Delve deep into the evolving landscape of the PC and console gaming industry – and learn how to best spend your digital marketing dollars – with our guests from Gamesight: CEO Adam Lieb and Solutions & Support Team Lead Christian Thomas. Gamesight is a Seattle-based venture-backed startup that has been instrumental in helping game developers understand and grow their fanbase through community, marketing, and analytics integration and insights.
The episode starts with a comprehensive overview of the current state of the PC and console games industry, highlighting its dynamics, challenges, and opportunities. The core of the conversation revolves around Gamesight’s “2023 Games Industry Digital Marketing Spend Analysis” report. Our guests dissect the findings – including things like the pros and cons of premium and freemium pay models. They elaborate on how budgets for PC and console games have fluctuated over the past year, the factors influencing these changes, and the effectiveness of various marketing channels. The conversation takes an intriguing turn as they compare influencer campaigns to traditional marketing approaches, offering game marketers valuable insights into different strategies.
Wrapping up, Adam and Christian forecast the key trends for PC and console gaming in 2024. They discuss the anticipated developments and how they might impact players and developers alike. If you’re a PC or console game developer or marketer, this episode is an invaluable resource – so listen now!
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Full Transcript
Please note that this transcript is AI generated and may be prone to errors.
00:00:00:02 – 00:00:20:19
Xander
Welcome to the Game Growth podcast. This week on the podcast, we’re interviewing Adam Leeb and Christian Thomas of Doomsday Games. They did a deep analysis of PC and console games in 2023, and we’re really excited to have them on and talk to them in depth about that analysis, what it means for PC and console gamers and how it compares to contrast mobile.
00:00:20:21 – 00:00:27:11
Xander
I thought it was a good episode. Really interesting hearing their perspective. Adam The team is very sharp. Warren has the most contrast and mobile side one. What do you think?
00:00:27:17 – 00:00:57:00
Warren
I love this conversation. I love talking shop with Adam and Christian. The guys at Gamesight are super bright, super candid, no B.S. and I thought it was a really good combination of hard data that they had around what’s going on in PC games growth as well as just sort of like the more qualitative in the trenches, what they see doing this kind of work and really talking to these guys because any growth marketers will expect a little bit differently and like uptake like we’re really high specked in like performance marketing.
00:00:57:02 – 00:01:16:18
Warren
Free to play strategies, web3 and stuff like this. And the Gamesight guys like they’re really high spec in things like influencer marketing and PC console. We have fewer stat points distributed there. So I think that the four voices on this podcast, we all complemented each other well, brought insights from the slightly different perspective and areas of focus that the team has.
00:01:16:19 – 00:01:36:23
Warren
And I think there’s a lot of actionable tips on this one. Like the ratio of actionable tips per minute is much higher than normal for anyone doing from marketing on PC or console. So yeah, high value absurd. Check it out. You’re going to dig it. All right. Welcome to the show, everyone. Really excited for the episode this week.
00:01:36:23 – 00:02:03:03
Warren
We have two folks from our friends at Gamesight joining. We have Adam, who’s been on the show a couple of times before and Christian joining. And we wanted to join today to dig into this recent report they put together entitled The Games Industry Digital Marketing Spend Analysis. You guys got to make that title a little more click shady, but the meat of this report is excellent and I think it really ties into a few topics that Zander and I have talked about on the show a lot reviewing the last year.
00:02:03:03 – 00:02:22:22
Warren
We’re in the beginning of 2024, so we’ve done a lot of year in review stuff lately and it really felt like a banner year for PC and console gaming, But we haven’t had a lot of hard data around that. It’s just been more of like a vibe check of like it feels like all the excitement is in that space, the games winning awards where player enthusiasm is.
00:02:23:03 – 00:02:33:08
Warren
So you guys are bringing a lot of interesting hard data around this in this report and we’re keen to dig into it with you. So welcome to the show, Christian, and welcome back, Adam to have you guys here.
00:02:33:10 – 00:02:40:07
Adam
Thanks so much for having us. I’d say clickbait is not a skill that we have in spades here at Game cited. So I guess I’ll take that note.
00:02:40:09 – 00:02:42:10
Christian
Data oriented to a fault.
00:02:42:11 – 00:02:44:21
Adam
I think it’s an accurate title.
00:02:44:23 – 00:02:46:13
Christian
Yeah. Cool.
00:02:46:15 – 00:03:00:02
Xander
Well, you know, I think much of our audience will know who Gamesight is. We’ve talked about you guys ad nauseam. We recommend you for PC attribution as a preferred partner. But for those who don’t know, Adam, you want to give a little bit of background about what games that is and give the highlight of the company.
00:03:00:04 – 00:03:23:06
Adam
Sure. Yeah. Yep. So it’s a marketing platform built for PC and console games. We do marketing measurement. It means a bunch of things these days, but the flagship for a lot of it is distributed attribution. So we’re connecting the dots between what’s happening outside of games with marketing, community influencer efforts, with what’s happening in the games, with sales, revenue, in-game events, stuff that nobody’s care about.
00:03:23:06 – 00:03:39:11
Adam
So that’s the heart of the business. So we have certainly a ton of data that flows through the business. And you know, this report is our kind of summary for the last year of where the computers in physical space are spending their money, how that’s changed year over year, what is working.
00:03:39:12 – 00:03:40:22
Christian
Better, what’s working.
00:03:41:00 – 00:03:50:14
Adam
Not quite as well it yeah, maybe things to look forward to next year it could if you’re not working, if you’re not training, maybe you ought to be. So I think it’s a fair summary.
00:03:50:16 – 00:03:52:18
Xander
Notes of attrition.
00:03:52:19 – 00:04:12:07
Christian
We do a lot of things with the business. We have the influencer side of the business. We have greater programs that we do. The core flagship stuff which made this report possible, the attribution side of the business. We kind of bring all of these things together to really just help game companies grow. So game developers and publishers getting their games out there, reaching the right audiences.
00:04:12:07 – 00:04:13:22
Christian
So that’s the name of the game.
00:04:14:00 – 00:04:22:10
Xander
Awesome. So I guess it started the 10,000 foot view two very, very brief overview of what would you say is the current state of PC and console games in 2023?
