Video Games Marketing & Communications - Frequently Asked Questions

Bastion is a global marketing and communications agency specialising in video games and interactive entertainment.

We support developers and publishers with:
• Strategic positioning and brand development
• Media engagement and global outreach
• Influencer and creator campaigns
• Launch strategy and campaign planning
• Corporate communications and reputation management
• Event and experiential activation
• Marketing consultancy for indie and self-publishing studios

Our role is to ensure your game’s story is clearly defined, strategically aligned and delivered to the right audience on platforms and in spaces they are most active.

Strong results come when communications strategy begins early. Studios often seek marketing support close to launch, but positioning should begin early, making considerations for development milestones, vertical slice, funding rounds, publisher discussions or announcement planning

We can help your team with:
• Strategic positioning and brand development
• Media engagement and global outreach
• Influencer and creator campaigns
• Launch strategy and campaign planning
• Corporate communications and reputation management
• Event and experiential activation
• Marketing consultancy for indie and self-publishing studios

Our role is to ensure your game’s story is clearly defined, strategically aligned and delivered to the right audience at the right time.

Bastion combines strategic planning, media engagement, creator management and corporate communications under one integrated framework.

We don’t treat influencer marketing, brand strategy or launch planning as isolated services. Instead, we build cohesive campaigns where messaging, audience targeting and execution are aligned.

We operate with a global outlook, supporting international outreach while maintaining a unified narrative.

Most importantly, we work as an extension of your internal team, not a disconnected supplier.

Creator marketing plays a critical role in player discovery and engagement.

We don’t treat influencer marketing, brand strategy and launch planning as isolated services. Instead, we build cohesive campaigns where messaging, audience targeting and execution dovetail to each other.

We identify creators whose audiences align with your genre, tone and player demographic. Campaigns are built around authentic engagement — livestreams, early access sessions, collaborative storytelling and community moments.

Creator campaigns work alongside broader marketing strategy to create layered visibility rather than short bursts of attention.

Yes. We support international campaigns designed to resonate across key territories.

Global marketing requires more than translation, it demands cultural alignment. We ensure messaging connects locally while maintaining strategic consistency across markets.

This is particularly important for console and PC titles launching across multiple regions simultaneously.

Corporate communications focus on how a studio presents itself to partners, platforms, investors and industry stakeholders. Having a clear identity amongst your peers is just as important as amongst your players.

Bastion supports:
• Corporate positioning
• Executive profiling
• Investor communications
• Industry reputation management
• Crisis communications planning

Strong corporate communications build credibility beyond player audiences and strengthen long-term brand equity.

Marketing strategy defines positioning, messaging, audience targeting and long-term brand direction.

Paid advertising drives targeted reach through performance channels. This is to say that you spend directly with platforms such as Google, Meta and LinkedIn so that your content is directly served to your target audience.

A strong strategy ensures that paid activity supports organic content rather than operating in isolation and telling inconsistent messages.

Bastion focuses on building foundations first, then aligning execution channels around that framework.

Marketing an indie game on a smaller budget means to need to be more selective over the tactics you deploy to maximise efficiency.

While bigger publishers and projects can cast a wide net and market at scale, smaller teams must have a very clear understanding of their audience and where these players can be found. Bastion helps build audience profiles aligned to key demographics to deliver effective marketing campaigns that generate curiosity.

We build exciting creative that makes an impact within the few seconds of attention we get from our players.

Absolutely, and Bastion has done so on many occasions. Building a Discord community helps your game maintain an active player base long after its release date, and creating a space for you to connect with your most dedicated players.

These fans can also serve as advocates to new players yet to give your game a try, and help bring in new audiences to sell more copies.

Bastion has extensive experience building and nurturing communities in Discord and across social. Providing players with a positive experience when engaging with the games they love in community spaces builds long-term fandom of the game, but also the team behind it and potentially what they create next.

The mobile games market is incredibly competitive. With approximately 1,619 newapps added to the Google Play Store per day in 2025, you cannot simply rely on rising to the top of the charts through organic performance. A creative marketing strategy is required to edge out your competitors.

Assigning a significant portion of your budget to user acquisition, retargeting, full-funnel marketing and audience retention is needed to keep daily active users high enough for your game to be sustainable.

Alongside that, the need for frequent app store optimisation (ASO), new content launches, performance analytics and market testing is high.

Bastion is well-versed in all forms of mobile video game marketing. Our dedicated team can support you every step of the way, providing a clear strategy that adapts to the ebbs and flows of your mobile game’s life cycle.

