2025

March

❗Independent Games Summit: Hitting the Bullseye: Crafting a Winning Strategy for Targeting Creators and Press

📺 GDC Panel with Sarah Podzorki and Dana Trebella

With renowned, long-term game media outlets like Waypoint and Game Informer shuttering over the past year, and the proliferation of influencers in the space, studios and publishers need to adjust their marketing strategies to fit the ever-changing media environment. nnThis rapidly changing landscape has led to misconceptions ("If this streamer plays my game, I'll get this many sales!") and challenges in determining the strongest ways to maximize the impact of outreach, assets, and announcements. In this talk, Dana and Jenny will combine their years of experience working in marketing, content creation, brand strategy, and PR to detail how studios and publishers can make sense of what's available to them. They'll first do this by sharing strategies for running a competitive analysis, then model how teams can use that information to determine the best timing, audience, and outreach for traditional media and influencers, creating impactful activations for their title's marketing lifecycle.

2024

October

❗Candid vs. Curated: Posting, Processes and Post-Mortems in Games

📺 SXSW Panel with Leah Williams, Amy Potter, Chloe Appleby

With social media increasing the focus on BTS – where everything and everyone is content – we’re seeing an uptick in curated documentaries from AAA studios that showcase triumph over adversity. But what happened to posting candid learnings and retrospectives on failings, as well as learnings? What’s the value in preserving those resources?

Join Chloe Appleby (Games Curator, Powerhouse Museum), Meredith Hall (Marketing Director, Summerfall Games) and Amy Potter (Marketing Director, Synty Studios), discussing the pros and cons of posting openly through the development process, the value in preserving process updates on social media, the question of curation versus candid – which should you use, and when, and where did the social media post-mortem disappear to?

❗Discoverability Roundtable: Being Seen & Seeing Yourself

📺 GCAP Roundtable with John Eternal

Discoverability, securing a publisher, finding your audience, and what marketing really means continue to be the scary topics developers struggle to tackle. This roundtable session will focus on defining key concepts in marketing and business development to help you better understand discoverability, strategies to be seen by your audience, creating your own luck and opportunities, and the common misconceptions and mistakes developers have built over time in these spaces. This session will be driven by the audience, with unfettered access to ask the scary questions, challenge your understandings of social and distribution platforms, and walk away with a stronger understanding of how to get your game seen in the wild west of algorithms and advertising.

❗Publishing Feedback Context in Game Development

🧵Bluesky Thread