00:04:22:12 – 00:04:46:11
Adam
Great. I would say great would be my summary. I think that the few data points I would point to to have someone believe me when I say they’re great is if you just look at revenue growth and you look at last year, PC gaming was the largest growth sector in gaming, mobile shrunk browser web stuff lot. It’s been shrinking and console grew mildly.
00:04:46:14 – 00:04:51:23
Adam
So PC games was the largest growth sector and it’s obviously the oldest sector.
00:04:51:23 – 00:04:53:03
Christian
Of all of the gaming.
00:04:53:05 – 00:05:13:04
Adam
Verticals. So it’s kind of crazy to think that that’s now the fastest growing, or at least it was in 2023. I think that’s a big data point. We look at the start I hear a lot is that there are the most 90 plus Metacritic score games released in 2023 again like the history of the industry and so wild there’s a lot of counting stocks kind of going up and to the right every year.
00:05:13:04 – 00:05:28:20
Adam
The number of steam games released last year was the greatest ever, but I was also sure the year before, the year before, the year before. So some of those things are these kind of like forever trends. But I think when you just look at where money was spent last year, where gamers chose to spend money, PC did better than it has in years past.
00:05:28:20 – 00:05:46:21
Adam
And I think more I guess anecdotally, you know, if we could certainly look at the Metacritic charts, but more adequately, there’s just like a ton of great games and they were not all triple-A premium $70 sort of flagship games. There are a bunch of those and huge ones that boulder skates and that Hogwarts legacies and the tears of the kingdom, all those types of games.
00:05:46:21 – 00:06:08:16
Adam
But there are also so many triple AI or games that were huge hits. There were some lethal company of an indie game made by one person that grossed $70 million like every part of the career. And you know, we’re all in their own business. Every part of the ecosystem had huge wins. So yeah, to the healthy place from a consumer standpoint, there’s so many games to play, so many amazing games to play.
00:06:08:18 – 00:06:28:14
Adam
The ability to make a game has never been easier. Rate the cost of development from obviously the sort of unity take tools. Maybe some of the AI tools have never been easier. Take a game, but I still think distributing a game, getting your game in front of players is probably harder now than it’s ever been. So when I say it’s great, I definitely mean from sort of an industry health standpoint.
00:06:28:14 – 00:06:45:16
Adam
I think from an in of when you’re a single game studio guy, it’s probably scary out there. There’s so much competition breaking through the noise and being that one in. I don’t know when I think about Lethal Company or what single game developer made 70 million, it’s like, well, how many games like that existed? Thousands and thousands, you know, How do you beat the one inmate?
00:06:45:18 – 00:06:56:01
Adam
Several thousand. And unfortunately, the answer is it all, it’s just go copy what somebody else did. That tends to not ever work. That would be my general state of the PC games industry.
00:06:56:03 – 00:07:06:00
Xander
Right? Well, in our 2023 year interview episode, I called PC the Platform of the year. And our guest at the time, Mike Schmidt, yelled at me. And so I got to say, second, play the data.
00:07:06:00 – 00:07:09:06
Adam
I think I see Ivan. Sierra’s right. See, I was right. Yeah.
00:07:09:07 – 00:07:34:13
Warren
So, Adam, you just said a mouthful there, and I want to unpack some of that. So you kind of have answered my question already, but I just want to get like, big picture, what were the driving factors behind this growth? And it feels like that this is product led growth. You mentioned the average Metacritic and we had some just like universally beloved games last year, but also just it seemed like much broader adoption of these games than normal.
00:07:34:13 – 00:07:55:05
Warren
So it’s like my headspace on it and I’d like you to kind of either confirm or poke holes in this is we had disproportionate amount of great products that also maybe there was socio economic conditions that caused higher adoption and more game time on PC console. And what I’m thinking of specifically is like as work from home is more normalized.
00:07:55:07 – 00:08:16:12
Warren
It’s very anecdotal, but I know for me, like my share of gaming time from mobile to home devices has definitely shifted more in the home device area as I’m not like either commuting or stuck in office. So I’m just curious like my gut read there on quality plus changing macro conditions of like how people are spending their time as driving factors that Ottoman Christian like.
00:08:16:12 – 00:08:32:12
Warren
What do you think are the main macro factors behind this? I feel like what it’s not and I know where you get more into this is that it’s the industry pushing way more advertising on these products down our throats. It doesn’t feel like that’s a driving factor at all. But yeah, I’d love you guys to speak to, you know, our assumptions of what’s driving this, what you guys actually found.
00:08:32:14 – 00:08:53:19
Adam
I think some of those things that you’re talking about, we’re probably not best to speak on. Like, I mean, we don’t do user research studies on consumer preferences and our, you know, hey, gamer, are you spending more time on PC than on mobile because you’re at home? More like I think some of those anecdotal evidence from personal thoughts I think from a business and data center like I don’t know that we necessarily see any of that.
00:08:53:21 – 00:09:12:11
Adam
We do see time spent in games and team sessions and things like that and like all of those are way up on PC and I think one of the things this year that was surprising and I would have probably said the beginning of the year is set number of session session link are up even without free to play games being up.
00:09:12:11 – 00:09:30:16
Adam
Like most of the growth this year came from premium, mostly single player. Some have multiplayer elements, but like by and large, single player story driven had games. Those are not games that historically are like play many, many, many times for very, very long periods of time. They’re like, you know, 20, 30, 40, 68 hour experiences and then people move on.
00:09:30:20 – 00:09:48:15
Adam
But some of these games, the depth in the amount of hours players can put to this games is so high that the players are spending too much time in them. And I think that’s something where when free to play games for sure, kind of becoming popular both in mobile and PC console. There is this notion of like while you’re giving away a game that has, you know, hours of fun now for free.
00:09:48:19 – 00:10:12:23
Adam
And so the consumer value is just flipped. Like why spend $60 on a game when I can play a game that’s just as fun for free? I think in some ways this year there’s been more of a balancing of like in order to have fun in a free to play game and especially a PC console when like you’re into the battle pass, maybe you’re into some other type of in-game purchases that you kind of need to do to feel like you’re either competitive or hanging out with your friends or your couch looks cool.
