We've worked with enough game publishers to know that most of them approach media buying the same way a packaged goods brand or a telecom company would. They set a budget, divide it across digital and maybe a little TV, hand it to an agency, and optimize for impressions and click-through rates.
The problem is that gaming audiences don't behave like soap buyers. And treating them like they do is one of the most reliable ways to waste a launch budget.
Here's what we see most often — and what the publishers getting it right are doing instead.
The mistakes that keep showing up
The Pattern
The standard playbook is to go dark for months, then flood channels in the two weeks before release. For gaming, this is backwards. Gaming communities build anticipation over months — sometimes years. The brands that win are the ones already inside the conversation six months before anyone can buy the game. A launch campaign that starts at launch is already too late.
Publishers obsess over pre-order conversions and day-one sales because they're clean, attributable numbers. But gaming has some of the longest purchase consideration cycles of any consumer category. A player might watch 40 hours of YouTube content, follow a game on social for eight months, and then buy it the day it hits 30% off — six months after launch. Media that influences that journey looks terrible in a last-click model and gets cut. Then everyone wonders why word-of-mouth dried up.
OOH is consistently underused in gaming media mixes — and consistently underestimated. Gaming audiences are concentrated in specific markets, commute through specific corridors, and respond to physical presence in ways that digital can't replicate. A well-placed 3D anamorphic billboard in Times Square or a takeover in a gaming-heavy DMA does something no banner ad can: it makes the game feel real, important, and culturally significant. That perception shift has downstream effects on everything from review coverage to influencer enthusiasm to retail sell-through. It's hard to measure. It works anyway.
Gaming audiences — particularly the 25–44 segment that controls the household budget — still watch a significant amount of television. Not appointment TV the way their parents did, but streaming, sports, and live events on connected devices. Linear and CTV placements during high-viewership gaming and sports programming routinely outperform equivalent digital spend for awareness metrics. Publishers who've written off TV entirely based on demographic assumptions from five years ago are leaving one of their best channels on the table.
Large holding company agencies are structured to move volume. They have preferred partners, programmatic relationships, and buying desk incentives that have nothing to do with what's optimal for a specific game launch. The publisher gets a plan that looks comprehensive on paper, executes efficiently at scale, and may have almost nothing to do with where their actual players are spending their time. Boutique beats big when the category requires it — and gaming requires it.
A 30-second TV spot cut down to a 6-second pre-roll cut down to a static banner is not a media strategy. It's creative arbitrage. Gaming audiences are sophisticated — they can tell when they're seeing a repurposed asset. Channel-native creative consistently outperforms adapted creative, and the gap is widest in gaming, where the community has extremely high standards for how their games are presented. The media plan and the creative brief should be written in the same room at the same time. They rarely are.
What the smart ones do differently
The publishers who consistently outperform on launch aren't spending more — they're spending smarter. A few patterns we've seen work across multiple titles and studios:
- They start early and sustain. Awareness campaigns begin 6–9 months out, not 6–9 weeks. This gives the community time to build organic momentum that the paid media then amplifies — rather than trying to manufacture awareness from scratch at the most expensive possible moment (launch week).
- They build a channel mix that matches actual player behavior. That means auditing where the audience for this specific game actually spends time — not relying on category-wide assumptions. A JRPG player and a first-person shooter player have almost nothing in common in terms of media consumption. The plan should reflect that.
- They treat physical media as a multiplier, not a nice-to-have. OOH, experiential, and retail activations aren't separate from the media plan. They're part of it. The best campaigns use physical presence to create cultural moments that digital then amplifies — not the other way around.
- They measure for the full funnel, not just the bottom. Brand awareness, consideration, community sentiment, and organic conversation volume are tracked alongside pre-order numbers. When the full picture is visible, the right budget allocation decisions get made.
- They work with partners who actually understand the category. Gaming marketing is a specialty. The nuances — genre conventions, community dynamics, influencer ecosystems, seasonal release strategy, regional market differences — require experience that generalist agencies don't have and can't fake. The publishers who've figured this out stop treating media buying as a commodity and start treating it as a competitive advantage.
"The best gaming media plan isn't the one that reaches the most people. It's the one that reaches the right people at the right moment in a seven-month consideration cycle."
The category deserves better
Gaming is the largest entertainment category in the world by revenue. It's bigger than film and music combined. And yet the media strategies backing most game launches would be considered unacceptably generic in categories a fraction of its size.
Part of that is inertia — the industry grew so fast that media sophistication lagged behind. Part of it is organizational: most publisher marketing teams are structured around creative and community, with media treated as an afterthought that gets handed off. And part of it is that the mistakes are often invisible. If a launch underperforms, the conversation is usually about the game — not the media plan that failed to put it in front of the right audience at the right time.
That's changing. Publishers who are taking media seriously — treating it as strategy, not procurement — are seeing the difference in launch velocity, word-of-mouth amplification, and long-tail sales. The playbook exists. Most of the industry just hasn't picked it up yet.
If you're evaluating your current approach, start here
A few honest questions worth sitting with:
- When does your media plan actually start? Is that early enough to influence the conversation before it forms without you?
- What does your OOH footprint look like — and is it in the right markets, or just the obvious ones?
- How are you measuring media success 90 days post-launch, not just 90 days pre-launch?
- Does your agency know your genre, your community, and your competitive landscape — or are they treating you like a CPG client?
- Is your creative built for the channel, or built for the trailer and adapted everywhere else?
If any of those questions are uncomfortable, that's usually where the opportunity is.