Why studios need to promote their games

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Elliott Resnick, Head of First Look Games, says that due to the highly competitive nature of the industry studios need to get their games in front of players if they are to succeed in the long term

Slot studios are fighting for operator attention in a highly competitive marketplace. There are literally hundreds of developers pushing thousands of games with endless new titles launching every month. So being heard above the noise made by rivals is a vital key to success.

Developers also face fierce competition when it comes to directing players to their games. Operator lobbies are stocked with thousands of titles, with game positioning often the difference between whether a title sinks or swims.

But what if affiliates could not only fulfil their traditional objective of new traffic to operators but also drive awareness of a studio’s content and have players specifically look for the game regardless of where they are positioned in casino lobbies?

To do this, studios must promote their games to players as well as operators, but that isn’t easy given developers take a small proportion of the revenues made on their slots. Above-the-line marketing is simply not an option for the majority of studios, so they have to look to other ways of gaining the attention of operators and players.

But due to the expensive nature of traditional game development, and the time it can take to bring a slot from concept to market (this can take anywhere from four to twelve months) studios must not leave game discovery to chance and instead proactively promote each of their most anticipated titles.

It is also important for studios to provide operators with easy access to information and assets about their games, not just for the purpose of selling their titles but also for other areas such as inclusion in the operator’s marketing and CRM. Without this, developers are missing the final but crucial step in launching their game – which is proactively letting players know about it.

This has led several studios to partner with slot streamers but while that now hangs in the balance pending Twitch’s upcoming announcement on 18 October, others are leveraging the incredible reach that traditional affiliates can provide. But striking partnerships with publishers can be labour intensive – something that already stretched teams have little time to dedicate to unless they hire someone dedicated to affiliate outreach pretty much full-time.

That is where First Look Games comes in, providing the world’s first platform that directly connects studios with all registered affiliates in the iGaming space who regularly craft detailed new game reviews designed to generate referrals to one or more online casino partner.

A publisher’s access to First Look Games is free, allowing all game studios to deploy finished/approved creative packs direct to an entire affiliate community within minutes. It puts the power in the developer’s hands, giving them control over the information and assets they share, and when they share them.

Affiliate marketing allows studios of all sizes to put their games in front of players and potentially build anticipation around future releases. For established studios that have highly sought-after content coming, affiliate marketing can drive large numbers of reviews along with significant awareness that a new game is set to land. For small studios starting out, it can make a difference between being prioritised for an operator integration or being left out. For those in the growth phase, game promotion can assist with realising greater ROI.

Studios can additionally use the feedback they receive from affiliate game reviews to guide future slot development by understanding what has and has not hit the mark with the player community. This feedback is incredibly valuable.

What’s more, affiliates are very cost-effective when compared to other forms of B2C marketing and can help studios to reverse engineer interest in their games where reviews are strong and the audience has a clear appetite for their content.

But right now, studios are not maximising the potential that affiliates provide. The studio-affiliate relationship is still relatively new which is why this marketing channel can be overlooked in terms of the value it can deliver.

First Look Games has been designed to do much of the heavy lifting on behalf of the studio, providing them with access to more than 800 approved publishers with their combined reach being more than 20 million players around the world.

Studios simply upload game information and assets to their dedicated library, and then our network of approved affiliates can access these files and use them to produce content such as game reviews or video content. The entire platform has been designed to be easy to use by any member of a studio’s team.

Despite this, we often find the studios do not know where to position us within their business – sometimes we are seen as a marketing resource, other times as a tool to support the commercial team. We can be both, but it shows just how new this area of game promotion is.

Over time this will change, especially when studios start to see the incredible success their rivals are having in the affiliate space by unlocking more of the potential in their games.

Getting any title in front of more of the right people is simply good business and in such a competitive market, that can be the difference between a studio succeeding or failing.