00:10:12:23 – 00:10:35:07
Adam
Whatever it is, there’s cost of being a free to play player is not zero anymore. And so now all of a sudden, well, 60, 70, $80 for Hogwarts legacy where I can put 400 hours into also now that feels like a great value for my money. So I think that the media has sort of bought out that on those premium experiences more time in more sessions than we’d ever seen before.
00:10:35:09 – 00:10:57:18
Warren
Right? So on that last point, just to put a bow on it, basically saying as free to play economics have become more refined slash aggressive what’s some years back may have been you know when we’re looking at the value proposition versus cost you know value in fun in free to play and call its glory days or first era, it was hard to make that justification of the premium purchase.
00:10:57:23 – 00:11:10:18
Warren
But now that we’ve pushed free to play monetization so aggressively, paying $60 flat is more appealing maybe than it was in the or formative years of free to play from the gamer standpoint. Do have your read on that.
00:11:10:19 – 00:11:27:23
Adam
Yeah, certainly not universally, but definitely on the margins and certainly some of the most successful games. The other the amount of hours we see in a game like all at three compared to even really successful free to play game is just so high. People spend so much time in that game and it’s cheap, dirt cheap for the amount of hours type fun per hour.
00:11:28:05 – 00:11:29:14
Adam
It’s an incredible value.
00:11:29:16 – 00:11:50:18
Christian
I’ve got some anecdotal evidence to that as well. There’s something that I’ve been unofficially tracking since I’ve started working in the games, advertising spaces, who around me and my peer groups, either friends or family. I’ve started picking up gaming in the last couple of years that really were not people that I would consider to be gamers before a story.
00:11:50:18 – 00:12:09:01
Christian
I have. Like every gaming console there is. My Nintendo switch does not get enough love. It collects dust for the most part. I really only take it with me when I’m going on a trip or something like this. And within the last year or two my wife has completely taken over that console like she’s on it all the time playing Animal Crossing, playing overcooked.
00:12:09:03 – 00:12:26:13
Christian
How much of that is marketing reaching her? I don’t know. But these are high quality experiences that she thinks times of tens of hours and two and three years ago, five years ago, I couldn’t have told you that I would have expected her to ever pick up a game like that and sink so many hours into it. And I have a brother that’s the same way.
00:12:26:13 – 00:12:43:02
Christian
I mean, even my mom my mom is on games from time to time, so there are much more high quality experiences to choose from there. Such a broad catalog of different types of games to reach different types of gamers. And I think that matters when we’re talking about the growth of games industry.
00:12:43:04 – 00:12:54:01
Warren
Right. And Christian, it sounds like you’re speaking to the phenomenon of people who now play video games regularly, but I assume all of those friends and family members you mentioned probably don’t self-identify as gamers.
00:12:54:03 – 00:13:01:23
Christian
I would say so, yeah. I mean, maybe now I could probably convince my wife to say she’s a gamer because we’ve got to have day three run through that we’re playing.
00:13:01:23 – 00:13:05:07
Warren
There’s no coming back from that one. When she’s talking about hard drives.
00:13:05:09 – 00:13:25:05
Christian
I think we have reached the point of no return on that one. But yes, for the most part, these people would not self-identify as gamers, and yet they’re playing games like I can ask them about, how’s it been playing the finals to my brother or to my mom, the games that she’s playing and what she can tell me, your experience, you know, So it’s an interesting shift that I wouldn’t have expected even a few years ago.
00:13:25:07 – 00:13:42:11
Warren
I said, Well, should we go from here into a little more specifics of the report, which had a focus on advertising spend for mobile and PC and should we dig into that? And maybe just starting with some of the macro trends that you guys saw around the actual digital marketing spend?
00:13:42:13 – 00:14:05:11
Christian
Sure. Yeah. The key trends that really showed up for us this past year when we were looking at the data were a few key things. The biggest one is that we’re starting to see a lot of publishers lean more into first party relationship with their players. So talking about account systems or email addresses, trying to secure that relationship, there are a few reasons for this.
00:14:05:11 – 00:14:29:03
Christian
Part of it is independence. Part of it is privacy. What we’re I think starting to see is a bifurcation in how advertising and privacy policies are going to work in the future. That one path is clean room focused solution where both sides are similarly blind to what’s going on on the other side. But we’re still going to try to get some performance data out of this.
00:14:29:05 – 00:14:56:09
Christian
The other side is a path where publishers and advertisers are going to own more of this relationship with their customers and players. I think for our specific advertisers, we’re starting to see a lot more of them push down that path and they’ve gotten a lot of incredible performance gains by owning that relationship. There’s a lot you can do once you secure that relationship with the player that was probably the biggest thing that we noticed this year.
00:14:56:11 – 00:15:21:18
Christian
Secondary to that, there’s the Twitter X story. This was a something that we were really keen on seeing by the time of the end of the year rolled around like how to outperform because we see what’s going on in other industries. How is that performing for games? Tik-tok and Reddit were also great performers in that regard, and then finally some of the stuff that we were already covering a little bit, the retention rates for free to play games versus premium games in a crowded field, how would that end up looking?
00:15:22:00 – 00:15:26:19
Christian
And this past year it was really the case that free to play games suffered in that regard.
00:15:26:21 – 00:15:51:19
Warren
Got it. Yeah. One thing that jumped out to me in the report, the big bullet point you have up top around x a 46% drop off in click traffic on X ported for game marketers between 22 and 2023. There’s kind of a tale of two worlds when it comes to this because obviously we saw brand advertisers pull out of X in droves with a lot of the drama that occurred with Yonex last year, rubbing advertisers the wrong way.
00:15:51:21 – 00:16:17:17
Warren
The converse of that was those of us that are buying on a pure performance focused teams like Uptick, we actually saw extra formats wildly increase. It’s just like the simple supply and demand. You know, like historically X traffic had been really overpriced relative to the return on ad spend. You’re able to get we haven’t seen like a corresponding actual drop in user usage relative to how much advertiser buying has dropped off.
