PC hardware and game partnerships: why a more creative approach is needed
By David Gray. Top image: ASUS (ROG Strix GT35)
The days of hooking up with a flagship title guaranteed to shift hardware units are fading. There is a better way…
As the games industry continues to lick its wounds through 2024, one trend seems clear: there will be fewer tentpole AAA games in the future that can be banked upon to drive PC hardware sales.
Games’ production costs are rising, mega-franchise timelines are extending, and there’s a shrinking pool of gamers’ attention to play for - once you subtract the dominant gaming platforms (e.g. Fortnite and Roblox), annual franchise updates (e.g. Call of Duty), and the perennial competitive multiplayer giants (e.g. Counter-Strike and League of Legends).
As Newzoo commented in the Global Games Market Report (Aug 2024):
The global games market is no longer growing fast enough to provide sufficient returns on many developers’ investments, so developers must adapt to the current environment.
One potential strategy for these bigger studios may be to simply develop and launch more compact games and place them optimally in the release slate to maximize returns and extend the runway for more extensive projects.
The upshot is that we can expect fewer blockbuster hits to galvanize PC gamers en masse. Instead, we’re likely to face a release schedule populated by a greater array of short-experience titles that each appeal to a narrower audience.
This development confronts tech marketers with a two-fold challenge:
How to make better use of gaming partnership assets when they are available. Especially on a local level, which has always been problematic.
How to drive more upgrades using middle tier titles. Each of which is less propulsive individually, but can still provide a strong ROI if the partnership is correctly targeted at the game’s fanbase.
I believe these challenges can be overcome by deploying:
Deep audience insight.
Effective messaging that wins hearts and minds.
Savvy influencer selection.
Creative thinking to achieve cut-through and make the most of scant assets.
Cost-efficient audience targeting.
Step one - Audience insight
We’re looking for the data-driven sweet spot here:
Who are the most tractable consumers we can reach? We want to target intenders excited for the game and interested in upgrading. (We identify this segment through a battery of engagement, sentiment, and intent metrics.)
What is the product truth - i.e. the key issue an upgrade will solve for? It may be that players want the game to run in sumptuous 4K with all the ray tracing trimmings. Or it could be they favor a high frame-rate, or a system that doesn’t keel over when hundreds of objects are on screen. How does the product’s KSPs serve these needs?
What is the consumer truth? Often this is a subconscious motivation like being able to show off a game in all its glory to friends, or it may be a desire to win at all costs online. Understanding our audience’s underlying drivers is key to reaching them psychologically and sociologically.
(We use psychographic and ethnographic techniques to surface these behavioral attributes.)
Once this process is complete, we’ll know which segments to prioritize, and the strategies that can reach them.
New game releases are highly correlated with increased searches for gaming gear - with a two-month lag between each trend line’s peaks. Source: Dialect Research team.
Step two - Targeting the pain point
Convergent research in the fields of psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and marketing has shown that decision-making influences are around 90% emotional and 10% rational.
Despite the apparent imbalance, successful communication requires both sides of the equation to be addressed. That’s because baseless enthusiasm is as ineffectual as Vulcan-like logic when it comes to moving people.
Rationality first, then.
Naturally, everyone wants to play amazing games on ultra settings at over 60 frames per second.
But in reality, most consumers make an internal calculation: trading off their desires versus their budget to hit upon the product that delivers the best bang for their buck.
So, though our marketing content should be delivered in an entertaining and emotionally appealing wrapper, it must still be supported by a hard center of “reasons to believe”.
For example, let’s say we’re promoting a gaming laptop - a product that’s the epitome of compromise.
It’s not just about the power under the hood, but having the right balance of power for the gaming partnership in question.
Take openworld titles like GTA V and Cyberpunk 2077. They’re both GPU and CPU intensive.
One angle here is to emphasize that our system has the right combination of CPU and GPU to meet the demands of the tie-in game.
