Video Games Marketing Newsletter - November 2023 - Jakub Mamulski, Heaps Agency

Hey, how’s it going?

Here’s another instalment of my newsletter. Just one article this month, but there’s a good reason for that. Namely, I cooperated with FootballTeam Game to audit their game’s marketing and a couple of other things. It was quite interesting from my point of view, as their title is a… Browser game. You don’t come across these often these days! It seems they’re quite satisfied with the result, so I’m happy as well.

I also went to Games Ground Berlin , a new gaming industry event. Even though they have some stuff to work on, like figuring out the logistics of the venue, I found the event quite interesting and happened to make a lot of new connections. And landed another cooperation, which I’ll hopefully tell you about in the near future. It'd be nice if Games Ground became a mainstay in the industry, so we'll see how they'll manage it in the future.

In terms of articles, I wrote a single one last month, due to the additional tasks I had. But I’m getting better at managing my time, so I expect to deliver more in December. But this one talks about the most massive community management crisis I’ve seen in a while - the Creative Assembly ’s Total War controversy.

Creative Assembly had a pretty major community crisis a short while ago and is dealing with the aftermath. Long story short, they released Total War: Pharaoh and comparatively few people played it (slightly more than 5k peak users on Steam), and it doesn’t look great for them. After that, chaos ensued, people were (allegedly) unrightfully banned on their Steam forums, and interested influencers started providing info that would’ve deteriorated the company’s public image. This all was well documented on Youtube and everyone talks about what has happened. I’ll take a different approach and will talk about what could be done to mend the relationship with their players and restore the Total War series to its former glory in terms of future product management. - CLICK TO READ MORE

Keeping my fingers crossed for the team there. Hopefully, they’ll be able to recover from that and remind people why they fell in love with Total War in the first place.

I’ve applied to a couple of conferences, so there are some chances I’ll have a talk or two at some events soon. I’ve done fewer talks this year, in which I’m quite disappointed, so delivering something before 2024 would be a bop. If not, I’ll do my best to attend more events next year.

If you happen to have any business regarding marketing for your game, I’m up for contracts and gigs - let me know via the DMs and we’ll figure something out!

As for now, that’s all. Have a good one and see you in the next newsletter. Cheers!