When to start marketing your game

When to start marketing your game

A practical and production aligned explanation for studios of any size

Many studios believe that marketing begins when the game finally feels ready for public attention. This usually means stable systems, attractive visuals, polished animations and a sense of internal confidence that the team has produced something worth showing. This belief sounds reasonable because it creates an illusion of control. Yet it is responsible for more lost momentum and more disappointing launches than any single design mistake.

Marketing does not begin when the game reaches maturity. It begins when the game becomes capable of producing a reaction in someone who has never seen it before. The goal is not to promote a finished product. The goal is to understand how real players interpret what you have built. Once this shift in thinking occurs, it becomes clear why most studios begin marketing far too late and why early communication is not a luxury but a structural requirement for a healthy production cycle. This is why marketing is not a launch week activity.

The moment a single fragment of the game can communicate its identity

Every game contains a short moment that expresses its purpose more clearly than any pitch or feature list. It may be a surprising reaction in a physics system, a clean tactical exchange, a satisfying pattern resolution or an unexpected failure that makes the viewer laugh. The rest of the game can be unfinished, inconsistent or visually rough and this does not matter. If the moment is strong, the game already communicates something real.

Many teams assume this moment only appears once a vertical slice is finished. In practice it usually arrives months earlier. The team often does not recognize it because they expect a complete sequence instead of a single striking fragment. When this moment exists, the game is ready for its first public reaction. Early feedback at this stage is invaluable because it shows how much meaning a viewer can extract from very limited information.

When a single slice of gameplay becomes expressive on its own, marketing can begin regardless of the current state of production.

Marketing must begin before the team fully understands the game

It is extremely difficult for a team to remain objective about its own project. After months of iteration, internal discussions and emotional investment, the developers carry a level of context that no player will ever possess. The more time passes, the more this gap grows. What is obvious to the team is invisible to an outside viewer and what feels meaningful internally may appear entirely secondary to players. This disconnect is one of the common patterns that lead to poor marketing decisions.

For this reason a studio should begin external communication while its own understanding of the game is still flexible. Real player interpretation often differs from developer intent. A mechanic that was designed to be precise may instead be perceived as improvisational. A scene that was intended to be serious may become humorous. A system that was meant to be dramatic may feel slow. These reactions are essential signals. If they appear late in development, the team can only acknowledge them. If they appear early, they can shape the direction of the entire project.

Marketing that starts early is not publicity. It is the process by which the team discovers what the game actually becomes in the hands and minds of players.

Short form platforms reveal whether your idea is visible without explanation

TikTok, Reels and Shorts are not simply places where games go viral. They function as real time diagnostic tools. These platforms show whether a viewer understands something interesting about the game in the first seconds of exposure. They reward clarity, emotional tension, comedic timing and surprising outcomes. They punish ambiguity, long setups, slow pacing and visuals that hide the core idea. The TikTok algorithm explicitly favors content that generates immediate engagement.

If an unpolished clip receives strong retention or rewatch behavior, the game has an immediately readable identity. If the clip requires context or explanation, the issue is almost always inside the game rather than in the edit. Many teams postpone short form posting because they want assets to look clean. In reality a rough clip that communicates well teaches more than a polished clip that communicates nothing.

When short form platforms can interpret your idea with no help from text or narration, the project is ready for real marketing activity.

The game is ready when it can produce emotion faster than understanding

Emotion guides attention. Viewers do not need to understand everything about a game in order to react to it. They only need to feel something. A brief moment of tension, surprise, chaos, relief or satisfaction is enough to start a chain of interest that leads to conversations, saves, shares and wishlists.

If the game can provoke emotion within the first seconds of a clip, then marketing is viable. If it requires thirty seconds before anything meaningful happens, outreach becomes expensive and unreliable. Emotional response is the earliest and most accurate predictor of whether a game will work on platforms that drive discovery.

A studio should begin marketing as soon as someone outside the team feels something while watching the game, even if they cannot yet describe what they saw.

Marketing begins when early data becomes capable of influencing production

Data matters long before a game reaches scale. Even a few hundred views can reveal whether a clip creates a pause in scrolling, whether viewers rewatch a specific moment or whether a visual element confuses people. These patterns appear early and they tend to remain consistent as the audience grows.

The true value of early marketing is that these signals arrive while production is still flexible. If players consistently misunderstand a core mechanic, the team can adjust camera work, controls or onboarding. If viewers react strongly to a moment the team considered minor, production priorities can shift toward enhancing that strength. If the Steam page converts poorly, the language of the pitch can be refined before launch expectations lock into place.

Marketing serves its purpose only if it happens early enough to influence what is being built. Steam's traffic analysis tools provide studios with detailed data on how players discover and interact with store pages.

The best moment to start is when changing direction is still affordable

Late marketing does not simply reduce visibility. It removes the ability to correct mistakes. Once art direction is locked, once core systems are expensive to modify and once the emotional center of the game depends on months of elaborate content, external feedback arrives too late to have meaningful impact.

A studio should begin marketing at the stage when structural changes are still possible. That is the period when camera language, contextual hints, interaction timing, onboarding flow and early pacing can still evolve without destabilizing the production schedule. Early marketing protects the team from committing too deeply to solutions that do not resonate with players.

A healthy production pipeline treats marketing as an internal compass rather than an external broadcast.

The real answer

You should start marketing the moment your game can communicate anything meaningful to someone who has no prior knowledge of it. This moment does not depend on art quality, content volume or technical polish. It depends on expression. If the game expresses even a fragment of its identity, the audience can begin to teach you how they see it.

Studios that begin early gain time to refine what works and remove what does not. They allow external interpretation to guide the direction of the project instead of relying on internal assumptions. By the time they reach launch, their message is clear because the audience helped shape it. For teams working without a marketing budget, this iterative approach is even more critical.

Studios that begin late are forced to justify decisions that should have been questioned months earlier. The result is predictable. The game enters the market with an identity that makes sense internally but fails to connect externally.

Marketing is not a finishing phase. Marketing is a learning system. The earlier it begins, the more the game benefits from everything the audience reveals.

Pavel Beresnev

Marketing Consultant for Games

I’m a marketing consultant helping PC and console studios build systems that grow wishlists and sales with clarity, not chaos.

I work with teams that want predictable growth across the full lifecycle of a game: Steam optimization, store asset improvement, messaging, analytics, creator strategy, and launch planning. My approach combines structured decision making with practical execution so developers can focus on building the game while the marketing foundation scales with them.

• Steam visibility, conversion and wishlist growth
• Store assets: capsules, trailers, messaging, positioning
• Analytics frameworks and marketing decision systems
• Creator and influencer pipeline setup
• Launch strategy for PC and console games
• Long term marketing systems, not one off tactics

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