation isn’t happening because TikTok suddenly got more enthralling; TikTok has been TikTok the whole time.

So, if TikTok didn’t change, what did? Gaming did. Specifically, the product changed. Or even more specifically: AAA gaming changed.

Take a look again at the period when these declines accelerated. It corresponds almost perfectly with the era when AAA studios went full-throttle in the following directions, which they’d been flirting and toying with throughout the previous decade but finally went all-in on during the post-COVID era:

• Monetization mattering more than craftsmanship.

• Live-service as the default.

• $70 as the new $60, with $40 in cosmetics and a battle pass on top.

• NFTs forced down players’ throats by executives who clearly didn’t play their own games.

• Character designs getting reworked by committees, for reasons that had nothing to do with what players wanted.

• Embracer cancelling 80 projects and laying off thousands.

• Concord launching and then dying in 14 days.

• Highguard launching and then dying in 46.

• The already-adversarial discourse around “gamers” from publishers, developers, and games media curdling into open contempt.

The bottom line? People didn’t get bored of games, they got sick of being actively antagonized by the people making them.

And there’s something else, which Ball’s macro view obscures: even as the Mature Market 8 was contracting, real demand for genuinely good games exploded. Consider the following:

• Schedule I, made by one solo developer, generated over $150 million in revenue and 8 million sales in 2025.

• R.E.P.O., another small-team indie, made $147 million.

• PEAK pulled in $87 million.

And lest you think these are just outliers, consider that Newzoo’s 2026 report shows that the long tail on PC (games ranked outside the Top 20) grew its playtime by 44% from 2022 to 2025. And while Shooter games dropped 5% and Battle Royale dropped 27%, the Sandbox genre grew 36% in a single year. The same Newzoo report also shows Roblox overtaking Fortnite and Call of Duty to become the #1 most-played franchise on PC and console globally, with 52% YoY playtime growth.

Yes, you read that correctly. Roblox, AKA “the kiddie game platform with the derpy block character avatars.”

I repeat, once more for emphasis: Roblox is the most-played gaming franchise on the planet right now. But why? Because the platform’s primary audience consists of Gen Alpha and young Gen Z — aka the exact demographic that most accesses TikTok. The exact demographic that’s supposedly had its attention captured by short-form video, AI apps, and everything else Ball cites as eating gaming’s lunch. And yet, those same kids are choosing to spend hours each day inside a game-creation platform with their friends.

If TikTok were beating gaming in some intrinsic, structural way (meaning: if short-form video was just inherently more dopaminergic than interactive entertainment), then Roblox simply wouldn’t exist as a phenomenon. It would be a footnote instead of the biggest game in the world. That’s what Ball’s missing in his diagnosis.

So I’d like to posit an alternative hypothesis: gaming isn’t losing the “War for Attention” to other media, it’s losing the war to itself — specifically, to the parts of itself that forgot how to make things people want to play.

There’s no reason gaming can’t beat out TikTok, ChatGPT, FanDuel, Polymarket, OnlyFans, et al for people’s finite attention. The market, and the demand, are still there, as is the infrastructure. The creative and human capital that have always fueled the industry are also still there. What’s missing, then, is product-market fit at the AAA level; and unfortunately, it’s been missing for so long that an entire generation of players has learned to look elsewhere for their entertainment and dopamine fixes.

You can see the proof when you take a closer look at the gaming segments that are currently growing. Namely, Indies, AA, “Triple-i”,1 sandbox platforms with massive UGC ecosystems, and premium games oriented around depth and with sustained back-catalog engagement.

What do they all have in common? They respect their players.

Newzoo’s data clearly shows these trends, and even Ball’s own report acknowledges that 2025 global game revenue still hit $195.6 billion (5.3% above 2024). So gaming as an industry isn’t dying… but gaming as a AAA blockbuster monoculture is dying.

That’s a highly meaningful difference, which matters because losing to TikTok calls for a fundamentally different solution than having alienated your own audience.

If you believe the former, the answer is:

• Panic,

• More aggressive monetization to extract value from your shrinking remaining base,

• Probably some strategy deck about the “gamification of TikTok” or whatever,

• More panic, then repeat until final collapse.

But if you believe the latter, the answer is to remember what made games worth playing in the first place:

• True craftsmanship,

• Respect for players’ time and money,

• Communities built on trust rather than extraction,

• A willingness to make something focused and great for a specific audience (rather than something bland and broad for everyone).

The second prescription is much harder, because it requires the industry to look in the mirror and admit that the problem isn’t external but entirely self-inflicted. But it’s also more accurate, more actionable, and ultimately more hopeful, because the conditions for a proper gaming renaissance are absolutely in place:

• The audience still exists.

• The tools exist, and are getting better.

• The talent exists (much of it freshly displaced from the studios and publishers that contributed to the problem).

• The platforms for distribution and discovery exist.

• The community infrastructure exists.

• The raw creative ambition exists (and is arguably stronger than ever).

The industry doesn’t need a bigger TikTok-killer, or to desperately pivot to whatever dopamine vector is currently winning the attention wars. The industry needs to remember that great games, made for specific audiences who feel respected and engaged, are what made gaming viable to begin with. The pieces for a bright future, akin to the Gaming Golden Ages of the 80s–90s, 2006–2012, and 2017–2022, are right there in front of our noses. We just need to arrange them properly.

Ball’s data is real and urgent, but he’s too pessimistic in his diagnosis. And I worry that the industry will take the wrong lesson from his report — it would not surprise me one bit if AAA studios respond to their losing the attention war by squeezing their players harder instead of building something better. And in doing so, they’ll only accelerate the decline they’re trying to reverse.

The fundamentals of gaming are strong, because the audience (the players, who have always powered this industry) hasn’t gone anywhere. They’re just waiting for the industry to come back to them.

Press Start to Play,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

I’ve been playing the absolute hell out of Crimson Desert since it launched on March 19, so I have some… thoughts on all the hullabaloo going on about it. Quite a lot of them, actually! So now, I’m going to regale you with them all. Don’t worry, it all ties into game marketing.

(Oh, and FYI, this is going to be a little different from SPM’s usual fare: more on the longer side, with a few deep tangents here and there… and I’m not going to be polite about all of it. So consider yourself warned!)

The TL;DR is: Pearl Abyss built something players loved, the press couldn’t see it, the market panicked for nothing, and there are some solid lessons to be learned here (marketing-related and otherwise).

Now, for the longer version:

Now that the dust has settled, I’m confident in saying that while Crimson Desert’s launch looked messy on paper, it ultimately turned out to be a massive win for developer Pearl Abyss.

Its sales numbers and player count, not critic review scores, tell this game’s success story: Crimson Desert peaked at 239,000 concurrent players on Steam within its first 24 hours, which is highly impressive for any new IP, let alone a studio’s first single-player outing. By the second weekend, that peak had climbed to 276,261, which almost never happens! Most games’ concurrent player count declines after launch, but for this game, it climbed.

As far as absolute sales figures, Crimson Desert crossed 2 million copies sold in its first day, hit 3 million within five days, has just passed 4 million as of press time, and is well on track to soon surpass 5 million. On Steam, it hit number one on the Top Sellers chart and stayed there for the rest of the month, having only just recently been surpassed by (who else?) Counter-Strike 2.

And yet the critical and press narrative remains that the game had a “mixed reception” (despite most of it coming from the press itself), even though every available metric keeps shouting otherwise. Something’s not adding up here, so we’re going to examine what that says about where the mainstream gaming press is at, and what that means for indie game marketers.

Crimson Desert’s Critic/Player Disconnect

Now, in my own (somewhat) humble opinion, Pearl Abyss really cooked here, despite the critical consensus that has deemed it a misfire or mixed bag at best.

Crimson Desert really sinks its teeth into you the longer you play it. Its early game (the first 2-3 hours) is quite rough; the critics are right about that. You’ll struggle against some really janky controls while trying to navigate multiple maddeningly obtuse systems, the UI is a Byzantine mess, the HUD is arranged awkwardly and doesn’t tell you what any of it means, and essential functions are buried under many layers of nested menus. The game makes almost no effort to explain itself, and you’re very much diving in at the deep end. So if you bounced off it in the first couple of hours, I completely understand.

But if you pushed through? Oh man does this game start paying dividends, and it only compounds the longer you play. Combat is simply phenomenal, the amount of detail in this (mind-bogglingly ginormous) world is simply staggering, and it boasts some of the best visuals I’ve ever seen in an open world game. I’m in utter awe at the raw ambition of this thing; from its layered combat to all the clever abyss puzzles, the sheer variety of things to discover off the beaten path is truly impressive. I still can’t believe that Pearl Abyss actually pulled this off.

More than anything, what makes Crimson Desert truly special and unique is that it rewards your patience. No Ubisoft-style laundry lists, map markers, or busywork tasks here! Like in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom before it (two major influences that this game proudly wears on its sleeve), Crimson Desert‘s best moments emerge from following your curiosity and wandering off the main path. So if you’re capable of engaging this world on its own terms, it will reward you with one of the most satisfying gaming experiences in recent memory. This game trusts you to figure things out, for better and for worse, and unlike many reviewers, I greatly appreciate the gesture.

In addition to the controls, obtuseness, and rough early game, mainstream game critics also cite Crimson Desert’s awkward and boring narrative to justify their low review scores. Now, does the story kind of suck? Yeah, it does. The narrative does a terrible job of establishing the stakes early on, it never fully comes together (at least not ~50 hours in; I could still be pleasantly surprised in the endgame), and the protagonist Kliff isn’t going to win any Pulitzers for Pearl Abyss. I found myself audibly groaning at the dialogue on multiple occasions. And while you can fast-forward through the (mercifully short) cutscenes, you can’t skip them entirely. This narrative dearth does noticeably dent the overall experience, especially if you saw the trailers and went in expecting The Witcher 3. It’s not, so temper your expectations accordingly.

However, the game has actually hidden some really deep and meaty worldbuilding underneath its cocktail-napkin plot, and it’s all there for you to discover and soak in if you actually care to explore and meaningfully engage with Pywel’s lore.

Besides, let’s be real for a second here: when you’re evaluating a video game, your main focus should be on the gameplay, not the narrative1 — and on that front, Crimson Desert delivers in spades, in a way that most open world games don’t even attempt (let alone achieve) anymore.

