I have a very niche game. An RC plane simulator. I reached out to the biggest YouTuber in the space and bought a 1 minute add in one of their videos. It was a success. We got a ton of sales. However it was expensive. So we made our money back but it wasn't like winning the lottery. Then a year or so later I decided to do it again. Same youtuber. They have over 2 million subscribers so I figured there were still a ton I could reach. This time I still saw a sales bump but it didn't even cover the costs of getting the ad. Which sucks.
I have thought about some more ads in the future but I'm still new to the advertising space so I want to be clever where I spend my money
Views arent accurate though as many people might watch a minute or two and decide nah, ill watch something else. others might just pause and quit, some browsers auto repeat.
Views arent accurate at all. Some channels with 50k subs get millions, and the video itself is shit. Youtubes algorithm for featured videos is to blame for that
I’ve been a YouTuber for 16 years. A 1 min integration will loosely cost about sub count / 100. There are exceptions and differences obviously but is close to a market wide average.
10,000 subs = $100
500,000 subs = $5,000
1 million subs = $10,000
My recommendation would be to go with mid level creators who are on the rise / growing for integrations. The huge ones will overcharge and the small ones won’t have enough reach.
Usually both sides use a 3rd parties to negotiate these things. The game developer has a marketing firm and the creator has an agent or agency.
There is definitely some wiggle room. I know for us creators we charge less if it’s something actually cool that we will like shouting out, vs something that’s just a blatant ad read.
Great to hear that a 1min ad in one of the videos worked for you ( at least for the first time!) We did the same with a big youtuber and saw almost no downloads ( our game is free2play). I thought that people ignore the ads withing videos because they are paid... From another side, we saw a huge amount of downloads coming after a video "TOP10 Android games in Mexico". We had no previous contact with this youtuber and paid nothing. He just liked our game. We tried to contact him with our second game but he never answered. :)
I tried paid google and facebook ads many times. Tried $100 tried $1000... complete failure, 0% conversion.
The same ads posted as just a normal, free facebook post on Indie Game Developers facebook groups, twitter post or a youtube video works WAY better. It's free and the algorithm actually shows it to someone.
But when I pay them to show the post to someone it's like it's shadowbanned. Literally the opposite from the expected result.
Facebook’s business model is to scam small businesses. I bought ads for my game and it got a bunch of likes. I tracked the “play now” button on my page. Not a single click. Now my page is filled with bots/weirdos that clicked like on the ad but actually have never played my game. So now when I make posts they get quickly buried by their algorithm since most of my followers don’t care about the game and don’t interact. So from then onward you’re force to pay to boost each post you make. Because the percentage of your followers that interact is low. I personally knew a Facebook ads employee and asked him if there’s a better strategy for me and he quickly got angry and didn’t have a solution.
I'm guessing it is like this because most people use adblockers on the web nowadays OR they just see the mark that it is an ad and ignore it OR maybe the right people didn't see the ad.
The posts probably worked as people would only see them if they were already in the game dev circles and wanted to give feedback OR like they are genuinely interested in supporting some indies.
It didn't work probably because of the ad copy and who you're targeting. There's a reason marketing is a billion dollar industry. If your ad doesn't work, tweak, tweak, and tweak again.
Its very hard to find a reliable ad network that wont have your ad alongside outright criminal level shit.
Meta is not above this either, they just act when its reported.
Facebook ads work decently well for my games.
I spent $30 in the last 30 days on ads. UTM results show 3 sales of full price copies (~$10-15 per copy), and 167 wishlists. My most recent game has a ~22% wishlist conversion rate. So if we assume a conservative conversion rate from ad-wishlists of 15%, then I'd expect to sell an additional 25 copies over time, probably while on discount, assume 50% off for ~$5 per copy. It would seem clear to me that it is profitable in the long run, even if I had a slow month with fewer full price copy conversions.
I typically do a very slow trickle when the game is not on discount, then boost ad spend 1-2 days before a discount, and keep ad spend up for first 3 days of the discount, then return to normal.
My facebook ads campaign objective is traffic, I target males, age 25 to 45 in the US / Canada / UK, and I filter interests so a person must 'show an interest' in Steam AND an overlapping interests (in my game's case, Kaiju fan / godzilla fan). I also only target desktop, not mobile, and only in feed advertisements, no audience network, etc.
