The Marketing Money Talk: How to Budget Your Indie Game's Promotion Campaign

Thank you so much for coming, especially because there's a Zelda talk next door. So if you're here, I feel very honored. Um I'm sure you're all gonna watch on the world.

Uh Let's talk about marketing money. Ok, let's dive right in. Today's talk is about how to budget your Indie games promotion campaign.

Um And the main reason why I'm giving this talk is because it's one of the most asked questions when I talk to Indie devs, it's self published for the first time to talk to publishers. They won't understand budgeting and also people that just make their first commercial game. Um To be honest, when I started writing this talk, I pretty quickly figured out why there isn't that much online resources about that specific topic.

Um In my research, I found a picture that pretty much like summed up what it feels like trying to make a talk about India games, marketing, budgeting and not to be dramatic, but it's quite similar to that because really when you ask, what is a good marketing budget, you might as well ask how long is a piece of string? It's a question that's super hard to answer and it wasn't easy to, you know, give like a default cookie cutter solution. So I hope in this talk, I can give you a guideline that you can follow.

But all I would say, like take it with a grain of salt. Those things really depend on the game. Um, before we dive in further, just a reminder to please fill out the evaluations after and also please turn off your phones.

Ok. The second reason we're giving a talk about budgeting isn't that easy is money is weird and you probably, you probably know those things, but I do want to highlight them again. Um Money really depends.

It's usually different. It gets you different far depending where you are. Like if you talk about the salary in the bay area compared to like a remote island, it's super different, especially in Indie, you're gonna wear a lot of hats.

There's people that can do their own Tik Toks, they can do their own press outreach. You may have to pay for that if that's not your cup of tea. So there's like a huge spectrum of like budgets that can result from that.

Also money changes, you know, prepa inflation goes up, all that kind of stuff. Probably by the time this talk is over, the numbers are outdated. So like, you know, I want to give you a rough guideline, but those things will change over time, the table of content for today.

Some housekeeping then we talk about free spice. It takes about Indie game budgeting rules. The main part of the talk is like a 10 step kind of like hierarchy where I would recommend to spend the money on.

It's kind of your best return on investment. So you start with the first one, spend your money on that and then once a sudden you move on to the next one and the next one, next one And then we've got a summary in the end. Who is this talk for?

It is for developers that make premium indie games for PC N console, like your classic 5 to $20 games. Um It's not meant for, you know, big investment companies that maybe publish quite a few games that publish 30 games per year. They're gonna budget differently or like bigger publishers, their budget is more gonna be like allocated and to see what sticks and what works.

This talk is more aimed at people that do old school game development, they make a game, they put some money in and they want to get more money out. So it's like the goal being profitable. Um And it's also not super aimed at people that make free to play games or mobile games, they work quite differently because you have to buy a lot more ads.

Um And also to bring it back to the analogy from the beginning, often when I think about indie games, I think about them, they're quite similar to a restaurant or a kitchen, how they are run, especially, you know, the, the people that make the food, the food is your main ingredient. If the food isn't good, the restaurant's not gonna work. If your game isn't good, it's not gonna work.

But there's a lot of stuff around it. Like you can have staff, you can have a nice ambiance. You can have nice cutlery, you could have online bookings, you could have more parking space.

There's a lot of stuff you could do to get an advantage. There's also a lot of potential to overspend. And I think it's similar for indie games.

There's so many things you can, you could spend money on, but not all of them are gonna get you the best bang for your buck. And I think especially in indie games, if you're self funded, you need to be super, super careful to not overspend and then don't have a return. And I think it's also the classic thing if you would see a restaurant or a nightclub that looks always busy and then suddenly goes bust.

I think the same thing can happen to indie games. They look like it doesn't apply to like super hits that make millions. But like in the mid range where they're like, oh, they got like a few 100 used to look decent, but maybe if they spend too much money, they're not super profitable still.

So this talk is really aimed at people. You know, we want to get the most out of your budget if you make a small in the game. Um Also how to include in a talk like that is like hidden de costs.

