A strong marketing department and strategy is critical in every industry that aims to maximise sales or expand its customer base. The gaming industry falls into the bracket of digital arts, where marketing and advertising campaigns are crucial to get the name out there.
While some of the more prominent names can rely on word of mouth and the sheer size and visibility of the brand to do their marketing for them, a host of games studios have been able to put together unique and on-brand advertising that has helped them push their titles and appeal to vast numbers of people – not just a gaming audience.
The importance of digital marketing
As one of the leading names in video gaming history, Rockstar Games has pioneered in several video and console gaming areas. Marketing and advertising are another area where they excel, and you can take a pick from any of the games in their catalogue to unveil a unique and effective marketing strategy.
In the modern age, all games must have an extensive online presence. This extends beyond console gaming to include other types of gaming, such as casino gaming. While casino games have an ideal angle into the market, given that they have been around for hundreds of years, it’s the makers of unique slot games who have to think of marketing strategies.Gates Of Olympus and other mythology slot games often use an array of intriguing marketing tools, which help to captivate their usual audience and stand out even among those who might not initially class themselves as fans of slot games.
Big hitters
Whether it’s Halo or Grand Theft Auto, many globally recognisable games have mastered the art of advertising and marketing. Rockstar has been able to branch out beyond Grand Theft Auto, and you could pick out any of their games from the last 20 years and explore just how unique and inventive the marketing strategy was for each one.
Grand Theft Auto series
You need only take a look at the mind-blowingly successful release of the GTA trailer at the end of 2023 to see how the top companies nail their marketing. While it might be slightly unfair to use one of the most prominent gaming franchises of all time as an example of successful marketing, the trailer had nearly 200 million views in six months. It exemplifies all of the marketing elements that Rockstar is renowned for – captivating music, dynamic graphics and a rollercoaster of action packed into a short, 90-second burst.
This isn’t the first time GTA has taken the world by storm with its trailers, though – the same thing happened for both GTA V and GTA IV. Even their marketing campaigns and TV adverts for Vice City and San Andreas set the standard long before YouTube and other social media sites dominated how gamers engage with marketing strategies.
Halo
Halo is another colossal gaming series that helped legitimise Microsoft’s entry into gaming. Although Xbox and PlayStation are neck and neck in the gaming console industry, Halo was the first Xbox-only game to generate the sort of cash we’ve seen from other pioneering gaming franchises such as GTA.
Halo 3’s “Believe” campaign was a remarkable success, and each instalment of the game has been a huge hit. The iconic 2007 game had two of the greatest-ever game trailers. The Starry Night TV advert was one of the most harrowing and gripping trailers of its day, and coupled with the Believe campaign and the billboard and TV ads that came with that, it’s no surprise that Halo 3 was one of the most successful games of all time.
Each game has had its own unique marketing push, from multimillion-dollar TV adverts to pizza-based advertisement strategies. They became so prolific and consistent with their innovative marketing strategy that the “Halo Effect” became etched into pop culture as a term to describe a marketing campaign almost guaranteed to work – and there’s no greater stamp of approval in gaming marketing than that.
Conclusion
We’ve only touched on the two biggest today, but several other games have had gripping market strategies. Resident Evil, Final Fantasy and many sports games have also created nostalgic, timeless trailers through their use of music and groundbreaking designs.
Although some of these trailers look slightly dated, especially for their PS1 variations, they were still pioneering at the time. If you go back far enough, they evoke wistfulness in many gamers who remember how game trailers looked before the advent of the internet.
While the games we’ve mentioned today draw on a completely different set of design plans and aims for different gaming demographics, they all show that getting the marketing campaign correct from the beginning gives the game the best chance of maximising its potential success.