Our dedicated creator marketing team can help secure creators to play and promote your game. Bastion's team utilises its creator scouting network to build a roster that meaningfully connects with your target audience, landing the key messages with players highly likely to convert and buy your game.

Our experience of creator management, relationship building, campaign planning and briefing ensures we make the most of your budget.

For a video games agency to be effective; it needs extensive industry experience, with a history of delivering successful campaigns across triple-A and indie games. It must also demonstrate itself as a reliable partner and understand the needs of your business.

‍Bastion has been a leading video games marketing agency for over 30 years, working with partners all over the world so their games find an audience of dedicated players to deliver success to their studios.

The sooner you hire a video games marketing agency, the better the team will be equipped to support through all your key beats. At least 12-months before launch allows for effective planning and execution, but even longer is preferred.

From building communications strategies, digital marketing plans, Steam product pages to conducting press and creator outreach for launch campaigns, having an agency embedded early means there is little room for delay. Bastion prides itself in working as an extension of your studio to get your game in the hands of players.

One of the most effective ways to improve Steam wishlists is to increase awareness among your target audience and to generate curiosity. This is done through effective creative marketing that shows some of the most exciting features your game offers.

As a video game marketing agency, Bastion builds strategies that deliver eye-catching content that develops meaningful connections with your players to drive them to wishlist or pre-order.

We deploy effective social media marketing, paid media strategy, influencer partnerships, community management and growth marketing strategies which deliver meaningful change to your sales targets.

Bastion has 30 years of experience providing the full suite of marketing services. Corporate communications planning, social media marketing, creator and influencer marketing, brand strategy, tone-of-voice guidelines, audience demographics, go-to-market campaigns, launch planning, store page descriptions, events planning and support, PR, media outreach, campaign strategy, live service planning and more.

Bastion supports indie developers and studios. Our services extend to all teams, regardless of size, to deliver tailored services to meet the needs of your business.

Our services are scalabale, meaning we can grow with your team whilst remaining budget-conscious to not over-stretch your resources.

We understand how important it is to find and grow a community around smaller titles to deliver word-of-mouth marketing, so we will help build that audience through bespoke marketing campaigns, targeting places we know where gamers are active.

Understanding your audience will define which influencer strategy will deliver the best results. Knowing who your players are, on which platforms they’re most active and which content creators they engage with helps build the strategy for how your video game goes to market.

Bastion’s influencer team will identify your core and secondary audiences, define a platform strategy with coherent KPIs that ensure we are efficiently allocating budget to our big bets.

Be it Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels or another platform, Bastion's team will set out a clear roadmap that builds momentum to reach a crescendo at launch, maximising on momentum.

By building an effective marketing strategy with a clear understanding of your audience demographics and how to target them.

Having a channels strategy to build and maintain your community across Discord, Instagram, YouTube and other social channels, with a tactical paid media plan to retargeted interested players, is central to your audience strategy.

Influencer partnerships, media outreach, event curation and opportunities for players to go hands-on with your game via demos all need to be mapped out so that momentum is built and sustained on the road to launch day.

The most obvious KPIs which permeate all campaigns are of course wishlists, pre-orders and purchases. But the additional KPIs that determine success depend on the objective of the campaign.

For top-level, or awareness marketing campaigns, Bastion will use KPIs such as reach, impressions, views, social media follower growth, average watch time and others. For consideration marketing, we may opt for click-through-rate, view-through-rate, traffic to produict pages. Then of course we have paid marketing focused KPIs such as cost-per-acquisition (CPA), cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-mille (CPM) and others.

No matter your objective, or level of knowledge around marketing return-on-investment (ROI), Bastion is here to support and deliver success for your team.

When choosing a video game marketing agency, look for a company that has extensive history in the industry, a healthy catalogue of case studies relevant to the services your team needs, as well as a global network capable of delivering campaigns internationally for your game.

Bastion has all three, which you can view on our website in both our case studies and services sections

We also have a robust reporting and strategy process, tried and tested with some of the biggest video game companies in the world. Our team will ensure you get the right support for your studio’s size, budget and ambition.

Whether your game is building towards launch or a live-service title looking to grow daily active users, having clear strategies for targeting players is a service Bastion can provide.

Player acquisition strategies can include paid targeting, digital and social campaigns, creator partnerships and media coverage, but there is also huge value in word-of-mouth marketing from your current players, harnessing their positivity and turning them into advocates.

Effective communication strategies to build relationships with your players, creators and media outlets is key to growth, and Bastion has done so for many of our partners to help reach new audiences while retaining core player bases.