For example, if you make a demo to be in Steam fest, obviously, that's kind of a marketing expense, but it's also development time. So those things are quite hard to quantify. So would keep those in mind those will occur as well.

If you make the game yourself a few words about me. My name is Thomas Reser. I'm the co-founder of future Friends games.

I did account and I worked on around 10 million games. I think like I've been in the industry for over 10 years. We do a couple of different things.

We do publishing, which is published a game called Summer House. We work in Laar Xo one and no, but we, we also a self publish provider. Like we help with different services with like press, with social media, um with consulting, we make store pages, we work on stuff like vampires survivors or what the goal.

So we do also work on different indie games, which was kept helpful for this talk, like the data, the knowledge in this talk comes from my brain, like experience from team just working loads of games over the years. I also did an online survey where about 30 people provided extra data and then big big, thank you. To a lot of smart people to help me out with more hot tech um special.

Shout out to Derek Luke Guilty and ICO partners player two pr pop agenda, Rukum Rocker play super media and yours truly, they were like super helpful for sharing data. So I get a broader picture of, you know what budgets look like. Ok, let's dive in free indie game budgeting rules to live by.

That might get me into trouble. Let's start with number one, I think like taking a certain percentage and saying that's my total marketing budget. You know, that's the budget is 100,000 20% is a marketing budget.

That can be like a rule of thumb. You will often hear those ranges between being between 20 to 40. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less.

I get it as a big company. It can make sense to get some kind of idea. I think for a small company, you just need to see what you actually need and then don't spend more than that and don't spend less than that.

And that's what we're doing today. Like go through a checklist, what you might want to spend your money on. I think planning your budget is great.

I think sticking to it. Terrible idea. There were so many instances over the years where we had to really win or make games successful because we were flexible because we had a little bit of extra room to like take up opportunities.

For example, that's a game we published called X one. Um And that game was right in its promotion, main promotion cycle when tiktok for games started becoming a thing. So suddenly we shifted loads of resources there because we got millions of views.

And then we had to delay the games a few times because of technical difficulties. And that randomly got us a game pass deal because suddenly there was a window open. So I think like being open as an Indie and then being able to change your budget once you figure out what works is super important.

Also, I feel like when people say with enough marketing budget, every game can be successful, I think that's just not very true. I will always see marketing as a multiplayer. And what I mean by that I can show you here, let's say you've got a highly market game that people really like you announce it and you know, your following goes up, your wish list, go up, it's great.

And then you put marketing muscle behind it, you do social media, you do press all that kind of stuff and it's a multiplier and suddenly you grow even faster. But then let's say it's a bit more unlucky. You have a game that doesn't resonate so much with players, you're gonna announce it, it's gonna be a bit more flat and then you put marketing money behind it and obviously it's still a multiplayer.

But the curve is more this instead of this. So I would always keep that in mind. Marketing can be really helpful.

It's not gonna be like your saving grades if the game just doesn't resonate with players. Ok, let's get into the main bit. Let's get into the budgeting hierarchy.

So the idea is making a list of what's the best return of investment, where do you get the best value for money? Um start at the top, work your way down. There's two ways how you could do it.

One that's actually in real life, how we see it. Mostly people have a certain amount of marketing budget and then they work their way down until they run out. Some, you know, sometimes you come to number three, sometimes you come to number eight, you might be a bigger company and you run until 10 and beyond.

And the other approach is if you start out and you don't know your budget yet, you know, take notes for each phone and see how much you would need. And that might give you an idea of how much money you should raise for your marketing. Top 10 points.

Let's go. Number one is first party support. What I mean by that?

If you open your playstation, you go into the Playstation store, you will see different games featured and sometimes it's Indie games and that's great because there's a lot of playstations. Sometimes you can get social media support from first party like Nintendo and Xbox and Steam or you see different Steam features like being the popular upcoming list getting a pop up banner on Steam. Those things are super valuable and I can't overstate how valuable they are.

This is different multipliers. It's not super scientific, but that's like roughly what reach different channels could get you. And you see on the very right, the first part is to us they've got a massive reach and actually in real life, it's probably more like that.