Another recurring criticism is that the game is “not for everyone.” This is a very curious charge to level at any game, because you can’t make a game for everyone. And everyone intuitively understands this, so where is this even coming from? Why do they think people read reviews in the first place? A reviewer’s job is to help readers figure out if they’re the type of player who’d enjoy the game being reviewed!

Making a game for a specific type of player isn’t a flaw, but a deliberate design choice that signals that the developers knew who their audience was and delivered an experience they’d like. And judging by the player counts, sales numbers, and positive player reviews (not critic reviews) that keep growing week over week, I’d say Pearl Abyss very much found its audience.

Patching Pace > Polished Day One

Let’s also give credit where credit is due, shall we? Pearl Abyss has been patching the game at a furious pace, releasing four (!!!) major patches within the first two weeks of release, and the nature of these patches shows that they’re actually listening to their community. Here are some of the things they’ve patched in, all based on direct player feedback:

• Fixed the sprint controls (thank god, my finger was starting to hurt from spamming X so much).

• Nerfed some of the more punishing bosses (as a Souls-like aficionado, I’m far less thrilled about this one, but I get it).

• Added private storage.

• Improved fast travel.

• Fixed the mount system.

• Fixed bug after bug after bug after bug.

Of course, a smoother launch is always more preferable (both for the developers and the players). But for a game of this scale, a few rough areas might well be inevitable.2 And given this context, I’d say the kind of responsiveness Pearl Abyss displayed actually matters more than a fully polished day-one experience; not just because the latter may well be impossible, but because the former signals to players that the studio respects them enough to iterate in real time.

The results speak for themselves, really: Steam reviews went from Mixed at launch to Mostly Positive within days, and are now sitting at Very Positive with an 82% positive rating across over 100,000 reviews. The Metacritic user score climbed to 8.8. And Pearl Abyss’s stock, which cratered nearly 30% on review day, has not only fully recovered but actually exceeded pre-launch levels, hitting 70,200 KRW on March 31, a 7% increase over pre-review prices and the highest the stock has been since April 2022.

While the market panicked, the players kept playing, oblivious to all the noise in the background. And the players, as it turned out, were right.

The Press Keeps Missing the Mark

(Hang tight, I’m going to digress a bit, because it really helps underscore and set the stage for the rest of this piece. Besides, if you understand how the press “thinks” and approaches reviews for different types of games, you’ll be better positioned to anticipate and adapt to how it might review your game. So come, let’s dive down the rabbit hole together!)

Now, I’m just going to go ahead and say this out loud, let the cards fall where they may: a lot of the press coverage around Crimson Desert was transparently disingenuous. Here’s just a small sampling:

• ‘Crimson Desert’ launches to mixed reviews: “Some of the worst controls in modern gaming” (NME)

  • The quote in the headline was cherry-picked from a single Reddit user, not a critic.

• Crimson Desert’s downfall will be caused by its controls if they’re not fixed pronto (NotebookCheck)

  • Note the word “downfall” for a game that was already the #1 seller on Steam.

• Lower-than-expected IGN score for Crimson Desert has fans split as $70 price tag looms (NotebookCheck, again)

  • Folds price anxiety into a review score headline.

• Everyone Agrees Crimson Desert’s Controls Suck As It Struggles To Earn Positive Steam Reviews (Kotaku)

  • This one not only completely frames the piece around the controls, it even dismisses positive reviews as “written in revenge against critic’s (sic) reviews”!

• ‘Crimson Desert’ review: overwhelmingly ambitious open-world fantasy (NME, Review)

  • Gems from this one include "uninspired dialogue," "dodgy controls," "a little tedious," "no real cohesion to this bonkers game," and "painfully undercooked," while simultaneously praising the game's combat, world, and scope.

  • The negative framing utterly dominates this piece, despite the reviewer begrudgingly acknowledging that it's one of the biggest, most ambitious games around.

• Crimson Desert is the Definition of “Not for Everyone” (GameRant)

  • An entire article built around the premise that the game's design choices are a warning, rather than a feature.

• Crimson Desert Exec Responds to Control Complaints (GameRant, again)

  • Frames Pearl Abyss's Will Powers as defensive, rather than explanatory.

• Crimson Desert review roundup: "overstuffed, unfocused, or burdened by too many overlapping systems" (Dot Esports)

  • Closes by noting they can't recommend it at $70 and encourage "deeper research"; an unusual caveat for a game that's the #1 seller on Steam!

But what about the actual reviews? Well, IGN, the world’s largest gaming outlet, gave Crimson Desert a 6 out of 10, while Eurogamer gave it a 3 out of 5. The game’s aggregated Metacritic score landed at 78, which is respectable on its face, but was nevertheless positioned in a way that triggered the aforementioned 30% stock crash and shaped an early narrative of player disappointment.3

And that would’ve been bad enough if it were a one-off thing. But this is just the latest instance where the games journalist class found itself entirely disconnected from (if not oppositional or even downright hostile to) the player audience it ostensibly speaks to and for.

Hey, remember Concord? You know, the generic hero shooter with an infamously hideous character roster that cost an estimated ~$400M4 to develop, only to launch to a laughable 697 concurrent players on Steam before shutting down within two weeks?

Well, IGN gave Concord a 7 out of 10. Yes, that’s right, IGN gave Concord — again, CONCORD, one of the biggest flops in gaming history — a higher score than Crimson Desert, a game that hit 276,000 concurrent players and sold millions of copies. Concord finished with a 63 on Metacritic, but individual outlets like IGN somehow rated it higher than a game that is, by any objective commercial or player-satisfaction metric, orders of magnitude more successful as both a game and a business outcome.

And it’s not just Concord; this is part of a pattern that keeps playing out with AAA launches. When you compare the inflated scores for games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Highguard with the deflated scores for Where Winds Meet, Stellar Blade, Black Myth: Wukong, and now Crimson Desert — as well as the manufactured “controversies” that the gaming press drummed up around those latter three launches (don’t worry, we’ll get to those later) — you have to start asking yourself some very uncomfortable questions.

First on my mind is, what exactly do these publications have against Chinese and Korean studios? What, is that too blunt? Maybe it is. And perhaps a bit uncharitable. But nevertheless, the pattern is sitting right there.

Now, I’m not saying these games are perfect, by any means. No, not even Crimson Desert, which I fully acknowledge has some pretty glaring flaws even after being patched. I completely understand if its janky controls, confusing UI, or steep learning curve dinged its score a bit.

What I don’t understand is why all of those flaws are framed as dealbreakers, when these same outlets gave other massive AAA titles a pass for the exact same issues Crimson Desert had.

Let’s start with the most obvious one: Elden Ring, which IGN gave a perfect 10 out of 10. Now, this isn’t a knock on Elden Ring — I love it, you love it, 45 million players across all platforms love it — but this game offers zero tutorials, no quest log, no map markers, a narrative told almost entirely through item descriptions that 90% of players will never read, and systems so deliberately obtuse that it was literally named the most confusing video game of 2022. Nearly 180,000 people Googled how to play it, because the game refuses to explain itself.

Gee, why does that sound so familiar? Oh, that’s right! Every single criticism leveled at Crimson Desert (obtuse systems, poor onboarding, “not for everyone,” prioritizing gameplay depth over narrative accessibility) applies to Elden Ring in equal or greater measure. But when FromSoftware does it, that’s just Hidetaka Miyazaki’s “visionary design philosophy.” Meanwhile, when Pearl Abyss does it, it’s a failure of basic game design. Got it?

Or take Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (which is actually a closer direct comparison, and is another game I personally loved). Here we have another massive and ambitious open-world action RPG from a mid-size studio (albeit Czech, not Korean). Reviewers — in their own positive reviews — described KCD2’s combat as “clunky,” with an “extremely janky” lock-on camera. It also has deeply obtuse systems that demand significant patience from its players (as well as a very high frustration tolerance), and it doesn’t truly open up until after dozens of hours of gameplay. Oh, and to top it all off, this game also launched with bugs galore.

And yet, the language critics used to praise KCD2 is almost word-for-word the same language they used to bury Crimson Desert: “not for everyone,” rewards patience, rough edges, overwhelming systems, blah blah blah. Still, in spite of all those issues, IGN gave KCD2 an 8.5, while GameSpot gave it a 9 and Destructoid a 9.5.

The same jank, in two different games, evokes completely different vibes and results in totally different scores. KCD2 had some serious rough edges and was the furthest thing from accessible, yet critics framed that as “charming eurojank.” But for Crimson Desert, the exact same issues became “unacceptable in a $70 game.” Are you starting to see what’s going on here?

You could also make a similar case for Starfield, which Game Informer itself called “obtuse” while still giving it an 8.5. PC Gamer’s reviewer admitted it took him a dozen hours to start enjoying it, which you might recognize is the exact same slow-burn dynamic that reviewers treated as a dealbreaker in Crimson Desert.

Furthermore, critics widely panned Starfield’s narrative as “a mile wide and an inch deep,” and noted that its systems were also overwhelming and poorly explained. And of course, since it’s a Bethesda title, you better believe it shipped fully-loaded with Bethesda’s signature jank (but that’s apparently acceptable because Bethesda’s such a household name in gaming). And lo, despite all these noted issues, Starfield scored an 83 to 88 (depending on platform) on Metacritic, and some outlets even gave it a perfect score.

At some point, you have to ask whether these scores reflect the games themselves, or the reviewers’ personal agendas. Actually, maybe that’s a bit harsh. At least, I don’t think every individual reviewer is sitting at their desk, thinking “I’m going to tank this Korean game’s score today!” But I do think something’s going on here… something subtler, and arguably worse.

Over the years, the gaming press has developed an implicit evaluation framework that systematically overweights narrative polish, onboarding accessibility, and adherence to Western design conventions, while underweighting gameplay depth, mechanical ambition, and the kind of “figure it out yourself” design philosophy that many players (myself included) actually prefer.

And this framework happens to advantage studios whose design sensibilities align with the reviewers’ cultural expectations, while disadvantaging studios from development traditions (usually East Asian studios, particularly those from China and Korea) that prioritize different things.

To put it more simply, the game isn’t being reviewed on its own terms. It’s instead being reviewed on the terms of whatever game the reviewer wanted it to be.