00:16:17:18 – 00:16:33:18
Warren
So we’ve actually seen the arbitrage ability to do performance when you’re buying an X is actually fantastic right now. We’ve mentioned this on a few episodes, so I think that’s just a very interesting tale of two different worlds, depending on what people are after with their media spend and what they’re measuring in their success. Keep You guys.
00:16:33:20 – 00:16:52:11
Adam
Yeah, Christine, correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the things contrary to that that we saw was when the whatever Twitter tick over happened, it became X and there was a lot of brand advertising pulled back. You started reading those articles that were like, you know, 30 of the top 35 advertisers on Twitter cut or whatever. We went and looked at all of our numbers.
00:16:52:11 – 00:17:22:18
Adam
We basically didn’t see that, right? Like game companies didn’t have the same whatever adverse reaction to that happening. Those that were spinning kind of kept spinning. And so that reduction took kind of a whole year, right. Where that, I’m pretty sure, was one early this year. So maybe that’s just delayed, but I wouldn’t attribute the decrease in Twitter and or X in game companies marketing budgets to the like immediate brand pullback of beyond mass taking over where I know that was more true in the CPG market as have these other spaces where.
00:17:22:19 – 00:17:23:10
Warren
Okay, got it.
00:17:23:12 – 00:17:38:14
Adam
That matter. Okay. Possible though that it was just delayed to be like yeah. And then we should cut that. I don’t think we ever saw it go over one. Maybe one and a half percent of like marketing budget spend. So it was never a huge player in the piece of console. Game space continues to be a huge player.
00:17:38:16 – 00:18:14:15
Christian
One thing yeah I know about that platform the report is a lot of this is very much performance marketing focus and that platform in particular just doesn’t have some of the same level of support for that type of marketing as a Tik-tok or Reddit or a Google or Facebook. So that kind of hurts as well. A macro trend that we’ve seen this year and we’ll probably get to this a little bit later on, is that a lot of marketers started flocking towards platforms where they knew that they could prove that performance either through historical data or they had support for those types of performance marketing features, for optimization around conversions.
00:18:14:15 – 00:18:19:22
Christian
What’s happening? This kind of thing is not as mature on the Twitter platform, Rex platform.
00:18:19:22 – 00:18:28:01
Adam
What it was supposed to be coming, right? I think we read lots of various blog posts about how a lot of those features were coming in, but I think they exist yet.
00:18:28:03 – 00:18:29:08
Warren
Can’t confirm non.
00:18:29:08 – 00:18:31:07
Adam
Mobile, I would say.
00:18:31:09 – 00:18:52:18
Warren
Yeah. So I think this will be a little fun. I’d love to pull it the thread a little bit more of some of the notable standout trends that you’re seeing at a personal level. A lot of our audience are growth marketers, some working PC, some in mobile, some in both. I know our team has a lot more data and like a much larger percentage of our games portfolio uptake is in the mobile free to play side.
00:18:52:19 – 00:19:07:11
Warren
I say we have like the minority of data on PC, so might be fun to kind of compare notes here of the big trends you saw. We just talked about one that’s a little different you see in mobile for Twitter. But yeah, what are maybe some of the other standout trends you saw at individual channel level and maybe this compares notes there?
00:19:07:13 – 00:19:32:12
Christian
Yeah, sure. I think the biggest standout one that jumped out to me when we first started reviewing the data was just how prevalent meta in Google are as part of the overall media share are for our customers. So meta has something like 80. Almost 90% of all advertisers are spending money on meta for their games. And then Google is second in that and it’s about 80%.
00:19:32:15 – 00:19:47:06
Christian
That’s a huge share. It’s kind of like that. And then a huge cliff that drops off. Yeah, I would assume it’s probably similar for mobile and probably it also includes Apple as well for you guys, but interested to see how big of media share those platforms shortly.
00:19:47:08 – 00:20:14:13
Warren
Yeah, I would say a big thing that happened with the big two there on mobile is just a lot of advertiser capitulation, giving up on Google ads on iOS. So with the privacy changes of scan and deprecation of IDFA, which we’ve talked about ad nauseum on the podcast, I think there was several years of teams beating their head against the wall, still trying to figure out ways to do productive media buying on Facebook and Google.
00:20:14:13 – 00:20:42:01
Warren
On iOS, the mobile industries. Can we just in a horrible job of adapting to that? Apple didn’t do us any favors. We have a neat bias here up tech as we built tech to to solve for this. But outside of that, just when we meet teams, they’ve just capitulated and stopped doing large scale media buying on Google more so because Google is the lowest opt in of any of the channels because YouTube is a subsegment of Google traffic actually does not ask for user consent to be tracked.
00:20:42:01 – 00:20:59:04
Warren
So literally none of those users are opted in for tracking. Whereas on Facebook we get about one out of seven users that we have to double opt in from because Facebook does at least prompt for that consent. But it’s hard for a lot of marketers who are used to working with perfect data to now only have the opt in monetization data for one out of seven users.
00:20:59:04 – 00:21:06:11
Warren
So I’d say that’s maybe the big delta in trends of what we saw on the mobile front and some of the trends that you guys are discussing on the PC front.
00:21:06:13 – 00:21:29:16
Adam
Yeah, so we had a drop off for IDSA deprecation for players who basically only interacted via like Facebook mobile app, but for PC and console advertisers, most of their campaigns are desktop focused, unified, not desktop exclusive, they’re desktop focused. So even if we lost a lot of sort of trackable players from a pure mobile space, they didn’t make up the largest subset of addressable audience.
00:21:29:18 – 00:21:39:20
Adam
Well, it did have an effect. It was in six seven of the players didn’t all of a sudden disappear from reporting when Facebook sort of like turned that non opt in feature on. Got it Yeah I mean.
00:21:39:20 – 00:21:51:16
Xander
What I was going to say one of the other channels that was obviously very important for us is to talk in this in hugest most ascending channel on mobile side and this is also really relevant to your audience. You want to talk a little bit about that?
00:21:51:18 – 00:22:18:20
Christian
Yeah, we could talk a little bit about Tick Tock, so it takes a big part of our customers plans for both the performance advertising aspect of things and also the influencer side as well. So we’re kind of seeing a lot of tectonic activity in both of those different types of efforts for performance advertising in particular, I think probably on last year’s report we were just starting to see a lot of more major advertisers start to pick up Tick Tock as a platform.