They have crazy reach. There's nothing else you can do to match that. Which sounds great.

Well, now we talk about how you get first party support, which is less great because it's not easy because it is so good. There's a different approaches you could take number one, you could do it. That means you turn a wish wish list, you try to get them, you talk to Sony, you talk to Nintendo, you email them when it's a game announcement.

You ask if you can be in a showcase, if you can get social media support, you could also get an agent or a publisher to do that. They probably will take a ref share or a certain amount of payment or you could be lucky and just make a really good game and hope that works and that sometimes work, but usually doesn't. So I wouldn't recommend that.

So the main thing here, this is a super hard one to put money on because it could be zero. If you do it, it could be infinite if you know, a publisher takes most of the money and then you don't recoup. Um I think the important thing is here.

Just do it, make sure it's covered. That's like the one thing you shouldn't ignore, like don't do loads of tweets but never like email Nintendo or something if you make a switch game. Um The second thing you should definitely do super high up.

The list is the Steam the Steam Store page or like any console store page. Even if you do nothing else, this is going to get a massive amount of traffic. Um and most people that will ever see your game, they will just find it in an online store again.

That's why first party support is so important. What you're gonna need on your store page. Let's go through that.

You're gonna need a nice key art capsule art that really communicates what your game is. Sometimes studying the house. If you do it with a freelancer or an agency, it can cost between $505,000.

Again, don't sue me if it costs less or more. If you want to work with a specific expert, it will be more expensive or like a famous artist. If you go on five and pick the cheapest option, it will be cheaper.

But obviously the quality will vary a lot. The second thing you can do in the store page is a trailer and that's a few clips from trailers and that should make clear how different trailers can be, you know, just gameplay, it could be animated, it could be a VR trailer, but we actually see some like real actors. So there's a huge range what a trailer could cost, but they are super important.

They are one of the main things that people look at a new store page and you're gonna need them for loads of other marketing stuff as well. Here's a few different prices for trailer could cost. If you go super duper cheap, they can cost like 500 to $1000.

That usually means you do your own capa, you write your own script, you just bring it to someone who knows how to edit a video and they put it together for you often for indie games. We see like the second one, the second range, the simple trailer, it's often like in the free for a $5000 range where you will probably get some capture. They will help some with the script.

You probably work with them and get like a quite decent trailer. It goes up if you go to experience trailer editor that makes like a more premium trailer, it can go into like the 5 to $10,000 range. That means they will do more capture.

They probably provide more marketing insights, they're going to help with the script, they're gonna help you pitch the game, you can more hand it off to them. And if you go for super fancy trailer, if you go with a pro where you just, you know, to give them the game and they just give you a great trailer back for a big agency. They can cost a lot more.

It can cost 10 to 50,000 even more if there's actors involved. So mixed reality and stuff like that. So there's a huge range but they should give you an idea of what the trailer costs.

How many trailers do you need? Usually 1 to 3 for a small game, usually one bigger indie games often have an announcement trailer, a release date trailer and a launch trailer or in the middle, a gameplay trailer maybe. Um some games and a lot of showcases are big.

I have 56 trailers, some even more. Obviously, at some point, it gets a bit of silly territory because you can't show that many different things about your game. What else you gonna need on the store pages?

Screenshots super important. But I don't know anyone who's just paid specifically for screenshots. So it's usually done in house or the trailer person helps you or your marketing person does it or you do it, you're gonna need a store description.

Um Again, this is something that's often done in house by the writers. It's often done by the marketing team or yourself if you wanted to get freelance help, prices vary a lot. But what we've heard a lot is like, you know, cheap go $500 real experts that maybe do like a bigger branding, write you more stuff.

It can cost a few $1000 to get this done nicely. We also gonna have T and back and stuff on the steam page on the eshop and so on. Um, again, usually done in house.

A lot of people read really good newsletters, especially Game Discover Go and how to market the game are really, really great for that highly recommended. Um If you get an expert, sometimes, you know, they will just give you a little bit of feedback. Sometimes to write the whole thing.