And just to pre-empt the inevitable “not all studios/games/reviews/whatevers!” objections: yes, obviously there are outliers and exceptions, and yes, some studios have been “grandfathered” past this. But these exceptions prove the rule!

FromSoftware, itself an East Asian studio, gets a pass because the press has already decided they’re geniuses (which they are, but that’s besides the point). Bethesda, meanwhile, gets a pass because “Bethesda jank” has long been a known quantity that reviewers have made their peace with. Finally, Warhorse gets a pass because eurojank is apparently endearing.

But Pearl Abyss, a relatively lesser-known5 (strike) MMO studio (strike) from Korea (double strike), making its first single-player game (yerrr out!) — a studio without FromSoftware’s pre-built critical goodwill or Bethesda’s institutional familiarity — gets held to a standard that none of those other studios were, for the exact same issues.

In other words, it’s a bias — one that, curiously, the press seems utterly unwilling (or may well be unable) to examine in itself.6

But even assuming all of the above is true, and regardless of the reasons why games like Crimson Desert are reviewed so unfairly, it still represents a failure from the reviewers because reviews are supposed to serve the audience. And if your evaluation framework and cultural biases are systematically misaligned with what your audience values, then you’ve by definition failed at your core function.

And that failure is reflected in the way players see through these reviews, see through these scores, and completely ignore them. Gamers are voting — with their wallets, their time, and their Steam reviews — for games that the critics consistently pan. And this all points to a reality which would’ve been unthinkable during IGN’s heyday at the turn of the 21st Century: the mainstream gaming press has become increasingly irrelevant.

Video game media outlets have pushed themselves so far from the audience they’re supposed to serve that players have simply moved on without them. Instead, they consult YouTubers, Twitch streamers, Substack newsletters (oh, hai!), Discord communities, and good old-fashioned word of mouth from the people they actually trust.

And despite my own gaming industry origin story as a former game reviewer for an actual gaming media outlet, I can’t say I’m shedding any tears for the gaming press. Its troubles are entirely self-inflicted. Reap, meet sow.

Lessons for Game Marketers

Phew, thanks for bearing with me there! Now, I know you read these articles for marketing advice, so don’t worry, there are some really useful marketing lessons here for you (or anyone who cares about how games succeed or fail commercially) at all stages of Crimson Desert’s launch, rise, fall, and second rise.

To start, Crimson Desert did some truly best-in-class pre-launch marketing. Pearl Abyss executed a veritable masterclass in how to methodically build hype — January’s “gone gold” announcement got people really excited for the game, as did the game’s escalating trailer reveals. Will Powers’ strategic PR beats drove the stock up 125% between March 2025 and March 2026, and his team put in a ton of legwork to create and nurture a thriving community that amplified the hype with each cycle. These efforts fed into and reinforced each other, creating boatloads of anticipation among the player base that actually buys and plays games, not just the press that writes about them.

Then the reviews hit, and the narrative briefly soured. But it ultimately didn’t matter, because the players were already locked in; the game’s massive preorders and day-one sales can attest to this. But the studio still moved quickly to repeatedly patch the game, and it maintained a true open channel to the community,7 reinforcing the studio’s relationship with players who were actually in the game. Each patch thus became a new marketing beat that further deepened trust from the community.

Within 10 days, the entire narrative (at least amongst players) flipped, and what was once derided as a “disappointing launch” is now a serious Game of the Year contender.

Pearl Abyss was able to turn it all around because it understands that your relationship with your players is more important than your relationship with the press. If you build something ambitious, listen to your community, and iterate fast, then your audience will carry your message and spread your gospel faster and farther than any review score ever could.

But this leads us to perhaps the biggest question raised by this whole debacle…

Does the Gaming Press Even Matter Anymore?

This question has been brewing and bubbling within the gaming community for years, and now the stark difference between Crimson Desert‘s player reception and that of the mainstream press has made it impossible to ignore. Since the pot has finally boiled over, let’s actually lay it all out honestly so you can decide for yourself whether to lean on the press as part of your own marketing efforts.

Why the Press Still Matters:

It would be the pinnacle of intellectual laziness for me to unilaterally declare that the gaming press is dead just because Crimson Desert sold well despite lukewarm reviews. The reality is that press coverage still exerts influence through several real and powerful mechanisms.

For one, Metacritic scores affect developer bonuses, publisher confidence, and as we just saw with Pearl Abyss, stock prices. A 78 on Metacritic (which isn’t even a bad score!) wiped out nearly a third of a publicly traded company’s value in a single trading session, and people lost real money as a result. Far from an abstraction, that’s an actual hit to people’s nest eggs and retirement funds, not to mention employee, founder, and investor holdings. A drop like that has real consequences, even if the stock eventually recovers.

Additionally, press coverage still shapes the initial narrative window. Instead of the game itself defining its narrative, headlines bellowing about its “mixed reception” and “disappointing scores” shaped Crimson Desert’s first 48 hours of public life. If this were a smaller studio without Pearl Abyss’s built-in hype machine and preorder momentum, that initial portrayal could well have proven fatal.

Unfortunately, indie (and even AA) studios don’t get second chances the way a game with 400,000 preorders does. If you’re a 15-person team releasing your first game and IGN gives you a 6, that number follows you everywhere: on Steam’s recommendation algorithm, in publisher pitch meetings, and in the minds of countless players deciding whether they’ll spend $30 on something they’ve never heard of.

Finally, there’s the discoverability angle. Although indisputably in decline, the gaming press still drives awareness, even if it no longer drives purchasing decisions like it once did. At the end of the day, a bad review from a major outlet is still a review from a major outlet, and for many games, any coverage is better than no coverage.

Why the Press Doesn’t Matter:

Now, all that said, you should also consider that every mechanism I just described is either:

1. Weakening,

2. Eroding, or

3. Being actively replaced by something else.

Let’s start with Metacritic’s influence on stock prices. Yes, Pearl Abyss took a 30% hit at first. But the stock fully recovered — and then exceeded pre-review levels — within just 12 days. The actual sales data and player reception drove the stock’s recovery, which means that the market corrected itself. If anything, the Crimson Desert debacle actually demonstrated that skittish investors erroneously treat lagging indicators like Metacritic scores as leading indicators. The moment actual commercial data emerged, the market’s review-driven panic evaporated into thin air.

In the end, it all worked out for Pearl Abyss, but how many more times does this need to happen before the market stops overreacting to aggregated review scores?

Now, let’s take a look at players’ actual purchasing behavior. Crimson Desert sold 2 million copies on day one, before most players had time to read reviews and after the Metacritic score was already public. Players locked in their preorders after watching the trailers, gameplay footage, creator coverage, and hearing about it through good ole’ word of mouth, and this pattern held strong even as negative coverage accelerated before the patches started coming in. The reviews and their accompanying coverage neither accelerated nor slowed down sales, which functionally made them little more than background noise.

This is far from an isolated case, by the way. Consider the following instances of games that highly resonated with players, and consequently sold like gangbusters, despite a seemingly concerted effort by the gaming press to dissuade them otherwise:

• Black Myth: Wukong was China’s first bonafide AAA release, and a truly stellar game. It sold 10 million copies in three days despite a wave of pre-launch controversy, stoked in large part by the press, that had nothing to do with its gameplay.

• Stellar Blade was a Korean production, featuring a fanservice-tastic female protagonist that ruffled critics’ feathers but players couldn’t get enough of. As such, it vastly exceeded sales expectations, netting 6 million units to date despite similar treatment from games journalists who took issue with the protagonist’s character design (but again, not its gameplay).

• Hogwarts Legacy (the only Western production on this list) was an open-world RPG set in the Harry Potter universe, which made controversy all but inevitable. But it nevertheless became one of 2023’s most well-received and best-selling games despite active campaigns, explicitly political in nature and completely unrelated to its gameplay, by certain outlets to discourage coverage and purchases.

• And now, Crimson Desert (another Korean export) has sold over 4 million units in less than a month despite the stubbornly persistent narrative we’ve just spent an entire article dissecting, fueled by a games media indignant that the game dared to dream big, chart its own course, and focus on the elements that mattered to its audience over those favored by mainstream reviewers.

In each case, the audience made up its own mind and embraced each of these games, rating them highly, shouting their praises on social media, and catapulting them to the top of the sales charts. Each time, players’ enthusiastic reception left the press to write post-hoc explainers about why the game succeeded “despite” the narrative that they themselves had created.

This points to a deeper problem with games media: trust between players and the press has all but evaporated, and people simply don’t take reviewers’ word as gospel anymore. And why would they? When IGN gives Concord (a game that players so resoundingly rejected that it was shut down within two weeks) a higher score than Crimson Desert (which peaked at 276,000 concurrent players, has an 82% positive rating, and is on track to sell 5 million copies), something in the media landscape is fundamentally broken.

Now, you can argue that review scores aren’t meant to predict commercial success, and that’s fair. But they are meant to predict whether a game is worth a player’s time and money. So when reviews and review scores are this consistently disconnected from what players actually experience, the scores eventually stop meaning anything at all.

We’re getting very near that point, and the pattern only makes it worse. When the same outlets consistently score certain types of games higher and certain other types lower, and when those patterns correlate suspiciously well with the reviewers’ cultural politics instead of the games’ quality, players notice. Because players are not stupid.8

And in an era where YouTube, Twitch, and Discord exist, they no longer need someone to spell it out for them. So they just quietly migrate to creators and communities that share their actual values and tastes as gamers, further accelerating the gaming press’ prolonged and agonizing death spiral (as well as all the layoffs, mergers, and enshittification that comes with it).

And once that trust is gone, it doesn’t come back. All of this has some pretty heavy implications for how you market your game.

Where Does All That Leave Us?

When it comes to games media, I think we’re watching an institutional collapse play out in slow motion (kind of like with legacy media as a whole, come to think of it). Though just to be clear, the gaming press isn’t going to disappear overnight; there’s too much infrastructure propping it up and too much inertia keeping it going, not to mention it’s still bringing in enough ad dollars (and pumping out more than enough SEO-driven walkthrough articles) to keep the lights on.

But the media’s role as a tastemaker is already over. This isn’t 2006, and reviewers at legacy gaming outlets are no longer the cultural gatekeepers who tell players what’s good, what isn’t, and what they should spend their time and money on.

