Is Gaming Marketing Dead?

Marketing is hard. Marketing in video games might just be impossible. How do you actually market your piece of art that a group of people have been working on for months, years, or maybe even longer? How would you feel when you’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on flashy posters and TV commercials when a single person releases their game for free online and it becomes a global juggernaut? It might sound like an exaggeration, but stuff like this happens all the time, and it won't stop soon. In this article I thought I’d explore various marketing techniques and strategies, and see what works and what doesn’t. I hope some of this is interesting.

Arc Raiders (2025). Photo via Game Informer.

I started this article with Arc Raiders in mind, because it had a fairly standard marketing campaign for a few years, it had essentially no one on board with it, and then somehow this failed effort became one of the best selling games of the year. It started several years ago with all of the regular techniques that we’ve come to expect from advertising a game. They released a trailer, then another, then some more in-depth interviews, and finally more trailers until it had a release date. I remember watching it from the sidelines, where it was making no waves in the gaming community. This was mostly due to its genre. An extraction shooter wasn’t particularly exciting, especially after a huge wave of extraction shooters from some of the biggest shooters like Battlefield and Call of Duty had completely missed the mark. People were looking at Arc Raiders and immediately looking away. No one was interested. That was until a few weeks before launch, when the game had some early access playtesting with members of the general public and content creators. The game did what every game should do, and it’s so deceptively simple, but the game was good. 

"People were looking at Arc Raiders and immediately looking away."

People were playing Arc Raiders, and they were just enjoying it. Naturally then, this created an insane amount of positive buzz. People were actively engaging with the game now, because its core gameplay loop was fun and exciting, and it worked. People were sharing clips and discussing the game online, because they wanted to, and I found it genuinely so interesting. All of that marketing prior for this game was kind of a waste of money, because it didn’t matter. No amount of expensive trailers would have worked on this game if it wasn’t good, but thankfully it was good! It made me think of other examples in this industry, maybe of some games where a huge marketing campaign worked even though the final product wasn’t actually that good at all. Then there’s other games that had zero marketing, like Bethesda’s ‘The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’ that was announced and released on the exact same day. A game like that is such a massive project, it kind of doesn’t need any marketing. Why waste hundreds of thousands of dollars when you could just… not? 

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (2025). Photo via Gamespot.

In the film world, when the budget of a project is a certain number, then the marketing budget is essentially the same number added on top. If a film costs £200 million to make, then that means the marketing budget will be around £200 million, meaning the total is near £400 million. So if we apply that to games, it’s such an insane amount of money, especially as games continue to get bigger and bigger. The ever-looming Grand Theft Auto 6 which reportedly has cost Rockstar upwards of $2 billion dollars to create, still has a non-existent marketing campaign. What will that look like? Why even bother? I think to myself about something like GTA 6, which is easily the most hyped video game of all time, and could very well be one of the most hyped forms of media in any category. What’s the point of spending so much on adverts during primetime spots or big posters in Times Square, when they’ve already got the world in your palm? Each trailer for this game (being only two at time of writing) has broken insane records on Youtube for example, so it makes me wonder what the point even is.

"Maybe that's a big key to all of this in the gaming world; word of mouth."

Smaller studios also don't need to do a big campaign either since it feels like every month there’s some big smash hit that was previously unheard of. Games like Peak, Blue Prince, and the Game of the Year winner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, all had fairly unsuccessful marketing campaigns until word of mouth propelled them to stardom and then an insane amount of money. Maybe that’s a big key to all of this in the gaming world; word of mouth. People are way more willing to try something if everyone is saying it’s great, but then why doesn’t that translate to film? I feel like there’s so many movies that come and go, with great reviews but they fail at the box office compared to the latest Marvel film that gets middling reviews. 

Diablo IV billboard in Melbourne (2023). Photo via PC Gamer.

It feels hard to spot a good marketing campaign because a good marketing campaign will go unnoticed by most since that’s what is expected, for it to work. I think about the interesting launch of Apex Legends, and how knowing your audience is such a massively key factor in succeeding in this space. This game was hidden from everyone until the day before its launch, which is similar to the previously mentioned “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” in the sense that there was no marketing campaign at all. It was focused on the launch, and they nailed it spectacularly. They gave the game to a huge array of streamers and influencers, and got everyone talking about it in that first week. There was no way you couldn’t go five minutes without hearing about this game, and luckily, the game was pretty good too! The strategy worked in the short term, because now everyone had to get involved and download the game but the added bonus of the game being good meant that the game could have staying power. It still regularly appears in most popular games lists even 6 years later. ‘Diablo IV’ also was a big success and that game had a far more traditional marketing strategy, albeit with the absolutely insane amount of money backing them from Microsoft. A rough estimate guesses the studio spent anywhere from $50 million to $100 million on the marketing alone, which is a huge amount, and it shows. They had a pop up chocolate shop in London, they had huge billboards plastered across every major city alongside completely original artwork sprayed onto buildings. Even crazier was the fake eyeballs they were selling at KFC. I’ll give you a second to Google exactly what that entailed. It was a bombardment of every trick in the book, which resulted in everyone hearing about this game, even people who’d never paid attention before. It worked very well of course.

To summarise my short ramble, I think marketing is complicated and for video games it’s basically the wild west. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I just wanted an excuse to question why this is the case. What are some benefits and some negatives of huge marketing strategies versus a non-existent one? It’s fascinating, but it makes me glad to not work in that sector of the industry. If you do, please email me with some insights, because I love to learn!

Thanks for reading.