Prices can vary for like the low hundreds to like a few $1000 if you want to get support with optimizing your store page. And the last thing on the store page that I would really recommend spending money on is localization. Super super important.

If your game is localized, localized store page as well, can make a huge difference, especially in China. Prices can vary. If you go to A I fan translation, Google Brave could cost, nothing, could backfire a lot.

If you go to a localization agency, you often see like prices with like six cents to 21 cents per word. Super depends on is, do you have a lot of puns? Um How many words do you have a game.

What's your turnaround time? What languages do you need? But that's kind of the range, I would say like a bigger premium indie game.

Often these days aims for like 8 to 10 languages. Again, big disclaimer. If you have got a massive narrative game, you maybe can't do that because it's gonna cost thousands and thousands per language.

If you get a racing game, which says the word is press start and select car, you could probably do all the languages. The next thing I would spend money on is ongoing marketing planning support. Um So now we've covered like the super basics the first two points.

Now we actually want to plan what we want to do actively to promote the game and setting the right goals is super important. There's two things I would like to avoid at all costs to miss. There's this event deadlines for online events we're gonna talk about in a minute.

They can be a really great multiplayer and first party deadlines. If you miss them, you've just missed them. There's no going back.

This can be really expensive mistakes. And again, I would also recommend being flexible. There's a few ways how you can go about this.

You could do your own marketing plan. You know, you read the newsletters, you talk to Indies, you try to figure it out, you could hire a marketing person. You could also have an agency on Apr retainer usually costs low thousands to like 10 thousands or you could do some consulting with an expert.

This will usually depend how often you want to talk to them, how much input you need. It's kind of one of those things where just make sure it's covered, make sure you've got enough input. So you know what's going on?

Number four, attending online events, it's a really big trend at the moment. It's a great multiplayer. Like I can't recommend this enough.

We're talking about like wholesome Direct PC Gaming show. The mix in the world. The first party showcases being in those events is a huge reach boost.

You often get a great steam feature. They have good social media following. They will be on IGN on games sport.

They are really good value for money. Um Simon Carla did a really good list of like different tiers of what those events are and how much reach they get and they also really vary in prices. So one thing they usually need is a new trailer.

So you need a trailer that costs money and there's different admission fees might be low hundreds, mid tier, often 2 to 10,000. If you go to big one, it could go 50,000 to 300,000 to above that. The prices vary a lot depending on if your game is cool.

If they wanted to be in there, how long your video should be or like your asset that you have in there um and also at what time and what showcase you want to be in, I would say to all of that they all have editorial slots as well. So if your game is really thick, you might get in for free. So it's definitely worth trying.

I think it's also a really good indicator if you're like on to something, if you get into PC gaming show for free, it means probably your game is pretty thick if like you get in no showcase, even the small ones where you have to pay and you get in nowhere. That's probably an indicator that people don't really like resonate with that game. Um How often do you be in events?

I think how often you can um most games that we work on where we like apply for loads of stuff, they will get like in three or four per year. If you get into more grades, just, you know, at some point you may burn yourself out with not having enough new trailers or beats for those events. Next up is social media management.

This is like the first thing on the list that has a way higher ceiling. Like, you know, you can only do one steam page. There's only so many events, social media, you could do one tiktok per month, you could do one per day.

So there's a lot more, you can do a lot more leeway. Um One mistake we see here a lot is people say, oh, we should just like hire someone like Victoria Tran. If you don't know if she works for, among us, for like Innis, she's really good at all.

Social media, comedian management stuff. Please keep in mind like it's an umbrella term. There's a lot of stuff that people do in this field, you know, video creation, filming time in front of a camera, customer support.

It's a quite complex field and it's easy to take it for granted. Um We looked at some numbers from the games industry career guide. How much salaries are in that range.

Again, depends hugely, you maybe look at 30 to 100 and $25,000 depending on where this person is based. If it's someone fresh off university on another continent, it might be less. If you have super senior, it might be more.

We also asked freelancers what their rates are at the moment. We got a lot of 20 to $100 per. Um I would recommend you have, it could be yourself, it could be someone in the team or someone you hire.

