VIDEO GAMES MARKETING NEWSLETTER #10 - Jan'23 - Feb'23 - The End

Hey everyone, Jakub Mamulski here. As it seems that I've found my place in a different industry, I've decided to can actively making content regarding video games marketing. The last full-time experience I had in the industry jaded me to the point of me becoming disinterested in pursuing such opportunities in the future. I'm now responsible for a single freelance contract and I may be able to hop on these, but there are just so many more interesting and substantial industries to take into consideration, I just don't see myself doing games in a full-time manner and I hope it will remain this way. Honestly, I loathe the idea of dedicating a third of my day to that. Maybe it will become better over time and perhaps I will try to get back into the industry, but I don't see myself doing that for another 5 years at least.

I'm not against part-time assignments, so if you'd like me to do some stuff for you for a few hours weekly, train your team in marketing or do some consulting and strategic-level work, hit me up.

I don't know yet if I'm going to delete this newsletter, or just put it on hiatus, but this may be considered the last post I made here, at least for the foreseeable future. The only reason why I'm not sure what to do with it is because it has a decent number of subscribers. So, if you don't mind, share your advice on what to do with that.

Thanks for reading what I wrote, even if I seemed mean and malevolent at times. 2022 broke me as a person, simultaneously allowing me to rediscover what is important in life. Love, dedication, smile, family and kindness are the values I'm subscribed to and want to follow. I even got back to the church, having consciously and independently decided to do so. It feels nice to be in control of your life. On the other hand, I also started being much more protective of who I am and better at establishing boundaries. I'm up for a fight if anyone would like to hurt me in some way. Then, there are other projects that I want to focus on. There's the wedding I'll be having with Wiktoria Stańczuk-Mamulska , the most amazing, smartest and kindest person I've ever met. Then, I'd like to establish a TikTok channel regarding gym culture and fitness as these became my hobby last year and I want to learn more about TikTok. I also want to do something for the environment, so I started hanging bird feed on hedges and trees and will most likely toss a lot of seed bombs full of our native Polish flower and other plants' seeds in public this year. I'll also need to write more in Polish, as I work in my native language now, having almost exclusively used English in the professional environment in the last few years, so I need to train my lingual skills. And, as I'm working in legal services marketing, there's a lot more ground to cover and a lot more to write there than here, honestly.

This means that I'm busy. And that I'll have to axe things that won't influence my career in a positive way. It just so happens that writing articles about video games marketing doesn't serve me any purpose anymore. So, the newsletter will have to go.

I'm still far away from buying a small plot of land, having it turned into a small rustic hotel and having a vineyard, but even at this early stage of the year, I'm convinced that understanding my priorities, getting into a new industry, being able to thrive and to be in control, make me feel almost as tranquil as at the future vineyard I wouldn't mind having.

So, once again, thanks for being subscribed here and to the people who granted me opportunities to work with them, I really appreciate you. Sorry to the people I disappointed along the way. A wink and a smile to the people that learned something from me. A bow to these from whom I learned. And a fuck off to the fiends.

Jakub Mamulski signing out, cheers.

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The biggest problem of Web3/NFT gaming

NFT-based games were pitched by some as the hot new thing to follow in 2022, a new bandwagon with, allegedly, a lot of great possibilities. As I wrote this article in mid-December 2022, probably nobody could name 5 such titles (especially if we exclude Axie Infinity, which is probably the biggest Web3 game of all time) and it remains the case. There may be a lot of reasons why this turned out to be the case, such as:

• overselling the technology, as most of its selling points could be achieved with conventional technology,
• Steam and other sales platforms denying Web3 games from being hosted on them, more or less forcing them to either publish solo or make cryptobros try and create their own marketplace for such titles,
• people tend to be on the fence when it comes to NFTs,
• user experience demanding people to create wallets, link them to the game and so on, which was quite an issue for users, who are not well-versed in crypto; it created a needlessly long customer journey.

These are all legitimate concerns and hurdles, but they can be more or less mended or somehow alleviated, especially if you have heaps of money for advertisement. There’s an issue, though, that makes marketing these games extremely hard, it is hard-wired to the characteristics of such games and I don’t think it can be mended. To understand this problem, though, we need to go to the very basics of marketing and talk about one of its core concepts.

Target audience - what it is and why it matters

Marketing pretty much any product to the B2C market starts with the product itself. Let’s talk about creatine, in this example. It’s a compound that does some things in your body on the cellular level and, aside from all the science behind it, it causes you to be stronger and to have more endurance at the gym, as compared to when you don’t take it. It’s one of the most tested, studied and used chemicals in the fitness industry and, as people consider it to be very beneficial. It’s usually sold either bland or flavoured as a powder, it can also be put in capsules.

Now, let’s imagine that we all run a bodybuilding supplement company and are working on a new product line. Having creatine in our lineup would be a no-brainer. However, despite the fact that it’s often used and beneficial, it’s just a bunch of white powder and very often it doesn’t matter to the consumer whether they will use our brand or some other one. Because of that, we may name it, design a nice-looking bag or jar for it and market it to a specific group of people. “People using creatine” may be considered a target group, but it would include pretty much all of the people who go to the gym. This is very broad and some may not be interested or just wouldn’t want to buy our stuff. In order to make it more appealing to some, we may customise how the product is perceived. Let’s say that you wanna get into the stereotypical set of people - manly men from bike gangs (only as an example). Make the bag black with some flames, slap a cool skeleton riding a Harley-like motorcycle) with an eagle above him, call the product “The Freedom Creatine” and make it whisky-flavoured.