The influence once wielded by the IGNs and Game Informers of the world has instead migrated to podcasts, YouTube, Twitch streamers, Substacks, Discord communities, and good old-fashioned word of mouth. Now, these aren’t perfect sources, either; indeed, they have their own biases and incentive structures that can (and often do) color and influence their coverage. But they have something the legacy press has lost (perhaps irrevocably): a relationship with their audience built on shared enthusiasm for games rather than the institutional authority that games media has all but squandered.

So, What Does This Actually Mean if You’re Marketing a Game?

If you’re an indie or AA studio head trying to figure out where to invest your limited marketing budget, the Crimson Desert episode offers a practical blueprint. You don’t need to have Pearl Abyss’s resources (which you obviously don’t have) to replicate their success, because the principles they implemented scale down to any team size and budget.

The general rule of thumb is: still pursue press coverage for the awareness it generates, but invest the bulk of your marketing energy into the channels that actually convert awareness into wishlists and sales.

Those channels are, in order of leverage:

1. Your owned platforms (Steam page, Discord, email list),

2. Creator/influencer relationships, and

3. Community engagement.

Remember, press is the amplifier, not the engine.

Let’s dive deeper and get into specifics.

A. Your Steam page is your most important marketing asset, period. It’s your storefront, your conversion funnel, and your primary discovery surface, all in one. It’s where purchasing decisions actually happen; your game’s capsule art, trailer, screenshots, tags, and description copy are how players actually determine whether your game is compelling enough for them to fork over $30 of their hard-earned money.

However, your Steam page is unlikely to help much with discoverability, which is an important caveat; according to Bain’s 2024 gaming research, 24% of players now discover games through content creators, more than through storefronts directly.

But once a creator sends someone your way, where do they land? Your Steam page. If that page doesn’t communicate your game’s genre, mood, and quality within a few seconds, then you’ve wasted the referral. A good IGN score cannot fix a bad Steam page, but a great Steam page can easily overcome a mediocre review.

B. Creator relationships are your new “press strategy.” And “relationships” are the operative word here, so don’t just spray-and-pray key drops to anyone with a Twitch channel. Instead, identify 20-50 creators whose audiences overlap with your target playerbase, build a genuine relationship with them before you need coverage, and treat them as partners rather than distribution endpoints.

A mid-size YouTuber with 50k subscribers in your genre will drive more wishlists than a 7/10 from IGN, because their audience a) trusts their taste, and b) showed up specifically for recommendations in that niche. Platforms like Keymailer, Lurkit, and Terminals.io actually exist to help you find and manage these relationships at scale, even on a small team’s budget.

C. Community is a compounding asset — and the earlier you build it, the more it’s worth at launch. Pearl Abyss patched fast, but more importantly, they had an active community to patch for. Their community was already emotionally invested in the game’s success and was more than willing to update their Steam reviews in real time as issues got fixed.

But you can’t just manufacture that from scratch in one week. To do this successfully, you have to start at least 12-18 months before launch, in a Discord server where your most engaged wishlisters can see the game evolve, give feedback, and feel ownership over the final product. Those early community members eventually become your unpaid marketing team — they’ll post on Reddit, recommend the game in other Discord servers you’ve never heard of, and defend it in comment sections if the reviews come in lukewarm.

D. And yes, still send review codes to the press. I’m not suggesting you should completely ignore traditional media. Especially for smaller titles, pure awareness is a huge bottleneck, and a feature on PC Gamer or a review on IGN will still put your game in front of millions of eyeballs that might not have found it otherwise. Furthermore, the games media’s walkthrough and guide ecosystem alone (which is where most gaming sites now make their real money) can drive meaningful organic search traffic to your game for months after launch.

That said, you must clearly understand what you’re getting: reach, not endorsement. The press can tell people your game exists, but whether those people actually buy it depends on everything else: your Steam page, your trailer, creator coverage, Discord buzz, and word of mouth. If all of those are strong, a 6 from IGN becomes trivia. But if they’re weak, not even a 9 from IGN will save you.

E. Finally, think of your post-launch patches as marketing beats. This might be the most underappreciated lesson from Crimson Desert’s turnaround. Every patch Pearl Abyss shipped generated a fresh wave of coverage in the form of new articles, new creator videos, and new Reddit threads; and these, in turn, created new reasons for players on the fence to reconsider and increased trust from players that were already playing. Each patch moved the needle on Steam reviews, which in turn fed the algorithm, which in turn drove more organic discovery.

A structured post-launch cadence, with meaningful fixes to actual player pain points, communicated transparently and on a predictable schedule, is one of the highest-ROI marketing moves available to any studio. And unlike a press campaign, you completely control it!

…

And there you have it!

To wrap it all up… the Crimson Desert brouhaha’s biggest lesson may well be that the days when an IGN score could make or break a game are completely behind us.

(And considering everything we’ve just examined today, that’s probably a good thing!)

The studios that understand this, build direct relationships with their players, and treat every touchpoint as a marketing opportunity will thrive in whatever’s coming next for gaming after all the current dust settles.

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

1

Now, that’s not to say that narrative isn’t important, or that John Carmack was necessarily right in comparing video game stories to those in pornos. If you’ve read my sister publication, you know that I greatly appreciate video game narratives and celebrate games that explore deeper themes in their stories.

But I’ve also always maintained that video games are games, first and foremost, and as such, gameplay must always come first (even if the gameplay is as simple as opening doors), and gameplay must always be paramount when evaluating any game. A game can have a terrible story and still be ultimately enjoyable — indeed, many such games are! But a game with terrible gameplay cannot, by definition, provide a good experience.

More thoughts on that here:

Game & Word

Issue 1.2: The Clash of the Game-ologies

Game & Word: Volume 1, Issue 2…

Read more

4 years ago · 6 likes · Jay Rooney

No, unfortunately this isn’t an April Fools joke.

Last Tuesday, Tim Sweeney opened a memo to Epic Games employees with a most dreadful seven words, the kind that nobody ever wants to read from their CEO:

“I’m sorry we’re here again.”

And just like that, over 1,000 people lost their jobs… on top of the 830 who were let go in 2023. Epic is now down to roughly 4,000 employees, close to where they were in 2020 before the pandemic boom drastically inflated headcounts across the entire industry.

As for Epic’s stated reason, they said that Fortnite engagement has been declining to the point that the company now spends more than it makes. And alongside the layoffs, Epic also identified over $500 million in additional cost savings, mostly across contractor, marketing, and unfilled roles.

But something’s not quite adding up… specifically, the fact that Epic brought in an estimated $6 billion in revenue last year.

Yes, you read that correctly: six billion (with a “b”) in greenbacks, just from last year alone. And yet they’re still cutting a fifth of their workforce.

Something is deeply broken in gaming, on a structural level. And if this latest salvo doesn’t prove it, I don’t know what does.

You Can’t Outspend The Engagement Problem

Now, Fortnite isn’t dead. Far from it! In fact, it’s still one of the biggest games on the planet, and it even led February in monthly active users on both PlayStation and Xbox. But the game’s trajectory tells us a different and far more ominous story.

Fortnite’s average monthly playtime dropped from 29 hours in 2023 to just 15.4 hours in 2025 (oof!), while peak monthly active players on PlayStation and Xbox fell 28 percent over the same period (double oof!). Seasonal content updates that used to spike engagement just aren’t landing the way they did, even as recently as in 2023 and 2024.

Meanwhile, Roblox is eating Fortnite’s lunch (and its breakfast, and dinner, and midnight snack), as titles like Grow A Garden and Steal a Brainrot helped the platform hit its peak playerbase numbers in 2025… right as Fortnite’s numbers were sliding.

The times, they are a-changin’, and Fortnite, once the envy of every publisher and a bonafide cultural phenomenon, one of the vaunted few games to break gamer containment and achieve noticeable mainstream cachet, is now losing the battle for players.

But why did Fortnite lose? Well, not because the game got worse (though I suppose this depends on who you ask), but because gamer attention shifted, and its player retention systems simply couldn’t keep up with a changing competitive landscape.

That, at its core, is the marketing infrastructure problem Fortnite is grappling with. And it starts long before launch — the way you build community, create feedback loops, and design your player engagement systems from the ground up will have ripple effects that reverberate later in time. Yes, even after nearly a decade of sustained sales and cultural dominance.

If Fortnite, the game that essentially invented the modern live-service playbook, can’t outrun a structural engagement decline with $6 billion in annual revenue backing it, what makes you think throwing more campaign dollars at a weaker foundation will work for your studio?

It won’t. The bitter truth is that systems beat campaigns, for better and for worse, every single time.

Marketing Is Always First on the Chopping Block

Now, let’s circle back to that $500 million in cost savings real quick.

Take a closer look at the cuts Sweeney’s memo specifically listed: contracting, marketing, and closing open roles. Did you spot it? That’s right: marketing made the list, again. Just like it did in 2023, when Epic specifically cited cutting “operating spend on things like marketing and events” as one of their cost-reduction measures (before ultimately resorting to layoffs anyway).

This pattern constantly plays out across the industry, time and time again, and it drives me up the effing wall every single time.

When revenue is strong, marketing gets the credit. Then, when revenue dips, marketing gets the axe. That’s just the way it is. Marketing is often the first budget cut because it’s usually the easiest to justify in the short term — you can slash marketing spend today and not feel the impact for months. Then, by the time engagement further craters, the people who made the cut are long gone and everyone’s scrambling to figure out why the pipeline dried up.

Cutting marketing spend while your core engagement metrics decline is like turning off your engine to save gas. Sure, you’ll coast for a while, but eventually, you’ll stop. And then what?

The smarter play (and I know it’s much easier to say this from the outside) is to treat marketing like the structural function it actually is, as a system that compounds over time when it’s built correctly, instead of a cost center you scale up and down based on quarterly performance.

Epic’s creator ecosystem actually perfectly illustrates this. Their pivot toward user-generated content drove growth, but at significantly lower margins than first-party content. That was a massively consequential decision on strategic marketing and monetization architecture that Epic should have stress-tested before they made it the foundation of Fortnite’s entire business model, not after engagement started sliding.

“The Layoffs Aren’t Related to AI”

But wait, there’s more! Check out this line:

“Since it’s a thing now, I should note that the layoffs aren’t related to AI.”