I would recommend for an indie game at least a part time person for this. If you can a full time person, if not more organic influence outreach, that means you send codes to influencers and they play your game and you don't pay them for it. There was like a online debate recently that people were like, oh, it's not working anymore.

It used to be easier to get organic coverage. It's still super worthwhile. I think it's not like it used to be able to get like loads of loads of tons of big videos, but it's absolutely potential to look at free influencer coverage.

Um Some things you worked on recently, you know, you still get your videos with hundreds or like 50,000 views and they can really move the needle. This can be a really big driver of wish list and visibility. How much it costs to get an organic influencer.

Outreach depends a lot. How big your game is, how much code management is evolved. Um If you go with a freelancer, if you go with someone who covers this globally, different countries, I would say roughly 2 to $5000 per outreach.

Most Indie games will have 1 to 3 outreaches, at least one at launch, maybe one for Steam Fest and then maybe one for like a preview, a demo version. Organic press outreach means you send news and codes to press and you get coverage from them. We do hear a lot, hey, this doesn't have the impact it used to have.

That is true, but I think it still has good impact. You see often wish to increase from big sites. More importantly though it's still like, you know, it shows up at Google, we worked on a game called Eye of the Temple.

If you Google that game, you got like loads of great headlines, you know who Googles Games influences, people have managed the store page, other press people. So I think there's a lot of like secondary value that helps raising your profile from price outreach. Um Also meta critics store are still important in some online stores.

A typical press outreach per beat would cost you 1000 to like maybe $5000 in the indie sector. It can easily go up to 10 if it's localized in different languages, if your game is quite big and the code management is complicated or it's multi platform. But that's roughly what you're looking at.

I would say quantity, I would say at least three pr beats are great. One is the game announcement. One is to release that announcement, one is to launch, it can be more steam first preview gameplay trailer and so on again, 3 to 5 is usually what we're working with bigger game 6 to 7.

After that, it goes a bit into silly territory at some point unless you know, like really, really massive or an ongoing in the game. If you made it until here, it's pretty sick. That's like most games who are like nice.

That's a good budget. Like that's a good way to market an Indie game. But obviously there's more money you can spend on if you have it.

What you could do is attend events like G DC, what you need for that ticket accommodation probably your travel, this will depend where you live and where you want to go. I would always say local events are great investment for networking, meeting platform holders, meeting, publish and all that going overseas. Depends.

Sometimes I definitely wouldn't say you should go to all the big events like games come G DC packs every year for the sake of it. Like I think it's, it's an overspend. But if you pick carefully, I think it's a good investment, paid influence coverage.

So paying people to make tiktoks youtube videos, Twitch streams. This was like a super hard one to figure out. I talked to agencies, we do it themselves.

Everybody was like, oh, it just really depends. So it really depends. I tried to figure out some things I can give you.

So it's a bit more tangible. I think it's a super easy way to overspend. It can be really good if you pick carefully, it can be a great return.

So it's a very case by case basis stuff. Most games we work with smaller indie games don't pay for that or pay in the low hundreds, bigger indie games. Often you see like 15 to 50,000 bigger games.

This budget can go way up and can keep going. I got some help in this slide from a friend MJ from yours. Truly, they do a lot of influencer stuff.

Um I just wanted to figure out what's like a price range and they are huge. Like I can tell you when we email people and say like, hey, I want a video, right? The price range is its Wild West is all over the place.

So it's a lot about comparing. If you're looking at a youtuber for under 500 K Ups, you would maybe look at 600 to $12,000 youth range. You could look at another metric which is cost per few.

So you could look at how much does me a few cost? I think a pretty good range. If you manage like 2 to 4 cents, it's great.

If around seven, still pretty good. If it goes beyond that, it would need to be a quite specific niche influence. If it makes sense for Twitch streamers, there's a similar big range.

If you look at the two hour stream for a channel that has under 1 million subs, you maybe look at 600 to $6000. If you look at really, really big Twitch channels, those numbers go like infinite. Like it's crazy.