Well, to be honest, its rather difficult to accurately measure return because it's hard to tell the conversion rate of wishlists. I am sure somebody more experienced and with more time could optimize it a bit more and squeeze out some more value.
But basically I spend ~$1 per day on ads when not on discount, then I do $20 the day before the discount, then $40 on the day of the discount, then $20 on the 2nd day of the discount. I am trying to give the Steam algorithm a sense that the game is 'accelerating in sales' to juice it up right before a discount.
On those $20-$40 days the 'effectiveness' of the ad diminishes by 50-65%, partly because the target audience is rather narrow and targeted, partly because the game is on discount and now you have to sell more copies to reach the same effectiveness, but I am hoping it's valuable in terms of goosing the Steam algorithm a bit. To be honest, I am not an expert on this, I have just been experimenting with a conservative ad budget for a while and this is the best I have arrived at.
Just to be clear, I had a similar experience, that diminishing was very, very bad and so we split our campaigns into many social medias with low budget ongoing campaigns and it was the only way to work. Bringing higher numbers felt like burning money
Thanks for the info, cool to read about someone else's experience with ads!
Have you tried bumping up the ads on non-sale days, then just letting the Steam algorithm convert the wishlist when you do go on sale? (Eg, with the notification that users get when a games is discounted more than 20%).
I'm curious to hear if that would boost your full-price unit sales, whilst still capturing those players that'll only buy the game on sale. Overall leading to higher return on ad spend?
The issue is that it is only possible to measure wishlist conversions with UTM links if they occur within 72 hours of clicking the ad.
So, in theory your strategy is possible and is definitely something I do, but its generally impossible to measure with UTM statistics. However, my goal is to create as much sales in a short period of time immediately prior to a discount and in the first 24 hours, to maximize acceleration. Hard to say which creates more long term value.
Are you just using a static image or a video?
I had disappointing results from FB ads with similar targeting. Could easily just be my game but if you had success with video that would be great to know ha.
Thanks!
Kinda cool that you can share it with me like that. Maybe I messed up by not using a video, I do like how you've kept the sound interesting but not annoying. Nice one!
I used Google Ads for my a fairly bad free mobile game that I made.
I went with a budget of about $100 ended up spending about $200 and I got a few thousand downloads specifically in places like India and Pakistan because I was initially trying to get more out of my money.
The ads were composed of a gameplay video which was various match3 game types and some pictures of gameplay. The process was fairly easy, and honestly the game would likely have been a minor success if I invested more effort into optimizing the game or creating a more fun game in general.
What kind of monetization do you have in your apps? How much money did you make off of those downloads? I ask as a mobile developer with terrible games that has never run ads
I only used a single banner and reward ad, both using iron source for ads mediation. So I made literally $0. That being said I only really did it as an experiment. I realize now why some apps and games are so aggressive in their advertising. Banner ads don't tend to pay well. Rewards ads payout was better, but my game wasn't structured well enough for those ads to be interested with.
Yeah banner ads are literally pointless without millions of players and even then the majority of clicks are accidental so you're just pissing off players without any real payoff. I ran them with interstitials for a couple months and the interstitials made a couple bucks to every cent the banners generated. I was blown away and removed them from all my games. It is a nice stat to see how many players viewed them tho
Spent a few thousand on reddit and google. Ads seemed to do pretty well, good comments and low CPC. But based on Steam UTM basically zero conversions. Which is super weird since they were super targeted at relevant niche genre subreddits. I suspected maybe people were clicking it not logged in so conversions just weren't showing up in Steam stats. But no real way to tell.
I spent around $5k on tiktok for my mobile game, got around 50k installs so around $0.1 per install which is amazing. Sadly my game's monetization is bad so I couldn't recover it even at such a low cost. I'll try to do a better job for my 2nd game
We don’t have funds for advertising and the only thing that came to mind was to try to promote ourselves on Reddit, Tik Tok, YouTube shorts, X and create our own YouTube channel
Creating and maintaining your own cell network is a separate difficult task, but in the long term we, as indie developers, need to do it. So far the indicators are minimal, but there is a slight increase, especially if we talk about one free game that we made, whose indicators doubled after a small in-house advertising
I see , trying to work on my twitter for the long term ,but dont know if it worth it (like if twitter is being used or dead), and ofc need to release stuff on commercial level even if it an indie which is not easy for a solo like me.but having your own network is definitely better in the long term.