00:22:18:20 – 00:22:42:04
Christian
So this would been going into late 2022. I think a lot of people saw how forward that wasn’t, that there was some opportunity there and a lot more people adopted Tick Tock as a platform this year. So it’s different types of content. There are different challenges that we’ve seen advertisers run into when trying to make ads for this platform, But there is a lot of space there to try to capture new players.
00:22:42:04 – 00:22:45:06
Christian
So we’ve seen a lot of our customers have success with it.
00:22:45:08 – 00:23:02:23
Warren
Yeah, and I would actually really agree from what we’ve seen on the PC side of our client base here, uptick, it really surprised us actually, the first time because the first couple of clients of ours that we wanted to test TikTok for PC games, they kind of begrudgingly allowed us to. We just wanted to get some data on it because it’s counterintuitive.
00:23:03:02 – 00:23:06:01
Warren
Tik Tok Essentially being a mobile primary experience.
00:23:06:05 – 00:23:09:00
Adam
Exclusive, I actually don’t even think they have a website today.
00:23:09:02 – 00:23:35:20
Warren
Within what? There is a website. Yeah, yeah. But it’s very reduced. Functionality is a bad experience. Yeah, it’s definitely not how most people are consuming TikTok content and we’ve found shockingly that for a number of our tests it was actually more cost efficient to bring a user through a mobile TikTok flow where they still have to come back to their PC separately and install the game using Gamesight tracking.
00:23:35:20 – 00:23:59:03
Warren
For some of our partners. A shout out. This was more cost effective than driving from a PC first competitor such as PC targeting on better or on Google. For anyone listening, this is like a very big tip for your testing of PC marketing. If you have not tried marketing to talk, mobile advertising flows to PC games, even if they’re not on mobile at all, is very much worth testing.
00:23:59:05 – 00:24:19:12
Christian
I’d be curious what your opinion is on that, because one thing that I’ve noticed, and it’s remarkable to me, the power of the targeting that they have, I mean, that’s the name of their entire platform is like the algorithm and the content in front of you that you care about. Obviously, that has kind of carried over to the advertising side of things.
00:24:19:12 – 00:24:34:12
Christian
The way they’re able to target user interests is pretty impressive for a platform that’s so young. I’m curious that that’s what you’re kind of attributing some of that performance to. If there were something else unique that you did that you think was really powerful for those campaigns, that you said that very well.
00:24:34:14 – 00:25:00:12
Warren
I wish I could say that there’s like a ton of secret sauce on this, but, you know, we try to be very, very candid. You know, there are certain advertising channels where either the human operator part or the layer of third party tools can add a lot of value to the optimization cycle for Meta, Google, TikTok. These channels just have badass algorithms.
00:25:00:14 – 00:25:08:17
Warren
I always say it’s more akin to animal husbandry. It’s like different operators will get different results. I see Adam wincing, but just wrong.
00:25:08:19 – 00:25:17:13
Adam
It is not any relatable analogy for most are kids like me. I’m like, It’s not a hard thing. It’s not an easy thing. I don’t have a water. I guess it’s hard. Okay.
00:25:17:13 – 00:25:19:05
Warren
It’s apparently only.
00:25:19:06 – 00:25:20:21
Xander
You don’t always do what you want, you know.
00:25:20:23 – 00:25:21:23
Christian
Of. Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:22:00 – 00:25:30:01
Warren
I guess I take for granted that everyone else grew up with, like, 100 homing pigeons, a dozen chickens and other various farm animals.
00:25:30:01 – 00:25:40:10
Xander
I would say the one thing that I think Warren is being slightly modest about for us is like, we do have a bunch of creatives who are very, very entrenched in tech talk. I understand how the creative works there. That’s different than the power of the alcohol.
00:25:40:12 – 00:26:08:06
Warren
Well, if I may be allowed to complete my animal husbandry analogy, so it’s less about pulling the levers and more about what you feed the algorithm and the cues that you give the algorithm. And every one of those little signals mean a ton because the algorithm is so powerful where it’s like if you’re buying on a large scale programmatic network from hundreds of thousands of unique sources, an additional level of optimization on top of what the AI Network is doing can be super powerful and really accelerates things.
00:26:08:11 – 00:26:27:19
Warren
In this case, just feeding a more engaging, creative or just picking a smarter behavioral trait in the game. User flow for an optimization signal. These are the things that massively move the needle and let the algorithm do the rest. So that’s where the animal husbandry analogy comes from, is it’s more like how you coax it to do the thing.
00:26:27:19 – 00:26:31:00
Warren
It’s not that you’re manually pulling a ton of levers to do it.
00:26:31:02 – 00:26:55:04
Christian
See the feedback loop, I think that that’s something that you will find almost across the board with the types of channels that make their way into these reports. Is that, one, they have really strong audiences and they know a lot about their audiences. And then two, almost all of them have those very strong feedback loops where you can feed conversion data back to them and they can fine tune those algorithms typically on your behalf.
00:26:55:04 – 00:27:07:12
Christian
There are so many options that you can do there as well, but to make sure that you’re reaching the right audiences, the ones that are most interested in your game, the ones that are most likely to spend money or keep coming back, whatever the particular goals of the campaign are.
00:27:07:14 – 00:27:26:08
Xander
Cool. Well, I think the last mean traditional U.S. channel. It’s worth discussing before we talk about influencers, which I think is definitely worth doing, just given your guys’s depth of knowledge is Reddit, which is obviously very, very relevant for the PC and console audience. So you want to talk a little bit about how you’re seeing PC and console marketers leverage Reddit, what the effectiveness is there?
00:27:26:10 – 00:27:45:21
Christian
Yeah, the things that we’ve seen a lot this year, you know, Reddit has been trending up the past couple of years that we’ve done these reports. And it’s actually remarkable because they’re still building out a lot of the support for some of that optimization piece that we were talking about. Some of the other platforms already have. And they’re still punching in this weight class, which is actually pretty great to see.