You can spend a lot of money here. Um We also have a cost per few range on Twitch. It's more than you aim for like the 13 cents paid social media ads.

Similar quite difficult thing. It's not easy to match out. There's a lot of games we worked on, tried to do that and then didn't have a good return if you figured out how to, you know, get a tiktok, Instagram ad and they get money back from it.

Great. Some people can do it. This also works surprisingly bad on crowdfunding than on release games.

A lot of games we work with. Don't spend money on this or like in the low hundreds. A lot of experts I talked to it really helps if you have 500 to $1000 per channel to optimize it.

So it gets a lot cheaper. So it's better not to spread too thin. But, you know, focus on a few channels but figure them out well.

And like once you know, it's running and you make money back per advert. Obviously, these budgets are quite of infinite and keep going until they don't work anymore. Also interesting.

A few people buy adverts to get more wish lists to get a better steam ranking. They would often look at 1 $2 per wish list. If they buy ads again, talk to people that have half of that, talk to people that pay double.

Depends on your game, depends on the country, but it's a rough guideline, some closing thoughts. Some of those things I've talked about are easier to outsource, some of them are harder to outsource. For example, social media, you can work with an agency.

We do that, but it's often something that's good. If it's kept in house, you're quite close to it because you will be involved in development and a lot of it happens, that's interesting in social media, price and influence outreach are super easy to give away those agencies. They have to contact you, explain in the game to send it out.

So there's different things that are easy and hard to outsource everything in the middle of first party supports to a page and marketing planner. I would like probably keep in house but maybe get professional advice if you can. What about the other stuff?

Physical press kits, super animated trailers, making off videos. We done it on there because I think for me at the moment, they just don't have that good return of investment. That being said we've done all this stuff from different games and it did work.

It's just not on my default list. So I would take those, you know, not super high up the list, but it can work if the game is right for it, other regions, this is very focused on the US and Europe. If you want to specifically market in Asia, I think finding a local partner super helps.

It's quite common that you don't take payment but a revenue share. So in that sense, you know, you're not spending money but you get less revenue from that. In the end, we've got a summary of our checklist what to spend money on.

Obviously, it's a tier list because video games number one Steam Store page, console store page. Most important thing and first party support, talk to the platform holders see if you can get featuring. Other than after that, I would make sure you've got a good marketing plan, a good marketing planner to set the right goals of where you're going afterwards.

I would invest in digital showcases in social media and community management, followed by organic price and influence outreach. Then I would say attending event and then see if you've got money left for pay influencers to pay that. And at the very last is the rest that could make sense if there's budget list in the F tier, I didn't have one, but that's what the chart looks like.

So it's worth the rest. Um Thank you very much for listening. Um Again, thanks so much for coming while sell there is on and like if you got questions, I think you've got a little bit of time so you could just come up to the mic and ask.

Thank you very much. OK. Hey, um Thanks for the talk.

That was great. Wanted to ask you specifically about Reddit. Have you had experience with that as, as a platform?

If you can expand on that, that would be great. Ok. Specifically Reddit, um I would say on an organic level, there's usually two ways how we tackle Reddit.

One is if somebody in your team loves Reddit and they're really good in it, that actually part of the community, it can be super strong, but they know the rules and it's quite complicated and then there's like Reddit light which I would recommend every indie game to go into. Nice subreddits like indie gaming subreddits made in unity. Subreddits.

They are a lot more chill and self promotion. They are not as big but still pretty good value for money. And then paid Reddit ads can, I've heard work quite well depending on the genre like strategy games and stuff.

Like more hardcore game of things can work well on Reddit. -- Thank -- you. Hi.

This might be a little eccentric of a question. I was just curious. So these are all a lot of the stuff you're talking about.

Makes sense within the ecosystem of gaming itself. I wondered if you had any experiences and all of these experiences that you had, like in other cultural realms or like oddball strategies you had tried that had worked or not worked. Just I was curious about that idea.

-- I -- think it's something we get a lot when somebody makes a racing game. They're like, oh, can we be in a racing on a racing website in a car website or like, can we have a crazy gorilla marketing stunt? And I would usually say those things are great once you've done the top 10, I think like this is the easier one to get.