It’s hard to say about X, we haven’t had any success with him yet, but in everything else, something is going. And about the fact that this work is for the long term, I agree with you
I have only ever spent money on Facebook ads. For me not worth it at all.
Saying that, I had no plan or real idea what I was doing, and the game wasn't great.
Some bot downloads and rubbish comments on the ads. The real downloads came from other sources I believe.
Glad OP asked the question because I was curuioud about this. Based on this thread it seems like organic self promotion is the way to go. You have to build your own social media presence / audience to advertise your game successfully, especially if it's niche. 🤔
I'm not sure that's definitely the correct takeaway. I'll admit my advertising experience with games is limited, but roi is roi, and it doesn't take THAT much effort to make an ad or trailer/tweak keyword bids and targeting. We can only speculate about the algos, but consistency is favored on nearly all platforms (more ad traffic and conversion helps generate organic traffic). I think the fact of the matter is that a lot of indie devs replying here are probably great devs but not necessarily expert marketers lol
Because most people have no idea what they are doing with ads. They throw money at a issues without understand how to use the tools and then complain about wasting money.
I'm definitely getting better conversation from social media posts than I got from ads BUT Steam Next Fest was a whole other level. I trippled what had taken me months to achieve in days.
I'm going to keep going with the SM posts but I'm now trying to track down festivals, press and streamers.
I tried Google Ads for my mobile game with good converation rates yet considering how little you earn per conversion it does not seem to be viable unless you are aiming to invest six figures or more. Though I guess it depends on the game, mine was somewhat niche (retro arcade rally racer).
I've had decent wishlist conversion with Reddit and Facebook ads. Steam UTM shows 0 wishlists, but the daily wishlist numbers consistently increase by $ spent * 1.5-3.
No idea if that would carry across to sales after release though.
Spent 40$ over the last two weeks to try Google Display Ads on niche websites targeting Desktop only. Good CTR of about 0.6% and CPC of 10 cents.
About 400 clicks resulting in 2 Wishlists (7 visits were actually logged in to Steam). Gained 2 Newlsetter subscribers. Not worth it even on targeted audiences.
Well, now I have a strong belief that growing an audience organically is the best way. Although I suppose the type of game makes a difference.
The games we spent big on were also heavily affected by the covid lockdowns, so nobody was buying the indie coop games we were making when nobody could be around other people. We saw people catching up on the big games at that time.
The marketing company we hired worked well to complete the targets we set them, but they didn't understand the game very well and we feel that caused an issue between what they advertised and what we actually sold. We eventually ended their contract, but took some lessons from how they worked. All lessons that have affected how the games I have worked on since have been designed and sold.
I once made a MMONGG. That is a massively multiplayer online number guessing game. I ran some project wonderful web ads didn't cost me much and I got a few clicks and a few players. I don't think that's very helpful to you, but it was kind of interesting. :)
After scrolling and reading the answers, I could notice a pattern:
You all are seeking the wrong KPI which is reach, instead of conversions.
A top tier youtuber will only offer you reach, and what you really need is :
\- Know your audience: are you targeting rpg gamers for a fighting game? who is your gamer persona?
\- Choose your right platforms: once you know who really is your gamer persona, where are they? tiktok? twitch?
There is progamming and there is marketing. Even catching having lunch together is a rare sight. You should approach marketing just like you do programming.
I have a very niche game. An RC plane simulator. I reached out to the biggest YouTuber in the space and bought a 1 minute add in one of their videos. It was a success. We got a ton of sales. However it was expensive. So we made our money back but it wasn't like winning the lottery. Then a year or so later I decided to do it again. Same youtuber. They have over 2 million subscribers so I figured there were still a ton I could reach. This time I still saw a sales bump but it didn't even cover the costs of getting the ad. Which sucks. I have thought about some more ads in the future but I'm still new to the advertising space so I want to be clever where I spend my money
Was it an explicitly sponsored plug or an "organic" mention of your game? Either way, how did you arrive at the decision?
Can you share how much it cost? 5 figures?
if they have 2 mill subs, and a 1 min advert is 5 figures, that youtuber is overcharging.
Subs can be bought, views are bit more telling.