00:27:45:23 – 00:28:08:16
Christian
And I know that they’re building some of those things to come out soon. So we expect that this will only get better. But I think the thing that Reddit has going for it that we saw a lot of advertisers using this year, a couple of different things. One, the community aspect there is very strong and Reddit, like all of these other platforms, knows a lot about their community and they have the tools for these communities to pop up organically.
00:28:08:18 – 00:28:46:01
Christian
Their advertising offers some pretty unique ways to reach different types of communities, reach adjacent communities, which may be something we’ll talk about. The influencer side is something that’s often interesting to us to find is that sometimes the best place to fish is right next to where you think all the fish are going to be. And so those adjacent communities tend to be really high performing and they have some really unique ways to reach those things, like audience takeovers, ways where you can reach an entire genre or entire subject, ways that you can reach users within the actual comment section, within those threads, just really unique ways that you don’t really find those on all of
00:28:46:01 – 00:29:00:21
Christian
the other platforms very consistently. So I think because of all this, our advertisers have found some great performance on Reddit and as they continue to mature, some of these tools for their performance advertising ecosystem, we expect that next year they’ll probably do just as good, if not better.
00:29:00:23 – 00:29:22:05
Warren
Yeah. Kristen, I think you made some really good points there. I mean, to me, Reddit is a little bit of not sort of the inverse, like Reddit has such an amazing user base for people working in gaming. But you alluded to this, Kristen, I’ll say it a little more explicitly. They’re really behind on this. Other networks we just mentioned as far as like how powerful their algorithm is to kind of do the work for you.
00:29:22:05 – 00:29:44:06
Warren
So we find it is one of those channels where a lot more can be controlled or needs to be managed by them in order to get more optimal results. But it sounds like, you know, you guys are pretty close to Reddit team in a lot of the stuff is in development. If they do get a powerful programmatic element to their buying, I think Reddit could really come from behind it to become a super meaningful network.
00:29:44:08 – 00:29:45:02
Christian
Yeah, I agree.
00:29:45:02 – 00:29:52:07
Adam
I think they just have a couple of big advantages, right? Like they have PC the audience of people where PC games are just more likely to be Reddit users than.
00:29:52:09 – 00:29:53:20
Xander
Napster or win over a lineup, you know?
00:29:53:21 – 00:30:26:13
Adam
Yeah. Compared to Facebook dot com Facebook is does not have the same penetration of PC gamers at least in terms of like daily or weekly logins. And then I think the thing that has changed more anecdotally the performance I’ve seen is just more investment in the creatives. And Reddit is different in that like obviously you’re not going to take your credit from Google and throw it on Reddit, but but figuring out what actually works and feels organic and I think that’s true of most of these platforms and Tick tock especially, but I think Tick Tock and Reddit of the two where like the Delta between a good and bad creative is just so wide where
00:30:26:13 – 00:30:43:04
Adam
I think sometimes, you know, a Google search ad or whatever, it’s like how different is each of these words? Maybe marginally, but how different is a Reddit creative that you can go, that’s cringe versus like, I got this was an organic post about some interesting game. I was going to check out the fact that it said sponsored or promoted like I didn’t really notice.
00:30:43:09 – 00:30:52:00
Adam
So I don’t I do think they’ve been around longer. More people have done it. Their team is helpful in getting you in the right direction as well. But a lot of it comes down to good creative.
00:30:52:02 – 00:31:20:14
Warren
It’s a good point out of them and looking through some other data in your report, one thing you guys touched on was just sort of the tick tock ads becoming more effective as a channel. And I think you guys alluded to it, but I think it’s really as we as marketers use these channels for a while, we move from just slamming our defaults, go to ads into that channel to learning the nuances of how people use that channel, the kind of content that feels native to them, and making custom ads that speak to this.
00:31:20:14 – 00:31:41:18
Warren
You said more so with tick talk now being relevant for several years, Everyone knows that you need to make very bespoke native viewing content for it and read. It feels like that same story, but maybe just a year or two behind where I definitely see the same thing. As you mentioned, Adam, of like a higher percentage of the ads really starting to feel native.
00:31:42:00 – 00:31:45:19
Warren
I am sure along with that, the efficacy of those ads are also increasing.
00:31:45:21 – 00:31:47:12
Adam
Yeah, you cringe less.
00:31:47:14 – 00:31:48:22
Warren
Yes.
00:31:49:00 – 00:31:59:19
Xander
It’s also a funny place because it’s like probably the place where the text actually matters the most out of any platform by far. You know, usually we say it’s text doesn’t matter much, but it sure does.
00:31:59:21 – 00:32:05:09
Adam
Yeah, I scroll and when you see words that don’t look like a Reddit post, you’re like, what tells us? Yeah, right.
00:32:05:11 – 00:32:06:13
Christian
No, we’re so trained.
00:32:06:15 – 00:32:21:09
Xander
Anyway, the last one, I think it’s maybe worth talking about What we saw got a little bit of time is to talk about influencers for know that’s a huge part of your guys overall business. So just talk a little bit about how that business has evolved, how important it is and how to do it effectively for marketers in 2023 and 24.
00:32:21:11 – 00:32:42:18
Adam
Yeah, I think this is one where like I kind of wish there was a better answer than this, but the answer is it hasn’t actually changed that much. People are getting better at it, but there’s a lot of things that when you read, you know, five news trends and influencer marketing, like read a bunch of those ones that came out in 2024 and they’re the same ones from 2018, you know, like micro-influencers, more performance.
00:32:42:18 – 00:32:43:12
Warren
Deals.
00:32:43:12 – 00:33:07:05
Adam
Like, you know, let’s focus on top ten or whatever. And it’s like, sure, But none of that is really necessarily proven out to be the case. The supply and demand, which I would have imagined a few years ago, would have flipped, hasn’t it? Still, roughly the same top content creators are still had wild demand. They are still getting 50 to 100 deals a week, that they are turning it to 95% of them down.
00:33:07:06 – 00:33:18:19
Adam
Getting in front of those creators, getting them to play your game. You talk about your game is hard, inexpensive, and that hasn’t changed. The willingness to take performance driven deals has not changed in that.
00:33:18:19 – 00:33:19:08
Warren
In that it’s.