That the consumer won’t be left buying too much GPU while the CPU is bottlenecked - unable to cope with its physics, AI, or scripting workload.
Perhaps the link-up is with a strategy game like Total War: Warhammer III or Civ VI. Here again CPU and GPU interdependencies are more nuanced than, “Just buy the most muscular bit of kit you can afford.”
By contrast, a partnership with an online shooter may favor talking up the laptop’s ability to deliver a high refresh rate.
While if our partnership game really is all about the ray tracing and butter smooth visuals, then we may need to focus on how to optimize the settings for every occasion:
Prioritizing the visuals for slower-paced, more immersive moments.
Tilting the balance towards refresh rates when firefights break out.
Reducing fan noise if you’re gaming in a public space.
Naturally these are just examples. The right tactics will depend on the product, game, and audience fit.
Step three - Bringing it to life
Now for the emotional part.
Only a relatable human being who understands how you feel can truly appeal to the heart.
Thankfully gaming influencers were born to play this role. The right creator is:
Strong in the local or regional markets you care about.
Reliably capable of producing great social content.
Stoked for, and highly knowledgeable about, the team-up game and genre.
Very close to their followers such that their recommendations are treated as word-of-mouth.
Quality-controlled and well-directed influencers can deliver the correct educational message in an entertaining way, while role-modeling the emotive side of the coin, too.
They also solve the “minimal assets” problem. A good influencer’s personality, community standing, and inventiveness fills the vacuum created by a paucity of assets.
Even a lack of access to the new IP can be solved by leveraging system requirements data, riffing about what is known so far, and putting the hardware through its paces on similarly demanding games.
In other hardware campaigns we’ve produced, we’ve found it best to work with nano and micro-influencers because they have a deeper relationship with their fans than macro talent can muster.
This shows up in engagement rates. According to Aspire’s influencer marketing report 2024, average engagement rates by tier are:
Nano: 4.39%
Micro: 2.59%
Macro: 1.44%
Nanos’ and micros’ greater authenticity typically produces better results for conversion campaigns.
But to ensure you get far more than just another influencer campaign, our creative team works with the influencers to develop fresh ideas that they can run with. This ensures delivery of a distinctive and coherent campaign that delivers on your objectives.
The creative team also has the design skill to maximize the use of limited assets in multiple channels from retail to DOOH to social - overcoming another common challenge of gaming partnerships.
Step four - Media targeting
While influencers can reach their own followers, our media team can ensure that the content resonates much further afield.
They’re adept at surgically targeting adjacent audiences through performance marketing campaigns: aggressively pursuing the lowest cost-per-acquisition and doubling down on high performing executions and formats.
No deal?
Can these techniques still work without a new game partnership on the table? Absolutely.
The Top Sellers charts on both Steam and the Epic Games Store are dominated by older IP.
That leaves an opening for a fast-paced, responsive hardware campaign that centers on the games you must play once you’ve upgraded.
As Jon Peddie Research points out: most gamers are playing today’s titles on outmoded hardware.
Meanwhile, popular games that strain your specs still ride high in the charts. Alan Wake II, Red Dead Redemption II, The Last Of Us Part 1, Cyberpunk 2077, and GTA V among others, are still racking up sales years after release.
Games may drive hardware but it’s a two-way street. Gamers want to justify their upgrades by playing an all-time classic the way it oughta be.
So cost-efficient, social-first content could pay dividends for a hardware brand that keys into that trend.
All told, as the gaming landscape evolves it follows that strategic partnerships must too. The industry is more competitive than ever, which places the onus on creative thinking and the introduction of new tactics to exploit every opportunity to the full.
For our own part, we’re always happy to discuss ideas, so it’s worth knowing that our experience ideally situates us on the intersection between hardware (clients include Logitech, Nvidia, ASUS), retail (Best Buy, Newegg, Costco) and videogaming (Epic, Ubisoft, Bungie).
If you would like to discover more about our integrated approach and work together on a project, get in touch.