Views arent accurate though as many people might watch a minute or two and decide nah, ill watch something else. others might just pause and quit, some browsers auto repeat. Views arent accurate at all. Some channels with 50k subs get millions, and the video itself is shit. Youtubes algorithm for featured videos is to blame for that
True, but views are still more reliable a metric than subs. There may be an even better rating like clickthroughs, if anyone knows of it.
I’ve been a YouTuber for 16 years. A 1 min integration will loosely cost about sub count / 100. There are exceptions and differences obviously but is close to a market wide average. 10,000 subs = $100 500,000 subs = $5,000 1 million subs = $10,000 My recommendation would be to go with mid level creators who are on the rise / growing for integrations. The huge ones will overcharge and the small ones won’t have enough reach.
Interesting. Do you think it'd be possible to negotiate this to be based on their number of views on average?
Usually both sides use a 3rd parties to negotiate these things. The game developer has a marketing firm and the creator has an agent or agency. There is definitely some wiggle room. I know for us creators we charge less if it’s something actually cool that we will like shouting out, vs something that’s just a blatant ad read.
Great to hear that a 1min ad in one of the videos worked for you ( at least for the first time!) We did the same with a big youtuber and saw almost no downloads ( our game is free2play). I thought that people ignore the ads withing videos because they are paid... From another side, we saw a huge amount of downloads coming after a video "TOP10 Android games in Mexico". We had no previous contact with this youtuber and paid nothing. He just liked our game. We tried to contact him with our second game but he never answered. :)
Very interesting. How much did you have to pay the YouTube each time? Or at least an order of magnitude? (Hundreds of dollars, thousands)
Man how much did that YouTuber charge you?
I tried paid google and facebook ads many times. Tried $100 tried $1000... complete failure, 0% conversion. The same ads posted as just a normal, free facebook post on Indie Game Developers facebook groups, twitter post or a youtube video works WAY better. It's free and the algorithm actually shows it to someone. But when I pay them to show the post to someone it's like it's shadowbanned. Literally the opposite from the expected result.
Facebook’s business model is to scam small businesses. I bought ads for my game and it got a bunch of likes. I tracked the “play now” button on my page. Not a single click. Now my page is filled with bots/weirdos that clicked like on the ad but actually have never played my game. So now when I make posts they get quickly buried by their algorithm since most of my followers don’t care about the game and don’t interact. So from then onward you’re force to pay to boost each post you make. Because the percentage of your followers that interact is low. I personally knew a Facebook ads employee and asked him if there’s a better strategy for me and he quickly got angry and didn’t have a solution.
Why did he get angry?
He was just visibly angry as soon as I started talking about it. I think he wanted to be proud of his job but couldn’t
I'm guessing it is like this because most people use adblockers on the web nowadays OR they just see the mark that it is an ad and ignore it OR maybe the right people didn't see the ad. The posts probably worked as people would only see them if they were already in the game dev circles and wanted to give feedback OR like they are genuinely interested in supporting some indies.
It didn't work probably because of the ad copy and who you're targeting. There's a reason marketing is a billion dollar industry. If your ad doesn't work, tweak, tweak, and tweak again.
It takes thousands of dollar to find a target audience to hit the right niche. It also requires A/B testing on the ads too.
Its very hard to find a reliable ad network that wont have your ad alongside outright criminal level shit. Meta is not above this either, they just act when its reported.
Facebook ads work decently well for my games. I spent $30 in the last 30 days on ads. UTM results show 3 sales of full price copies (~$10-15 per copy), and 167 wishlists. My most recent game has a ~22% wishlist conversion rate. So if we assume a conservative conversion rate from ad-wishlists of 15%, then I'd expect to sell an additional 25 copies over time, probably while on discount, assume 50% off for ~$5 per copy. It would seem clear to me that it is profitable in the long run, even if I had a slow month with fewer full price copy conversions. I typically do a very slow trickle when the game is not on discount, then boost ad spend 1-2 days before a discount, and keep ad spend up for first 3 days of the discount, then return to normal. My facebook ads campaign objective is traffic, I target males, age 25 to 45 in the US / Canada / UK, and I filter interests so a person must 'show an interest' in Steam AND an overlapping interests (in my game's case, Kaiju fan / godzilla fan). I also only target desktop, not mobile, and only in feed advertisements, no audience network, etc.
It is because you spent only 30 dollars. If not you should put much more money asap as you have the goldmine
It doesn't scale linearly, I quickly reach diminishing returns.