While such a product wouldn’t be very interesting to other people, our target audience would go crazy for it and it may become the best-selling product within that demographic group. Of course, this is a very general, simplified and stereotypical view I showed of the group of people and the mechanism is quite a bit more complex, but it works for the purpose of showcasing that people want to buy a product that is catered to them and that they feel expresses the same values as they do.

This approach is the generally accepted standard in the whole world of commerce. Some products may have a narrow audience (as in the example - men who behave like they are or just are part of a motorcycle gang, ride a motorcycle, like whisky, think that the Freebird solo is the peak of the entire history of music and also go to the gym and are interested in bodybuilding supplements), a broad one (milk chocolate - people who like milk chocolate) or somewhere in between (a V-neck for a teenage/early adult boy - 13-20 years old males, who like this particular style of clothing and, if it was 2008, they’d also be often considered metalcore music fans, as this is what they usually wore).

Here’s where the NFT/Web3 games come with a big problem.

Two target audiences for one product?

We could define Web4 games’ target audiences as “gamers who are into NFTs”, with some additional classifications that allow for narrowing the group, thus making it more well-defined and theoretically better, as in they know who to exactly reach out to. However, it turns out that gaming and Web3 usually don’t correlate very well and there’s not a lot of overlap between the set of people who like games and those who like NFTs. This produces some extremely weird results.

I’ve worked with 2 companies that dealt with Web3 games and both of them were in a totally different place, as one was making an entirely new product, and the other one was trying to retrofit their old game with the technology. I will not name them, as I’m under NDAs, so I also can’t provide any exact data, but it seems that 3 characteristics were true for both of them:

• it was very hard to make regular gamers interested in these games, as NFTs and Web3 gaming don’t have the best opinion in the world of gaming, as some consider them to be deceitful as some “NFT evangelists” oversold the idea that they are great and are the next big thing, so gamers were not convinced,
• cryptobros are more interested in earning money rather than playing games, so they will follow you on social media and will generally engage with you when you give away free stuff, as they are the most interested in that - not in your product which is ultimately the game.

This leads to a weird situation where people who don’t wanna play your game follow you on social media in order to get stuff from you, while not giving your game a shot, meanwhile gamers avoid your product. It may lead to absurd situations in which you will have a social media following, a product and very few actual users.

Is there a way to fix that?

Yeah, I think there’s a way to fix that and to still have a Web3-based game. Don’t try to appeal to both audience groups and remember that you are making a game, so you need to market it to gamers. Create a good product that will sell well and have some technology behind it based on blockchain and NFTs and people will learn about these functions over time. Axie Infinity, despite talking about the P2E model once in a while (btw, it’s a very nice incentive for people who may have nothing against NFTs and gaming, especially for 2nd and 3rd world markets, like The Philipines or Nigeria, so if you wanna cop players via PPC campaigns, try it out in these markets; such players’ retention rates may be small, but the CPI is small), usually focus on their gameplay and are first and foremost considered a game, not a crypto project.?

I believe that if some high-quality Web3 games that focus on being games start rolling out to the market, people’s opinions about the technology will change. But, as long as the most focus is put on NFTs and trying to oversell them to an audience which at best doesn’t care about them and at worst actively detests them, the status quo will not change.

The other thing is that the studios making these games make a big thing of the technology, but barely anyone cares about it. Even if the tech is groundbreaking, people won’t care if you won’t talk about why your game’s going to be good or what kind of story it will tell. Sure, there are some enthusiasts who care, but they will most likely not be worth tapping into, or they will be a marginal group of players, most likely. That’s one of the reasons why people who don’t play fighting games don’t consider rollback netcode to be a selling point. They just want the game to have cool buff dudes who kick their butt and explode. Having a 70-page long whitepaper about the technology, game design, open economy and stuff simply won’t matter to the vast majority of the recipients of your content. So, focus on having a good game and marketing it well, rather than pushing the idea of NFTs to people who either will be discouraged by them or won’t be playing your game only waiting for giveaways.

One more thing to consider would be to try to cater to both groups of people, but it would entail excluding big batches of your audience from parts of your communications and would be both difficult, troublesome and probably expensive to do (in order to do that effectively, I suppose dark posting, as in publishing the posts that won’t be displayed organically and then paying money for them to reach a very well defined part of your fanbase, would be the best, but it sounds so arduous and over the top that I just instinctively want to discard the whole concept).

tl;dr - why would you want to sell bacon to vegetarians, thinking they will care about the high-fat content and presence of L-Carnitine?

Conclusion

Thanks for reading the article. Do you have any experience with marketing Web3 games and would like to share your opinions about that? Have you encountered similar issues as I did? How do you think it could be mitigated? Share all you wish in the comments below. Have a good one, cheers.