Your wishlist target depends on various factors, but the most important one to consider if your level of investment into the project, and therefore how many sales you would need in order to make your game profitable.

Bastion will help map realistic-but-ambitious wishlist targets across your key beats, including Steam Next Fest, sales, demos, and launch. We will also provide competitor analysis to understand the performance of similar titles, and where they achieved success.

PR marketing has significantly changed over recent years due to the ever-changing landscape of video games in general. That said, effective PR tactics can still be very effective, as long as teams set up campaigns that reflect modern ways people engage with content.

Instead of focusing on op-eds, cover features and print coverage, now is about connecting with creators, journalists with their own platforms, and surfacing your game and team in channels which now drive attention.

Bastion can build PR campaigns for the modern era of marketing.

The budget for video games marketing a video game is normally 1:1 to development costs. Therefore, if you spend $500,000 developing a game, the same should be spent on marketing costs.

These numbers can change based on the size of your studio, and leaving some room for contingency in the event your game falls short of projection, or massively exceeds them, always helps.

Bastion can help with budget planning for your studio, and equally can maximise the budget you have to ensure you get the maximum return from your investment.

A question that is also determined by the type of game you're building, with a few non-negotiables. For social media, TikTok and Instagram are the must-have channels to connect with players through exciting content that generates attention. To showcase your game in its best light, Twitch livestreams and YouTube 'let's play' long-form content, primarily delivered by either your studio or creators, ensure players get a chance to experience your game and give them reasons to purchase through gameplay. Ensuring media also deliver coverage for your title that shows the positivity of both your game and studio also helps build momentum towards a successful launch.

Having a clear strategy for when to activate these different channels and maximising visibility across all these touchpoints is as important as the channels and content. Bastion will build the strategy, campaign plan and content for you, leaving you to focus on making the best game you can.

Within Steam itself, there are opportunities to give your game the best chance to be put in front of players.

The first is optimising your Steam store page, which Bastion can help create for you, with effective copy, player and creator testimony and all the information players look for when browsing for their next title.

The other opportunities are moments for early access, such as Steam Next Fest, demos, early access and free weekends can really help improve visibility against your competitors.

With 690 million registered accounts and 200 million monthly active users, Discord is an incredibly important platform to maintain a healthy community of active players.

It is a space to nurture your most dedicated players, as well as a hub to bring players from other channels to inform them of the latest updates to your game, gather feedback and also help connect players with other groups to avoid churn.

If you're looking to build a vibrant gaming community, Discord is the space for it, and Bastion can help manage this space for you with community management, content and communications strategy as well as crisis comms management.

Both aren’t mutually-exclusive, but budgets and the type of game you’re creating may determine that you opt for one over the other.

Traditionally, mobile games benefit from consistent media spend to market their game and acquire new players. Console and PC games can benefit hugely from working with creators to geenrate awareness and positive sentiment by connecting your game with an influencer who builds authentic content for your target audience.

Bastion will work with you to develop a clear understanding of your end goals, what your budget is and how we can most effectively apply it to deliver good ROI and positive results. Speak to our team today to get to work on your marketing strategy.

The time to successfully market a video game depends on so many factors that it becomes an impossible question to answer. To build a vibrant community around a game takes months, if not years, of concerted effort and dedication from a community team to create positive and welcoming spaces on social and Discord to ensure players not only find your game, but stay with it.

To generate mass awaress can be done almost instantly, provided you have significant budgets, but this can also be fleeting. Bastion specialises in building meaningful connections between players and your game. Agencies can create attention, but Bastion ensures that we hold a player’s attention, generating advocacy and loyalty with our players.

Yes, marketing agencies can help build your presentations and proposals to get your game signed up to a publisher.

Bastion will connect you with the biggest publishers in the industry, support you in building your pitch deck with a clear creative vision, insights driven audience outlines and white space identification, as well as achieveable-yet-ambitious KPIs.

The most common mistakes developers make when marketing a video game tend to stem from the same cause: lack of planning and clarity.

Teams can get so busy actually making the game, that they don’t think about actually selling it until it is actually ready to go. Then, it becomes a rush to onboard an agency to create a strategy, content plan and rollout to begin making a return on your significant investment.

By bringing a video game marketing agency like Bastion into the fold from the outset, we can be fully prepared for the road ahead. Most importantly, we can also help find the right audience for your game. We will conduct audience profiling, influencer outreach, asset and ^{comms strategy} as well as brand building, leaving you to focus on creating an amazing video game.