'Steam is a supermarket, and your game is beans' - A guide for reluctant marketers
What even is marketing?
That's the question Hannah Flynn, Izzy Jagan, and Lou Jones started their talk at Develop Brighton with.
In a conversation with the audience entitled 'What games marketing actually works in 2024?', the trio explored different aspects of the craft.
Jagan, global PR manager at Square Enix, posited that no one really knows what PR and marketing is because it's such a broad topic. She added that it's a lot more creative than people assume.
Jones, senior campaign manager at Yrs Truly, concurred, saying the job can go from admin and stats to "absolute creative joy."
"There really is a lot of joy in marketing because you're speaking to people and people are inherently kind and happy, most of the time," they said. "And that's what you really want to speak to. So I think any conception you have that it's dry and that it's sort of unreachable, leave that out of the door. We don't want that. We're all about the people here!"
In a segment of the talk, the speakers addressed people in the audience who needed to self market their game, and in particular those who are doing so begrudgingly.
"If I was to share one thing especially to devs that are reluctantly marketing; I know it's the last thing you want to be doing," Jones said. "You know, no one sets out to make a game [saying], 'I can't wait to market this, I'm so excited'.
"Often I get devs coming to me and they're like: how much should I spend on influencers? Should I be going to events? Should I do all this? These big great ideas of what marketing stuff they need to do. And the question I ask them is: do you know what your game is? Do you know how to talk about it? What's one sentence that will summarise your game? And a lot of the time they don't have that foundation because you almost skip that step, because the other stuff looks so flashy.
"But if you don't have that foundation of messaging, all of that other stuff is going to be wasted effort on your part because it's gonna fall apart."
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