It's a lot harder to convince someone who doesn't play Steam games but likes cars to buy a PC. Download Steam, sign up, download a game, get a controller. There's a lot of steps to convince people.

So I think it can make sense as a secondary thing, but I would focus on games first. Of course. Thank you.

Hey, uh thank you so much, Thomas. Um Amazing talk. Also big fan of your talk from last year.

Uh No one cares about your video game. I watch that all the time. But um yeah, specific question in terms of social media channels and what has the biggest Roy for ad spend?

I guess I'm curious because, you know, I, I do like the Twitter, tiktok, Reddit trifecta. I'm not sure really where my money is best spent. Um And I'm sure that's game dependent but you know, -- rough rule of thumb if you had -- some, yeah, I would say like I'm not the super expert on pay ads um from what we've tried and people we've talked to, I feel at the moment, reddit, tiktok and that matter.

So Facebook and Instagram work quite well. I like stuff like Instagram stories, I think have quite a good return. We do have, we do have did have some good success on tiktok but mostly for games where we've made loads of posts.

So we've already made 50 posts. We know those two went trending. So we boost them, you know, you beat the test the post first, but that takes a lot of upfront investment to figure out what's a good Tik Tok for you, right?

OK. That makes sense so figure out what works and then kind of double down on that. -- Yes, I -- think it helps a lot.

It's like, you know, social media is ruthless but it's really good. It's really good testing because people only make post pick and they act with them if it's interesting to them. -- Thank you so much.

Thank -- you. So you mentioned this talk was for um you know, PC games, console games and not for mobile games. But what about those of us who are creating a VR game?

Is there any difference in spend anything else you would add or change? Um For a VR game? Yes, we do work on a lot of VR games.

I feel like they in a quite similar category, a few things that are different is like it's less press, I think it's still relevant, but there's only two or three big websites. So it'll probably go light on the band there. Um Other than that social media is quite, is a little bit different in that Reddit is a lot more excited about VR games than other games.

So I think Reddit is more important. Also, tiktok works surprisingly well. Um Other than that campaigns can be shorter because wish lists and all that momentum doesn't matter so much.

So it can be like, you know, 23 month campaigns are more common than VR. Um But a lot of it is quite similar in terms of like organic outreach for present influences the marketing plans. So I think like it almost applies.

It's pretty close. I think mobile is quite removed from what we talked about. We are, it's pretty close to that.

Great. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for the presentation.

Um I was wondering sort of a meta question. How do you measure whether, you know, some form of marketing is actually performing better than others? Are there certain very direct metrics?

-- You can actually, -- yeah, I feel like we get this question asked a lot what our Kpis and usually our KPIS number goes up. I know it sounds simple, but I think it's really helpful. You would see your social media following growing, you would suddenly see wish lists increasing, you see pre orders going up.

So really keeping like an eye on those really quite basic numbers is quite good. Got it. Is there a way to tie that directly with uh installs or um they do like, you know, link tracking with UTM links?

Um It, it can give you an idea. It's not always super reliable. Like if you got a tracking link on tiktok, a lot of people see a game on tiktok and then they go to the PC and wish list.

So that didn't work like that tracking thing. Um I feel like for us, it's a lot based on just like working in a lot of games and getting a gut feeling, you know, we do something but nothing else happens and then we see how the numbers go up but they don't. So I think this is what the talk is mostly based on.

It's, it's quite hard to track. I think tracking links is probably the closest you would get. Thank you.

Hi, thanks for your talk. Do you have a point of view on um social media accounts being um developer owned or individual to each game? Um It really depends if you want to make more games in the same niche.

I think if you stay like in narrative games in racing games, definitely, like I would make a studio account instead of a game account. What we also do quite a lot is just like rebrand them as we go, you know, we would have the studio name on Twitter slash the game name and then when this next game, we just exchange that and update the accounts. Um generally the more personal your accounts can be the better if you have a small game, especially on Reddit.

Um But it really depends on a case by case basis. Cool. Well, I think time's up.

Thank you very much.