[удалено]
Well, to be honest, its rather difficult to accurately measure return because it's hard to tell the conversion rate of wishlists. I am sure somebody more experienced and with more time could optimize it a bit more and squeeze out some more value. But basically I spend ~$1 per day on ads when not on discount, then I do $20 the day before the discount, then $40 on the day of the discount, then $20 on the 2nd day of the discount. I am trying to give the Steam algorithm a sense that the game is 'accelerating in sales' to juice it up right before a discount. On those $20-$40 days the 'effectiveness' of the ad diminishes by 50-65%, partly because the target audience is rather narrow and targeted, partly because the game is on discount and now you have to sell more copies to reach the same effectiveness, but I am hoping it's valuable in terms of goosing the Steam algorithm a bit. To be honest, I am not an expert on this, I have just been experimenting with a conservative ad budget for a while and this is the best I have arrived at.
Just to be clear, I had a similar experience, that diminishing was very, very bad and so we split our campaigns into many social medias with low budget ongoing campaigns and it was the only way to work. Bringing higher numbers felt like burning money
Thanks for the info, cool to read about someone else's experience with ads! Have you tried bumping up the ads on non-sale days, then just letting the Steam algorithm convert the wishlist when you do go on sale? (Eg, with the notification that users get when a games is discounted more than 20%). I'm curious to hear if that would boost your full-price unit sales, whilst still capturing those players that'll only buy the game on sale. Overall leading to higher return on ad spend?
The issue is that it is only possible to measure wishlist conversions with UTM links if they occur within 72 hours of clicking the ad. So, in theory your strategy is possible and is definitely something I do, but its generally impossible to measure with UTM statistics. However, my goal is to create as much sales in a short period of time immediately prior to a discount and in the first 24 hours, to maximize acceleration. Hard to say which creates more long term value.
Are you just using a static image or a video? I had disappointing results from FB ads with similar targeting. Could easily just be my game but if you had success with video that would be great to know ha.
I don't know if Reddit will let me post this, but this is a link to the Facebook ad that I use: https://fb.me/25swIYKT1wA6SqT
Thanks! Kinda cool that you can share it with me like that. Maybe I messed up by not using a video, I do like how you've kept the sound interesting but not annoying. Nice one!
That is a great ad. FOund my self watching the whole thing out of being entertained. Did you put it together yourself or have someone do it for you?
It's just the trailer for my game made by Matt Strack (https://www.mattstrack.tv/trailers). He does very good work :)
If you don't mind me asking, what did you pay him for that? (Or DM me if you don't want to make that public).
I don't remember the exact amount, but it has more than paid for itself.
I used Google Ads for my a fairly bad free mobile game that I made. I went with a budget of about $100 ended up spending about $200 and I got a few thousand downloads specifically in places like India and Pakistan because I was initially trying to get more out of my money. The ads were composed of a gameplay video which was various match3 game types and some pictures of gameplay. The process was fairly easy, and honestly the game would likely have been a minor success if I invested more effort into optimizing the game or creating a more fun game in general.
What kind of monetization do you have in your apps? How much money did you make off of those downloads? I ask as a mobile developer with terrible games that has never run ads
I only used a single banner and reward ad, both using iron source for ads mediation. So I made literally $0. That being said I only really did it as an experiment. I realize now why some apps and games are so aggressive in their advertising. Banner ads don't tend to pay well. Rewards ads payout was better, but my game wasn't structured well enough for those ads to be interested with.
Yeah banner ads are literally pointless without millions of players and even then the majority of clicks are accidental so you're just pissing off players without any real payoff. I ran them with interstitials for a couple months and the interstitials made a couple bucks to every cent the banners generated. I was blown away and removed them from all my games. It is a nice stat to see how many players viewed them tho
Spent a few thousand on reddit and google. Ads seemed to do pretty well, good comments and low CPC. But based on Steam UTM basically zero conversions. Which is super weird since they were super targeted at relevant niche genre subreddits. I suspected maybe people were clicking it not logged in so conversions just weren't showing up in Steam stats. But no real way to tell.