00:33:19:08 – 00:33:19:19
Adam
Extremely.
00:33:19:19 – 00:33:20:16
Warren
Low.
00:33:20:18 – 00:33:45:00
Adam
That is extremely low and like sort of find at some very, very small scale. You can do it, but no one has done it scalable ever. So that’s at least in gaming. So that is all challenging. I think what has changed is the best practices have become more accepted. So five years ago we would have told everyone the same thing, which is like don’t write a script, give it to a creator and expect them to read it and have a good piece of like influencer marketing, right?
00:33:45:02 – 00:34:04:19
Adam
That has never happened and it never will happen. Like, that’s not what makes influencer marketing successful. Five years ago, I don’t know, 50% of column like triple-A game companies didn’t care and wanted to do that. I would say now probably 10%. It’s not zero, but it’s it’s probably, you know, not close to 50 either. So yeah, ten, 10 to 20% maybe.
00:34:04:23 – 00:34:32:14
Adam
So some of those best practices, things are now more industry standard than they were, you know, even more tactical stuff like usage rates. Again, five years ago, probably 50% of triple-A game companies would put insane things in contracts like we have indefinite usage rates for your likeness, for anything we ever want to use it for. In. See, no reasonable person should ever sign an agreement that says that 50% of game companies, league employees probably tried to get that term in five years ago.
00:34:32:18 – 00:34:59:03
Adam
Now that’s probably ten. So it has gotten better, more sophisticated. Certainly the data that we use like sort of 18 Sep, I think the data that the industry broadly uses has also like moved in the right direction. Let’s focus on things like follower counts and no more focus on things like audience reach for games like my my game genre, my competitors, things like that that go into by buying decisions and work decisions.
00:34:59:03 – 00:35:14:15
Adam
So I would say the industry is like broadly move in the right direction, but it’s not, you know, it’s mostly the same stuff that was true of years ago. That is just more true now and more accepted now than it was then, where maybe that was the idea of working with 100 mid-tier content creators five years ago was like no one was doing that.
00:35:14:15 – 00:35:19:19
Adam
And now like how people are doing that. So maybe not the sexiest answer, but probably my best answer.
00:35:19:19 – 00:35:44:09
Warren
Yeah, and you guys are a lot closer. You know, we dabble and some of our partners will dabbling in aspects of working with KOLs or influencers content creators call it what you will. But one general trend I’ve seen and please correct me if you think it’s off base, is the industry sort of better learning how to apply concepts and theories from performance paid advertising to influencer, even though it’s not 1 to 1?
00:35:44:09 – 00:36:05:06
Warren
So like I’ll give an example, kind of restating something you just said, Adam, which is looking beyond just like follower count. Like when we’re doing performance playing, you never like we’ll just buy from the biggest app possible or the biggest website possible. But I feel like in the early days of influencer there would be pushback if there was a proposal or it’s like, Well, I’ve never heard any of these people.
00:36:05:06 – 00:36:24:12
Warren
Why would we want to wonder? We want to work with the big names? And I think what I see teams start to realize is in the same principles as performance media buying, what is the CPM? What is the cost of the impression or the eyeball, and what is the relevance of each impression. It’s not 1 to 1 and we can’t measure it as exact as we do in performance media buying.
00:36:24:14 – 00:36:42:05
Warren
But That’s something that at least the teams we work with, we see that mindset starting to be applied and then getting why we might recommend, Yeah, okay, we don’t need to work with like these large twitch streamer is for a given project. Like these are more people in your micro niche, they’re smaller Twitter accounts, but they have exactly the following you want and their cost is right for what we get from them.
00:36:42:09 – 00:36:47:16
Warren
I’m projecting a bit, but that’s a trend I see. Would you guys say that that industry is evolving that way?
00:36:47:18 – 00:37:02:13
Adam
Yeah, I would. I would say I think the actual reason, which we will just explain it a little better is ten years ago, let’s say influencer marketing in games was broadly a PR function, right? Yeah, it is. At least that big triple-A was like they might have had people who were used to deal with celebrities and then the like.
00:37:02:13 – 00:37:20:15
Adam
I guess we treat these people like celebrities or they said like these content creators are like more like press. They’re doing reviews of our games. Let’s treat them like press. And so it was this PR function. And you can imagine that PR is not full of performance marketing people that shift from being a PR function to what it is now.
00:37:20:15 – 00:37:41:00
Adam
And I think at the best companies like the most sophisticated sort of influencer companies, it’s a touch on discipline. Influencer is its own discipline and it borrows from PR, it borrows from community in cars, from marketing. It can usually tell how sophisticated a company is and their sort of influencer marketing capabilities by like where that division sits in the organization.
00:37:41:00 – 00:37:58:05
Adam
If it’s it’s it’s in the period versus it’s under marketing or sits or community, it can kind of tell you. I think that kind of explains the phenomenon you’re seeing more enriches. Yeah. If you took a person with five years of mobile app you a experience and say you’re now in charge of influencer marketing, well yeah, they’re going to do all of the things you said.
00:37:58:05 – 00:38:15:02
Adam
They’re going to quickly learn the data that matters. The data doesn’t. What drives performance, what doesn’t, whether there’s like perfect measurement, which there’s not. You know, as I say, as a company, we do a ton of measurement for influencer. It’s not perfect. You don’t have 1 to 1 click through view, through tracking on every single Twitch streamer YouTube video.
00:38:15:05 – 00:38:32:17
Adam
So you’re having to extrapolate from that data that you do have and the deterministic attribution in the list and all the other things that you can do to kind of understand what effective wording from that and say, okay, well these are the types of deals we do that actually drive value and these are the ones that don’t. These are the type of creators that drive value and these are the ones that don’t.
00:38:32:18 – 00:38:52:07
Adam
Those things come from people with more historically performance, you know, marketing backgrounds where they have that discipline, they have that experience, and the brain works that way. It happens more infrequently when it’s a community manager and used to managing a community of thousands or hundreds of thousands of gamers. And now they’re also managing all of the influencers that they’re not going to show.