Isn’t it interesting that a CEO cutting 20 percent of his workforce felt he had to proactively address whether AI was the cause? Fully unprompted, in the middle of an internal layoff memo?

That really tells us where this industry’s head is at right now.

The games industry is terrified of AI, and not in a rational or measured way. It’s positively petrified, to the point of reflex. Every new layoff announcement carries an implicit question: was it the robots? And every CEO now feels obligated to answer it, regardless of whether or not anyone actually asked.

But you want to know what I think is actually happening here? It’s not that people are afraid that AI is eliminating jobs today (or rather, not in this context; yes, job loss is a real fear, and yes also within gaming, but stick with me here). Rather, the possibility of AI eliminating jobs tomorrow is giving leadership a convenient cover story for decisions that ultimately have nothing to do with technology.

Epic is laying people off because its engagement is in decline while its costs keep rising, which is a big problem because of the studio’s lower-margin revenue models, and all of this is taking place amidst an industry-wide slowdown. That’s it, full stop. But the fact that Sweeney had to say “it’s not AI” out loud once again shows us that AI has become the industry’s new boogeyman, and it makes every new round of bad news feel existentially threatening instead of a normal part and parcel of the cyclical nature of business.

This creates a strategic problem for studio leaders. After all, if you’re too scared to adopt AI tools for marketing, analytics, community management, and player engagement because you’re worried about the optics, you’re leaving materially meaningful efficiency gains on the table (that your competitors without such qualms are quietly picking up). On the other hand, if you rush into AI without a strategy, you burn budget on tools nobody uses, reinforce the narrative that AI is all hype, and risk immolation from your community if word ever gets out.

The correct move, obviously, is to intentionally integrate AI — starting with the functions where AI demonstrably improves outcomes (marketing operations, player data analysis, marketing localization, and community sentiment tracking), while staying away from the areas where the risk/reward is either still unclear or unambiguously unfavorable (anything player-facing).

But that’s a decision that each studio’s marketing leadership has to make.

What This Means for Your Studio

Epic is a gaming giant, so don’t cry for them. They’ll survive this just fine. Hell, Sweeney’s memo even nods to the company’s long history of reinvention: surviving the shift from 2D to 3D, then from single-player to online, and then again from premium pricing to free-to-play. This is very far from their first rodeo.

But most studios don’t have $6 billion in revenue to cushion the blow while they figure out what comes next. Most studios get one shot, maybe two.

So if you’re running an indie studio right now, the Epic layoffs are an urgent signal that you’d do well to acknowledge. Here are a few things to sit with:

Your engagement system IS your marketing system. If you’re treating marketing as something that only happens near launch, you’re already cooked. The studios that survive the next three years are the ones already building community, testing messaging, and creating feedback loops, starting from the earliest stages of development.

Cutting marketing in a downturn accelerates the downturn. When things get tight, the initial instinct is to pull back on spend. But marketing infrastructure (specifically, the kind that compounds) is what keeps your pipeline alive when the market contracts. If you cut it now, you’ll pay for it later. The piper always gets his due.

AI is a tool, not a threat. But only if you have someone who knows how to wield it effectively. The gap between studios that use AI effectively and those that either fear or misuse it will widen dramatically over the next 18 months, and after that point the leaderboard will be fully locked in. Don’t get left in the dust.

You probably don’t need a full-time CMO, but you definitely need a marketing strategy. Epic had hundreds of marketers and still ended up here, so headcount isn’t the answer. The actual answer is having a clear strategy, building the right systems, and retaining senior leadership that connects marketing to measurable business outcomes.

One Last Thing

I work with game studios that are past the startup phase but aren’t big enough for a full-time CMO — the ones in the $2M to $20M range where the founder or a mid-level hire is wearing the marketing hat on top of everything else.

If you read all of this and recognized your own studio in any of it (whether the engagement questions, the AI uncertainty, or the marketing infrastructure gaps), I’d love to talk.

No pitch, and no pressure. Just a 20 minute conversation about where you are and what might actually move the needle:

Let's Chat

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

I’ve been thinking about something a lot lately, and it may seem unrelated to gaming at first glance. But stay with me, I promise it’s relevant!

In Hollywood, nobody (and I truly mean nobody) starts filming a $100 million movie without already knowing:

• Who it’s for,

• How they’re going to sell it, and

• What the campaign arc looks like from first teaser to opening weekend.

The marketing team is in the room during pre-production, and they’re shaping the trailer strategy long before principal photography begins. They’re building audience anticipation as a deliberate, engineered process that runs parallel to making the actual film.

Now think about how most game studios operate:

1. Development starts.

2. Years pass.

3. Budget climbs.

4. Somewhere around month 30 (of a 36-month cycle), someone finally creates a Steam page and starts wondering how to get streamers interested.

The gaming industry is a $200+ billion market, reaching 3.4 billion players worldwide. Yet most of it operates with a marketing maturity that even a mid-budget film producer would find baffling.

I think this is finally starting to change, though. And the signals are… shall we say, interesting.

IO Interactive (the developers of Hitman, now working on a James Bond game) created an entirely new C-suite role in 2025: Chief Marketing & Revenue Officer. This is really quite remarkable, isn’t it? A bonafide C-suite position that puts marketing and revenue strategy on equal footing with production. That’s a studio of roughly 600 people declaring that Marketing leadership belongs at the executive table from day one.

But then, Frontier Developments went even further. Their CMO, Jo Cooke, was promoted to CEO. I repeat: the head of marketing became the head of the entire company, and not just at a scrappy indie upstart, but at a publicly traded studio! (Reports of Hell freezing over, and of pigs flying, are as of yet still unconfirmed). That, to me, is the strongest possible signal that the industry is recognizing what Hollywood internalized decades ago: understanding your audience and knowing how to reach them is essential. To call it a support function is unbecoming; it’s a leadership function.

Good on Frontier for recognizing what’s clear as day, I say.

If you don’t believe me (and I’m sure some of you don’t; after all, the industry has long treated marketing with begrudging lip service, if not outright contempt), then maybe the data will convince you.

OP Game Marketing analyzed over 5,000 games released on Steam in 2024, and they found that publisher-backed games significantly outperform self-published titles across all revenue tiers.

But why do you suppose that is? It’s not because publishers are magic, I can tell you that much. The answer is simple: it’s because publishers (the good ones, anyway) bring marketing strategy, audience development, and go-to-market planning from the start of the engagement. They force the marketing conversation to happen early, and the results speak for themselves.

But self-published studios can absolutely do this, too! However, doing so requires that you treat marketing as a development discipline instead of a launch-week expense. Someone on the team — or advising the team — should be asking positioning questions during pre-production:

• Who is this for?

• What makes it different?

• Where does our audience spend their time?

• What’s the first marketing beat, and when does it land?

Still not convinced? Here’s a stat that should finally hammer this home: VG Insights found that “triple-i” studios (indie studios with over 50 people and more than $50M in revenue) capture 53% of all indie revenue. These are far from the biggest studios, but they are the most professionalized ones. They embed production pipelines, publishing experience, and yes, marketing strategy in their operations, planning campaigns around reveals, demos, showcases, and launch beats… the same way film studios plan around teaser trailers, full trailers, press junkets, and opening weekends.

The rest of the indie world, meanwhile, is competing for the other 47% of revenue. And within that, 85% goes to the top 10% of titles. The math is stark and brutal for anyone trying to ship a game, and damn near impossible for those doing so without any marketing infrastructure.

I know what some of you are thinking: “But Jay, we’re a team of five people! We can’t afford a marketing leader.” And I get that. But ask yourself this instead: can you afford to spend two years making something great that nobody ever finds? Because that’s the default outcome for 75% of Steam releases.

The good news, however, is that marketing leadership doesn’t have to mean a full-time hire! It can be a fractional engagement (oh, hi!), or a consultant who shows up during pre-production to help with positioning, comes back for go-to-market planning, and guides the campaign through launch. The film industry actually runs on this model, tapping specialists who come in for specific phases and bring expertise that the core team doesn’t have.

Gaming is getting there, slowly but surely. And the studios that arrive first will have a structural advantage that only compounds with every successful release.

Your studio could be one of them. But it starts with thinking differently about marketing, and dislodging the marketing misconceptions that the industry has so thoroughly ingrained in us for decades.

How does your team conceptualize the relationship between marketing and development? Are they separate conversations, or integrated from the start? Let me know in the comments.

To your success,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

What does the minimum viable marketing infrastructure look like for a game studio with 10 to 100 people and no dedicated marketing leader? Because that’s just the reality for most indie teams. If you’re an indie founder, chances are you don’t have a CMO, and you might not even have a dedicated marketing person… but you’re still expected to launch a game that gets noticed in a market with over 20,000 annual Steam releases. That’s a very tall order!

So here’s a quick and easy marketing framework you can use. But first, a quick and very much necessary disclaimer: this is NOT a full marketing plan, which is a much, much bigger and deeper conversation (albeit one I’m happy to help you with). This is a skeleton you can build on, whether you’re still in pre-production (ie, the ideal time to start marketing), or six months from launch (not ideal, but still doable).

So, let’s get into it! Copy and paste the framework below onto Google Docs or Notion, and work through it step by step.

Spawn Point Marketing’s Quick & Easy Marketing Framework for Indie Game Studios

Phase 1: Know Your Players

Before you build your Steam page or post a single screenshot, you should be able to answer all these questions in nanoscopic detail:

1. Who, specifically, is this game for? Whatever you do, don’t say “gamers” (yes, obviously you’re targeting gamers, but which gamers?). Don’t even say “FPS gamers.” Go as deep as you can, covering all of the following segmentation categories:

   1. Demographics: Age, Gender, Race/Ethnicity [Includes Language(s) Spoken], Income, Education, Occupation, Lifecycle [Marital Status, Family, Homeownership, etc.]

   2. Psychographics: Activities/Hobbies, Interests, Opinions, Personality, Lifestyle

   3. Geographics: Urban/Rural, Region, Country, State/Province, City

   4. Behavioral: Play habits, purchasing habits, media habits

2. What are they playing right now? Don’t just say “FPS” and call it a day. Go deeper!

   1. Are they playing Battlefield, or are they playing Borderlands? Because each of those games scratches a different type of itch, despite being in the same wider “FPS” genre.