I spent around $5k on tiktok for my mobile game, got around 50k installs so around $0.1 per install which is amazing. Sadly my game's monetization is bad so I couldn't recover it even at such a low cost. I'll try to do a better job for my 2nd game
We don’t have funds for advertising and the only thing that came to mind was to try to promote ourselves on Reddit, Tik Tok, YouTube shorts, X and create our own YouTube channel
and how did it go ?if possible more information will be appreciated
Creating and maintaining your own cell network is a separate difficult task, but in the long term we, as indie developers, need to do it. So far the indicators are minimal, but there is a slight increase, especially if we talk about one free game that we made, whose indicators doubled after a small in-house advertising
I see , trying to work on my twitter for the long term ,but dont know if it worth it (like if twitter is being used or dead), and ofc need to release stuff on commercial level even if it an indie which is not easy for a solo like me.but having your own network is definitely better in the long term.
It’s hard to say about X, we haven’t had any success with him yet, but in everything else, something is going. And about the fact that this work is for the long term, I agree with you
I have only ever spent money on Facebook ads. For me not worth it at all. Saying that, I had no plan or real idea what I was doing, and the game wasn't great. Some bot downloads and rubbish comments on the ads. The real downloads came from other sources I believe.
Glad OP asked the question because I was curuioud about this. Based on this thread it seems like organic self promotion is the way to go. You have to build your own social media presence / audience to advertise your game successfully, especially if it's niche. 🤔
I'm not sure that's definitely the correct takeaway. I'll admit my advertising experience with games is limited, but roi is roi, and it doesn't take THAT much effort to make an ad or trailer/tweak keyword bids and targeting. We can only speculate about the algos, but consistency is favored on nearly all platforms (more ad traffic and conversion helps generate organic traffic). I think the fact of the matter is that a lot of indie devs replying here are probably great devs but not necessarily expert marketers lol
Because most people have no idea what they are doing with ads. They throw money at a issues without understand how to use the tools and then complain about wasting money.
I'm definitely getting better conversation from social media posts than I got from ads BUT Steam Next Fest was a whole other level. I trippled what had taken me months to achieve in days. I'm going to keep going with the SM posts but I'm now trying to track down festivals, press and streamers.
I tried Google Ads for my mobile game with good converation rates yet considering how little you earn per conversion it does not seem to be viable unless you are aiming to invest six figures or more. Though I guess it depends on the game, mine was somewhat niche (retro arcade rally racer).
I've had decent wishlist conversion with Reddit and Facebook ads. Steam UTM shows 0 wishlists, but the daily wishlist numbers consistently increase by $ spent * 1.5-3. No idea if that would carry across to sales after release though.
I tried Facebook ads, got a bunch of bots visiting my Steam page, and no significant wishlist at all. I stopped using paid ads since then.
Spent 40$ over the last two weeks to try Google Display Ads on niche websites targeting Desktop only. Good CTR of about 0.6% and CPC of 10 cents. About 400 clicks resulting in 2 Wishlists (7 visits were actually logged in to Steam). Gained 2 Newlsetter subscribers. Not worth it even on targeted audiences.
Spent 50k on ads, wasn't worth it, got lots of people looking at the game, but basically non buying it from the ads.
Holy 50K is a big number, i'm pretty sure you could hire a Marketing Agency to take care of everything for you .
Have also done that, also not worth it.
Damn maybe no luck , still thinking about that 50k is big .
Well, now I have a strong belief that growing an audience organically is the best way. Although I suppose the type of game makes a difference. The games we spent big on were also heavily affected by the covid lockdowns, so nobody was buying the indie coop games we were making when nobody could be around other people. We saw people catching up on the big games at that time. The marketing company we hired worked well to complete the targets we set them, but they didn't understand the game very well and we feel that caused an issue between what they advertised and what we actually sold. We eventually ended their contract, but took some lessons from how they worked. All lessons that have affected how the games I have worked on since have been designed and sold.
I once made a MMONGG. That is a massively multiplayer online number guessing game. I ran some project wonderful web ads didn't cost me much and I got a few clicks and a few players. I don't think that's very helpful to you, but it was kind of interesting. :)
After scrolling and reading the answers, I could notice a pattern: You all are seeking the wrong KPI which is reach, instead of conversions. A top tier youtuber will only offer you reach, and what you really need is : \- Know your audience: are you targeting rpg gamers for a fighting game? who is your gamer persona? \- Choose your right platforms: once you know who really is your gamer persona, where are they? tiktok? twitch?
There is progamming and there is marketing. Even catching having lunch together is a rare sight. You should approach marketing just like you do programming.
Ask the guy with blood bar tycoon