00:38:52:07 – 00:39:06:19
Adam
They treat it with the same level of analytical rigor. So I do think that we’re seeing more and more influencer stuff be outstanding marketing. And I think when that happens, you get more performance, you get more data, you get more and a lot quicker.
00:39:06:21 – 00:39:24:08
Xander
Awesome. Well, we’re getting to just about to time. But before I go and he used a question that wasn’t on the outline, I want you to look forward and it’s now into 2024. You’re doing your year in review. Write up of 2024. What’s changed? What is an evolution that we’re going to see in 2024 has tricked it. But you say.
00:39:24:10 – 00:39:25:18
Adam
What do you I Christian.
00:39:25:19 – 00:39:46:23
Christian
Here’s I think I think that end of the year people will probably be more sophisticated and active in looking for solutions to whatever privacy changes come down the pipeline. I mean, I know there’s a lot of stuff that’s kind of been bubbling up for a long time. I don’t think it goes as far as making like, monumental changes.
00:39:46:23 – 00:40:05:01
Christian
I know that Google is doing some cookie deprecation. There are some things about privacy, sandbox, things that are coming out. Yes. I don’t think that will move as quickly to make monumental changes by the end of the year. We shall see. But I think what we will see is a lot of more advertisers thinking about this in a much more proactive way.
00:40:05:03 – 00:40:24:05
Christian
One of the things that I mentioned at the beginning is kind of this bifurcation between how different advertisers are thinking about privacy. Are we going to go lean towards more of a return type solution with our advertising partners, or are we going to go towards trying to own this first part of your relationship with our players? A lot of people are still in the middle not thinking about that.
00:40:24:05 – 00:40:29:01
Christian
I think we’re going to see a lot more advertisers kind of pick a side there and try to choose a solution.
00:40:29:03 – 00:40:31:06
Xander
Awesome. Adam Maybe that’s it.
00:40:31:08 – 00:40:51:23
Adam
Yeah, right. When I probably would say that, I think that tip talk is probably going to be the biggest growth channel kind of again, it was, it was last year, but looking at the percent of team companies that have TOK in their marketing budgets I think goes way way up the dollar allocation to tick tock. I also think goes way up a variety of reasons.
00:40:51:23 – 00:41:22:07
Adam
I think they’re super aggressive in terms of investing in their business. They are actively making changes and, feature requests based on partners like us and partners like many of our customers. That’s great. I would say that’s not always been the case for some of the major kind of advertisers in the industry. They have large businesses and I would not say that PC console gaming is something that they prioritize as, Hey, we want to make sure that we have the best advertising platform for PC and console games.
00:41:22:09 – 00:41:35:04
Adam
I’ve seen that from Tick Tock, so I think they’re going to be a huge winner. I also think just terms of the mix of where players like to discover games, they like to see other people play them, other people talk about them. Tick tock, you should be really fast. Are doing that in a quick way of great up this thing.
00:41:35:06 – 00:41:50:14
Adam
Let me check it out. All right. I also think there’ll be some upgrades in terms of the flows like you sort of mentioned, the flow you use, which do you think is bad but still works? I think by the end of the year there will be a much better flow that works even better, that will cut out some percent, that kind of drop that you’re used to seen.
00:41:50:14 – 00:41:57:06
Adam
So that would probably be my biggest and I’ll call it winner change from now to this time next year in the area.
00:41:57:06 – 00:42:01:19
Xander
The two talk hat trick three years of maximum growth. Now it’s the.
00:42:01:19 – 00:42:05:05
Adam
Harder rates, you know, bigger baseline growth. So yes, it does.
00:42:05:05 – 00:42:06:06
Warren
Large numbers.
00:42:06:07 – 00:42:17:13
Xander
Yeah. Awesome. Let’s get harder. Well, we’re just about a time. Christian. Adam, thank you so much for joining us. If anyone wants to get a hold of either you learn more about Gamesight or get access to this report happen to you.
00:42:17:15 – 00:42:29:22
Adam
I’m on Twitter at adam. Ashley can go to our website Gamesight.io. we have like I don’t know support there and chat there and demo requests and all that kind of fun stuff there on the website.
00:42:30:00 – 00:42:41:23
Christian
I’m also another LinkedIn, so that would just be where to find me. But yeah, we’re always in the support channel looking out for people looking for help when they’re trying to measure performance, their beams are catching awesome while.
00:42:41:23 – 00:42:45:16
Xander
So we will link the report and the block article and on the podcast as well.
00:42:45:21 – 00:42:59:10
Adam
Yeah, another report. And we’re always looking for other prompts, you know, other things people are curious about things that maybe were in that report that we would love to hear about. Always love to hear that from customers corridor potential. So ideas are welcome.
00:42:59:12 – 00:43:01:15
Xander
Great. More digs out.
00:43:01:17 – 00:43:18:04
Warren
Awesome. Yeah I mean Kristen is great having you guys on everyone make sure to check out Gamesight if you’re doing anything in the space of PC and console marketing, the people are great. The tools are great. Definitely one of our supported providers for up to a platform. Speaking of which, up to is the people that brought you the podcast today.
00:43:18:04 – 00:43:38:20
Warren
So if you’re doing anything to grow your game, if you need people to help you grow your game with user acquisition, data analysis, creative development, Web3 growth strategies, we do all that fun stuff. We love meeting teams, building great games and always having help. You can reach us at our website. It’s Upptic.com. That’s U-P-P-T-I-C-dot-com and bonus plug.
00:43:38:22 – 00:43:52:14
Warren
If any one in the industry is going to dice, make sure to check out the Magic The gathering after party site event sponsored by the Gamesight team. They will be there. I will be there and it should be fun. What’s the date of that?
00:43:52:14 – 00:43:57:03
Adam
It would be February 13th. It’s the Wednesday night. Eight days.
00:43:57:05 – 00:44:04:00
Warren
Also. Mine is not yet sold out, but last I checked, some of the other dice parties were sold out. So move fast.
00:44:04:01 – 00:44:14:07
Adam
Yes, in there are both casual and competitive queue. So whether you just want to show up and have fun and get some cards, you can do that. And if you want to compete for big prices, you can do that as well.
00:44:14:09 – 00:44:15:13
Xander
Awesome talk soon.