   2. Are they playing new releases, older titles (maybe one they picked up during a Steam sale, hmm?), or both?

   3. $70 games, or $30 games?

   4. Games with particular art styles or narrative themes?

   5. Solo, co-op, or competitive games?

   6. Think about what YOU currently play, and what that says about the type of player you are.

3. Where do these people spend time online? Apply the same general logic you used to interrogate their playing habits:

   1. Do they scroll TikTok for hours on end, or do they wile away the days arguing on Reddit or X?

   2. Instagram or Snapchat?

   3. Do they always tune into a particular streamer, or do they browse IGN every day?

   4. What podcasts do they listen to?

   5. Which forums and Discord servers are they active in? Not just gaming spaces — do they hang out in any anime, comics, or other fandom-related gathering spots?

4. What need does your game fill that nothing else does? What’s a truly novel twist on a proven concept that you can use to position your game with?

   1. If you don’t have one, lock yourself in the conference room with your team and a case of Red Bull, and don’t leave until you come up with one:

      1. “Man, I wish someone would make GTA, but set in Ancient Rome,”

      2. “It’d be fun to play a souls-like knitting game,”

      3. “How would it be like to play Resident Evil, but from a zombie’s point of view?”

   2. Think about Quantic’s 12 Gaming Motivations, and which ones your game fulfills (circle/mark/check whichever ones apply):

      1. Action

         1. Destruction - Guns, explosions, and mayhem (ie, “Blow sh*t up”)

         2. Excitement - Fast-paced and thrilling gameplay

      2. Social

         1. Competition - Anything PvP, or with a leaderboard

         2. Community - Everything from chat to co-op

      3. Mastery

         1. Challenge - The difficulty is the point (Souls-likes are a great example)

         2. Strategy - The genre, obviously, but also anything that involves thinking ahead and rewards good decision-making

      4. Achievement

         1. Completion - When a big part of the appeal is getting all the achievements/collectibles

         2. Power - For those who like maxxing out their character and/or gear

      5. Immersion

         1. Fantasy - Not just the genre; moreso the general opportunity to be someone/somewhere else

         2. Story - Games with a compelling narrative and/or characters

      6. Creativity

         1. Design - Robust character/homebase customization, and also sandbox games; basically, the game is a vehicle for self-expression

         2. Discovery - When your game’s world or mechanics are fun to explore, tinker with, or even break

   3. Then, combine these player motivations with your game’s art style, narrative, sound design, mechanical gimmick(s), and other unique differentiators. Congratulations! You now have a crystal clear idea of what your game — and ONLY your game — can provide your players.

If you can’t answer all of these questions in your sleep, you’re not ready to market yet. You need to do more research first, which means you need to become a veritable gamer anthropologist for your target segment. Start here:

• Talk to players in adjacent communities. They’ll be more than happy to tell you what they’d love to play, if only someone (ahem) would make it. Note: this includes communities for previous games your studio has launched.

• Read Reddit threads and Discord servers for games similar to yours. No matter how niche your genre, chances are your game is not the first on the block. Read what people say about similar games: What did they like? What didn’t they like? How would they improve it?

• Understand what your future audience loves and hates. This alone will go a long way towards averting a very nasty surprise after your trailer drops (or, god forbid, after launch). Consider:

  • You’d be very hard pressed convincing a cozy crowd to pick up a souls-like, but you’d better believe they’d be all over a cat-themed Stardew Valley clone.

  • Some player segments are deathly allergic to anime characters, while others can’t get enough of them.

  • Concord and Highguard bombed because they never got the memo that players writ large are mostly done with new live-service hero shooters, but Marathon seems to scratch juuuust the right itch for juuuust the right type of player.

  • Get the picture? If your game is barking up the wrong tree, better to find that out NOW rather than late in development. To take your audience’s temperature, describe your game’s defining characteristics (core idea, gameplay loop, characters, art style, etc) in a forum or Discord server your target audience hangs out in, and ask for honest feedback. Then take careful note of what people say.

Once you’ve done your research, take your notes and use them to construct a persona for your target audience — basically, write their bio. Don’t write it for your audience as a whole; instead, pretend you’re profiling a single person that’s representative of the segment you’re targeting. Give your persona a full name (“Completionist Carl” or “Souls-addict Sally,” for instance) and make sure you cover everything in this section.

This work takes hours (perhaps many hours), but not dollars. Anyone can do it, and it costs literally nothing! That being said, time is money, so hop to it.

Phase 2: Build Your Home Base Early

Get your Steam page up at least 12 months before launch; Chris Zukowski’s research consistently shows that early Steam pages generate dramatically more sales, and the longer it’s up, the more this effect scales. This doesn’t mean you should set it up on day one (at the very least, you should have some capsule art and a brief description to slap on there; a blank page won’t do you any favors), but generally speaking, you want it up as early as possible once you’re sure about what you’re building and have something to show your players.

Also, set up a Discord server to listen and build a real community around your game. It’s supremely important that you DO NOT treat it as just a broadcasting or announcement channel; this signals that you only want to talk to (if not over) your players and have no interest in talking with them and listening to what they have to say. Gamers have innate, finely-tuned, and military-grade BS detectors; they will see right through it, get annoyed, and turn on you faster than you can say “Fallout 76.”

Finally, start an email list. Yes, seriously! People still use email. If you’re on Substack, you should already know how powerful a targeted and properly cultivated email list can be. If you’re just visiting here from Reddit or LinkedIn, then let me be the first to tell you: a targeted and properly cultivated email list can be insanely powerful. However, growing said list is very much a slow burn (which you’d also know if you’re a Substacker), so get to it and start ASAP! Here are some quick and easy list email list growth hacks to get you started:

1. Create a landing page with an email capture form and your hook/trailer, SEO the hell out of it.

2. Gate your demo or vertical slice behind an email capture form, or deliver it via email.

3. Offer lead magnets like exclusive art packs, soundtrack previews, and other goodies in exchange for player email addresses.

4. Offer in-game incentives like giveaway keys, beta access, or exclusive cosmetics in exchange for email addresses.

5. Run small paid acquisition tests (ads on Meta and TikTok can still be relatively affordable, depending on your niche and genre) for your landing page.

Mix and match these as needed, or come up with your own brilliant idea. You can have a lot of fun with this, so go nuts! Marketing doesn’t have to be boring, you know.

The best part about your Steam page, Discord server, and email list is that they’re owned channels,1 which means they don’t depend on an algorithm; once your players are in, they’re in. And even better still, these channels compound in effectiveness over time!

Phase 3: Plan Your Marketing Beats

Every game needs a campaign arc, just like a film needs a release campaign. The core beats for most indie and AA games are as follows:

1. Announcement/reveal

2. Gameplay trailer

3. Demo (ideally during a Steam Next Fest)

4. Release date reveal

5. Launch

6. First major post-launch update

Space these out as generously as you can. Each one should spike visibility, re-engage lapsed attention, and give your community something new to share. You should also regularly engage the community in between each event — regularly scheduled dev logs and vlogs are a tried and true method of both signaling progress and making your community feel more involved, but if that’s too labor intensive (I get it), even a quick weekly progress report can go a long way.

Phase 4: Measure What Matters

If the FirstLook report we dived into last week taught us anything, it’s that the metrics most studios track are basically useless, if not actively misleading. DO NOT hitch your launch expectations on vanity metrics like follower count, social media impressions, trailer views, influencer coverage, or even wishlists (yes, that’s right, I called wishlists a vanity metric; prove me wrong in the comments).

Instead, track the following behavioral indicators, as they’ll tell you (with far greater fidelity) whether or not your game is actually resonating with the people you’re asking to buy it:

• Demo playtime

• Retention rates

• Discord growth + activity

• Quality of player feedback

A demo with 5,000 players and 40% Day 7 retention tells you far more than 50,000 wishlists without any engagement data. Don’t assume buzz will convert into revenue; a cursory look at the Ballad of Highguard should be more than enough to disprove any misguided notions otherwise.

Set up whichever systems you need to track these metrics, and make sure they’re running without hiccups before you start measuring.

Phase 5: Use AI as Your Multiplier

If you’re like most game developers (specifically 52%, according to GDC), you probably just threw up in your mouth a little, but hear me out. Don’t worry, I won’t tell you to use AI for anything related to making the actual game.

But go ahead and take a look back at the full framework. Sure seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it? Certainly much more than you’d want to do (or even have the capacity for) as a founder or solo dev. In the olden days, you’d need a team of at least five people to competently execute a plan like this.

But it’s the year 2026, and you don’t need five marketing people to do this anymore! AI tools can help with a lot of the operational drudgery that powers a successful marketing campaign behind the scenes. Here are just a few “back office” marketing tasks that AI can take off your plate:

• Community sentiment analysis across channels

• Competitive monitoring

• Content scheduling2

• Review synthesis

• Marketing localization

• Market research

The GDC 2026 survey showed 36% of game developers already use AI in some capacity, while 58% of marketing and PR firms do (a16z’s estimates are much higher, at 76% of game studios). Those numbers are going to climb fast. Regardless of how you personally feel about AI, it’s undeniable that the studios that adopt it now will have a structural advantage over the ones still debating it. It behooves you to bite the bullet and at least try it out.

Besides, less time spent on marketing tasks (like the ones I listed above) means more time spent actually making the game. And isn’t that why you became a game developer in the first place?

Phase 6: Know When You Need Help

There comes a point in every studio’s growth where the founder can no longer be the creative director, the community manager, and the marketing strategist all at the same time. That doesn’t mean you need a full-time CMO — that may well remain beyond your budget. But it could mean a fractional engagement: someone who helps with positioning and go-to-market planning during key phases. The film industry has operated this way for decades, and gaming is starting to catch up.

So, there you have it!

Before I sign off, I want to note that you don’t need a massive budget for this. Most of it you can do for free, paid in nothing but sweat equity and the midnight oil you burn. The few paid portions are optional, and either cost a pittance or put you in control of how much you spend (you can set daily or total budgets for ad campaigns, and a $20/month ChatGPT or Claude subscription will net you more than enough compute for the tasks I listed).

But you do need to be intentional, you do need to start early, and you do need to treat marketing as a proper developmental discipline instead of a post-development afterthought or launch-week emergency.

Marketing is what gets your creation — your labor of love, and that of your team, for the past two years — in front of players so they can enjoy the beautiful game you made (and thus pay you the revenue you need to keep your team’s families fed). Treat it with the respect and gravity it calls for, and it will reward you accordingly.

Best of luck! Now, tell me: what does your studio’s marketing infrastructure look like right now, and where does it feel most fragile? Drop a comment, or grab some facetime with me to tell me more (no pressure, no sales, just an honest conversation about your road to launch):

Book a Free Consultation

To your success,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

Newzoo recently dropped their 2026 PC & Console Gaming Report, and there’s some real juicy nuggets of data in it. The whole thing is worth a perusal, but there’s one particular finding in it that you should be paying real close attention to if you’re an indie developer.

From 2022 to 2025, playtime for games ranked outside the Top 20 on PC grew by 44%.

In other words, the long tail of PC gaming. These are the games that don’t get keynote slots at The Game Awards, the ones that aren’t Call of Duty or Fortnite or Roblox. Those games collectively grew their share of player attention by 44% in just three years.

If data makes your head hurt, let me put that in context.

The Top 20 games still command over half of all playtime across PC and console. That hasn’t changed, and probably won’t change anytime soon. But their grip is loosening. On PC specifically, the Top 10’s share of playtime dropped from 52% in 2022 to 47% in 2025, while on Xbox, Game Pass is distributing playtime far beyond the mega-hits. Even on PlayStation, the most franchise-concentrated platform, the long tail noticeably grew.

So the market isn’t just growing at the top (though it’s certainly growing there, don’t get it twisted). It’s deepening.

And that’s actually really good news for studios that aren’t trying to compete with Fortnite!

Newzoo’s data also shows that the games succeeding outside the Top 20 have a very specific profile:

• They’re overwhelmingly premium (not free-to-play)

• They’re progression-heavy

• They over-index in RPG and Adventure genres

But most critically: their success comes from sustained back-catalog engagement, not just launch-week spikes. In other words, the long tail rewards depth instead of hype.

And the pricing data further reinforces this.

The $30-$50 price segment is the fastest-growing band across every platform, growing 60% on PC, 99% on PlayStation, and 45% on Xbox from 2022 to 2025. Meanwhile, sub-$30 new releases captured 9% of total PC revenue in 2025 — a whopping 156% increase since 2022. This signals a meaningful structural shift in where players spend their money.

But the studios riding this wave aren’t quite the ones you’d expect.

Schedule I was built by a solo developer, and it generated over $150 million in gross revenue, selling 8 million copies to become Steam’s best-rated game in 2025. Meanwhile, R.E.P.O. made $147 million, while PEAK made $87 million. According to analysts, the top five indie releases of 2025 alone accounted for 3% of Steam’s entire game revenue… on a platform that earned a record $17.7 billion last year.

These aren’t flukes or anomalies, by the way. They’re simply the leading edge of a pattern across the entire market, one corroborated over and over by Newzoo’s data.

So… what does this actually mean for an indie studio trying to figure out its next move?

First, the long tail is real, and it’s expanding. You don’t need to be in the Top 20 to build a sustainable business, and games like Schedule I prove it. The top 79 games account for 80% of PC playtime, which means that games ranked 21 through 79 are collectively capturing meaningful, and growing engagement. That’s your competitive space — go and claim it!

Second, the genres that dominate the long tail are the ones indie and AA studios are best positioned to make. The real winners last year were RPGs, adventure games, and other premium, progression-driven experiences with real depth. So please don’t make another live-service shooter, or another battle royale. Just in case Concord and Highguard didn’t convince you, Newzoo’s data actually shows that Shooter playtime fell 5% and Battle Royale dropped 27% in 2025. The data now conclusively shows what players have known for a while now: those genres are in decline. Meanwhile, the genres that are actually growing are the ones where craftsmanship matters more than budget.

Third, pricing power is shifting. The old mental model of “$60 or free” is dead, and honestly, good riddance. The $30-$50 sweet spot is where the real growth is, and even sub-$30 is thriving on PC through breakout indie hits. Studios that price strategically for their audience (instead of just copying what AAA does) are being rewarded in the marketplace.

And fourth (this is the big one), the PC market is structurally diverging from console in hugely significant ways for indie developers. The PC player base is headed past one billion, and PC revenue is forecast to surpass console by 2028. PC is also the only platform monetizing free-to-play effectively. And PC’s long tail is widening faster than any other platform. Fact of the matter is, if you’re an indie studio or publisher and you’re not PC-first in your marketing strategy, you’re swimming against the current, and the incoming riptide is going to drag you far, far away from shore.

Newzoo’s report frames this moment as an inflection point, and I concur fully. Scale alone no longer guarantees outcomes, and the rules that shaped the industry for two decades are being rewritten, before our very eyes, by the people who always held all the power in gaming: the players. Understanding where these players are going, and why, is now a strategic imperative.

If you’re an indie developer or studio head, you now have your marching orders. Go ahead and read the full report if you have a chance; everyone with a game currently in development should be taking it very seriously.

The long tail is expanding. So now, the question is whether you’re positioning to be in it, or still pretending that you need to be in the Top 20 to survive.

What’s your read on this data? Is the long tail a real opportunity for your game, or does it still feel like a consolation prize?

To your success,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

I’ve been reading through an interesting new report. If you’re a studio head, take heed of the uncomfortable truths therein.

FirstLook surveyed 253 senior AA and AAA studio leaders (C-suite executives, VPs, marketing directors) across the US, UK, and EU, and found that 93% of them say they cannot reliably predict whether a game will be a commercial success or failure before launch.

…Whoa. I’m honestly kind of speechless. Think about what this means for a second. Almost nobody knows whether their game will succeed or not, despite tracking wishlists, monitoring trailer views, analyzing social media engagement, and generally having more marketing data at their disposal than at any other point in gaming history. The industry is practically drowning in metrics, yet is still flying blind.

But wait, there’s more!

The report also found that 76% of studios have, based on pre-launch signals, believed they had a hit on their hands… only to watch the game underperform. And on the flip side, 83% have worried a game looked weak before launch… only for it to exceed expectations.

So, basically, 3/4s of studios have been fooled by false positives, while false negatives have fooled more than four out of five. The metrics most studios are tracking are so imprecise as to be actively misleading.

I’ve been saying for a while that vanity metrics are killing game marketing strategy (indeed, digital marketers in other industries have long figured out to ignore them), but I didn’t have numbers this stark to back it up. Now we do.

So… what actually works? Fortunately, FirstLook’s data also tells us. Let’s have a closer look!

When studios were asked which early indicators were most commercially meaningful once players actually got hands-on with a game, their top responses weren’t wishlists or trailer views, but rather hours played (cited by 41% of respondents), replay rate (30%), and Day 1/Day 7 retention (29%). In other words, behavioral commitment — not passive awareness — predicts revenue.

And here’s yet another bombshell finding: for surprise sleeper hits that exceeded expectations, studio heads identified Discord community growth as the number one unseen success factor. A full 48% (ie, nearly half) of studios cited it, outranking YouTube views, social engagement, press coverage, and yes, wishlists.

Oh, and it gets better (worse?). Discord growth is the single best predictor of a sleeper hit, and most studios don’t even measure it properly! Only 40% of studios currently track their Discord community in a structured way. So here we have industry’s most reliable early warning system for commercial success, and most of the studios that need it most are completely ignoring it!

The power of Discord growth as an indicator actually makes intuitive sense when you think about what it really represents. If you’ve ever joined a Discord server, you know it isn’t a passive action. It’s not like hitting “Add to Wishlist” on Steam while browsing during a sale, nor is it like clicking “follow” on an Instagram profile. Joining a Discord server means someone took the effort to seek out your community, committed to being there, and is actively engaging with other people who care about your game. Think about the difference between someone glancing at your restaurant’s menu on Yelp, and someone making a reservation and telling their friends to come, and you’ll get a sense of the difference in effort and commitment involved.

Eden Chen, FirstLook’s CEO, put it well when he said that the teams that win are measuring commitment over chasing vanity metrics. And this has enormous implications for how studios should be thinking about marketing from day one.

If wishlist count alone doesn’t predict success, then optimizing purely for wishlist volume is misallocating your marketing effort. Clearly. Now, it’s not that wishlists don’t matter — they clearly do, as one signal among many. But they’re a top-of-funnel awareness metric, and awareness without intent is just noise.

If hours played, replay rate, and retention are the real commercial indicators you should be paying attention to, then your marketing strategy needs to work backwards from the quality of your engagement. That means treating your demo as a measurement tool in addition to a conversion tool. Once your demo drops, ask yourself:

• How long are people playing it?

• Are they coming back?

• Are they telling their friends?

Those signals, whether during a Steam Next Fest or a public beta, are worth far more than any wishlist count.

And if Discord community growth is the number one indicator for sleeper hits, then community building isn’t a “nice-to-have”; it’s quite possibly the most important thing your marketing team should be doing during development. And proactive, effective community building involves far more than just posting announcements and running contests. You have to build a place where your future players want to spend their time and talk to each other about your game. That’s active demand, and what becomes the signal in the noise.

I keep coming back to a theme you’re going to hear me harp on repeatedly in these pages (so apologies in advance for that, but it’s really important and it absolutely bears repeating until you’ve fully internalized it to the point of reflex): you’ll only have the data you need, and have it when it matters, if you treat marketing as a pre-production discipline instead of just a launch-week expense.

After all, you can’t measure Discord community growth if you don’t even have a community yet! And you similarly can’t evaluate demo retention if you haven’t built a demo and put it in front of players. Also, if your Steam page went up three moths before launch, you’re not going to be able to meaningfully track engagement signals. That’s not enough time. You need at least six months, and preferably closer to 18 months, at minimum.

Because it’s not like the 93% of studios that can’t predict success are lacking data; they have more data than they know what do with. They’re simply measuring the wrong things, at the wrong time, using the wrong framework.

Your marketing leadership needs to know which signals matter, when to measure them, and how to act on them. This isn’t a luxury for studios with big budgets, by the way — the fractional model is increasingly putting that caliber of marketing leadership within reach of teams of all sizes. Take advantage of this, because it’ll determine whether your studio is one of the 76% that got blindsided by a false positive, or one of the lucky savvy few that knew exactly what they had before shipping.

What metrics does your studio trust most before launch? And has one of your games ever surprised you (in either direction), despite what the data said?

To your success,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

Capcom’s been on cooking lately, and Resident Evil: Requiem may well be their best dish in recent memory.

But Capcom didn’t just ship an excellent game. They also shipped a well-oiled, finely-tuned marketing system that serves as an example for any developer charged with the unenviable task of marketing their game in an increasingly crowded space. It’s a veritable masterclass in foundational marketing principles that most studios (and honestly, most companies writ large) have forgotten.

The results speak for themselves, really: six million copies in 17 days, the fastest any Resident Evil title has ever reached that milestone. For context, RE4 Remake took three months just to hit five million, while RE Village took five months. Requiem blew past five million in under a week, kept accelerating, and still shows no signs of slowing down.

The game’s peak Steam concurrent players hit 344,214 — more than double the franchise record set by RE4 Remake’s 168,191 players, and higher than RE2, RE3, and RE4 Remake combined. In the UK, PC accounted for 36% of launch sales, up dramatically from previous entries (which were primarily PlayStation events); in fact, analysts estimate that Steam alone drove over half of total unit sales globally.

And yeah, the game itself is phenomenal. I picked it up myself ahead of GDC because the buzz was impossible to ignore, and so far, I reckon it’s earned every last bit of it.

But despite what industry common knowledge would have you believe, “just make a great game” isn’t a marketing strategy. Plenty of amazing games die in obscurity every single day on Steam.

If you don’t believe me, simply apply some logic for a second: in a space where over 20,000 titles launch every single year, but with only so much gamer attention to go around (and let’s not forget that video games are also competing with Netflix, TikTok, and good old-fashioned doomscrolling on X), it’s practically inevitable that most games will fall by the wayside. Yes, including many great ones.

So, how did Capcom beat the odds? Part of it is, undoubtedly, strong brand recognition. And I’ll grant that it’d be practically impossible for any title in a franchise as iconic as Resident Evil to fail in the same way many indies do.

But would Requiem have broken the records it did if Capcom just released it into the wild, with no marketing support whatsoever? Absolutely not.

So again, how did they do it?

By building a lean, mean, 18-month visibility engine, with strategic beats at every major inflection point in the gaming calendar. And when you look closely, the playbook maps almost perfectly onto foundational marketing theory — the kind of stuff that’s been in business textbooks for nearly a century, but most game developers ignore in practice.

Let’s break it down.

Ansoff’s Matrix: Market development in action

Igor Ansoff’s growth matrix gives companies four strategic options for increasing their sales:

1. Market Penetration: sell existing products to existing customers

2. Product Development: sell new products to existing customers

3. Market Development: sell existing products to new customers

4. Diversification: create something entirely new

Capcom’s Requiem campaign is a textbook example of market development: taking a proven franchise and systematically expanding it into new customer segments.

Ever since 2017, Capcom announced every new Resident Evil title at a PlayStation event. But Requiem broke that pattern, debuting at Summer Game Fest — a multiplatform show.

Why? Because PC is where growth is happening. And Capcom’s platform shift signaled to an entirely new segment of potential buyers that Resident Evil was coming to meet them where they already were.

But Capcom was just getting started! In September, Capcom announced that Requiem was coming to the Switch 2, tapping into decades of Nintendo-Resident Evil history going back to the N64 era. Then came brand partnerships with Nvidia, Porsche, Hamilton watches, and Fortnite; each partnership reached audiences who might never have even considered playing a survival horror game before.

Most studios and publishers announce where they’ve always announced, but Capcom announced where their next customers actually were. That’s market development, and it paid off with a platform split that would have been unthinkable even just a few years ago.

AIDA in 18 Months

The AIDA model — Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action — is one of marketing’s oldest frameworks. It’s also one of the most frequently botched in gaming, where many studios (and even some publishers, who really should know better) compress the entire funnel into a six-week launch window and wonder why their conversion rates are so terrible.

But not Capcom! They stretched the funnel across 18 months and gave each stage its own dedicated moment:

Awareness

Requiem’s Summer Game Fest reveal in June 2025 introduced new protagonist Grace Ashcroft with a trailer that also flashed Raccoon City, casting the widest possible net. Requiem was the most talked about game of the show, and by month’s end, wishlists had surged past one million.

Interest

Gamescom and PAX demos in August finally put the game in players’ hands, and September’s Switch 2 announcement via Nintendo Direct generated a fresh wave of coverage that expanded interest to an entirely new hardware audience.

Desire

The Game Awards reveal in December brought back Leon S. Kennedy, arguably the franchise’s most beloved character. More than just fan service, this reveal was strategically timed to convert passive awareness into active anticipation heading into the new year. Requiem was once again the most covered game of the show, and hit the highest trailer views.

Action

In early 2026, Capcom ramped up with a standalone broadcast, appearances in Nintendo and Sony digital events, and those aforementioned cross-industry brand partnerships. By launch day, Requiem was the second most anticipated game of 2026 by every measurable metric — wishlists, social engagement, trailer views, and press coverage. Only GTA 6 was ahead (naturally).

———

Each beat generated press, buzz, and excitement, and these compounded with each new announcement, reaching a wider audience while reinforcing commitment from people already in the sales funnel.

Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (STP)

Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (STP) is marketing 101, but it’s remarkably rare to see it executed well across a single campaign. Capcom, however, pulled it off by treating each major reveal as a segmented communication to a different audience — while, crucially, never alienating the core.

The Summer Game Fest reveal targeted the multiplatform and PC-curious crowd. The new protagonist, Grace Ashcroft, created an entry point for players unfamiliar with Resident Evil lore — she’s an FBI analyst, introverted and easily scared, a deliberate contrast to the franchise’s traditional action heroes. As such, new players could identify with her.

The same trailer included glimpses of Raccoon City — targeted squarely at the existing fanbase who’d instantly recognize it. Two audiences, one piece of content, no compromises.

Meanwhile, the Nintendo Direct announcement specifically targeted the Nintendo audience, leveraging platform nostalgia. The Game Awards Leon reveal targeted the hardcore, long-tenured Resident Evil faithful, while the Fortnite partnership reached a massive Gen Z audience that might never visit a gaming news site.

Consistent brand positioning was the common thread through all these different segments and touchpoints. Capcom always presented the game as a premium survival horror experience — that never shifted. Only the entry points changed.

Diffusion of Innovation

Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory describes how new products spread through a population:

1. Innovators

2. Early adopters

3. Early majority

4. Late majority

5. Laggards

Capcom’s rollout mirrors this curve quite precisely:

The Summer Game Fest reveal and early media hands-on captured the innovators — the press, content creators, and hardcore fans who actively seek out new information. These people drive early wishlist numbers and generate the initial wave of coverage.

The Gamescom and PAX demos captured early adopters — players who want to try before they commit, and who spread word-of-mouth through their communities.

The Game Awards Leon reveal and the escalating brand partnerships through early 2026 activated the early majority — mainstream gamers who buy based on accumulated buzz, strong review scores (Requiem currently holds an 88 on Metacritic), and social proof.

The Switch 2 launch and the Fortnite collaboration began pulling in the late majority — people who might not typically buy a horror game, but got curious from Requiem’s sustained visibility and cross-platform accessibility.

Each phase built on the last, and no single moment carried the launch’s entire weight.

Product-Market Fit = Everything

Now, I should mention that none of this marketing machinery would have worked if the product itself didn’t deliver. And Capcom deserves credit for this beyond the marketing team.

Requiem was designed for broad appeal without sacrificing the franchise’s unique identity. Multiple difficulty settings accommodate newcomers and veterans alike, while real-time switching between first-person and third-person perspectives lets players choose their preferred experience. The dual-protagonist structure (Grace’s survival horror tension alongside Leon’s more action-oriented combat) gives the game two distinct gameplay modes that appeal to different player motivations.

These are the 4 “P”s of Marketing, working in harmony:

• The product was built to serve multiple segments.

• The price held at the standard $70 premium tier, signaling confidence and quality.

• Place was multiplatform from day one: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Switch 2, all at the same time.

• And promotion was the 18-month drumbeat we’ve been dissecting.

When all four Ps align, that’s when you sell six million units in 17 days.

So, what does this mean for studios that aren’t Capcom?

Yes, I know Capcom is a massive publisher, and Resident Evil is one of gaming’s most iconic and storied franchises.

But you don’t need Capcom’s budget to apply Capcom’s logic, nor do you need Resident Evil’s brand recognition to get Resident Evil-sized results! The principles actually scale down quite beautifully.

Here’s how:

1. Start your marketing when development starts, not six weeks before launch — Capcom’s funnel ran for 18 months, a full year and a half before launch! Meanwhile, most indie (and even quite a few AA) studios treat marketing as a post-production afterthought. But the data consistently shows that Steam pages that go live six or more months before launch generate dramatically more wishlists and opening-week sales. If your marketing starts in pre-production, your audience has time to move through every stage of the funnel naturally.

2. Follow your audience to where they actually are – If your players are on TikTok and Discord, then your announcement doesn’t belong in a press release. Capcom broke a decade of tradition and precedent because the data told them that PC was growing. Ask yourself: what is the data telling you about where your players spend their time?

3. Design your campaign as a sequence of compounding moments, not a single launch spike. — Every touchpoint should expand your reach while deepening existing interest. Map your reveals and announcements to the AIDA framework, and give each stage of the funnel its own moment.

4. Segment your audience and speak to each segment individually — You can reach multiple audiences with a single game, but not with a single message. Identify who your different player segments are, and craft touchpoints that speak to each of them. However, you must keep your core positioning consistent.

5. Build a system, not a campaign – Campaigns end, but systems sustain. Capcom didn’t run a Requiem marketing campaign; they built a Requiem marketing engine that generated compounding momentum over a year and a half.

That last part is exactly what I help indie devs with: building marketing engines that create sustained momentum (and sustained sales) instead of one-and-done launches. If this sounds like something you’d like for your upcoming (or existing!) game, book a call with me at the link below! I’d love to hear what’s working (and what’s not) in your studio’s marketing:

Book a Free 20-Minute Consultation

What’s one game you think nailed its marketing rollout… or completely botched it? Drop it in the comments!

To your success,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

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