Your Favorite Game Didn't Need an Ad Campaign. It Had You.

Think about the last game you got your friends to download. Nobody paid you and nobody asked you to, you just couldn't stop talking about it until they finally gave in. That's honestly the most valuable marketing in the world and the best games are built to create it.

The Among Us story

Among Us is the cleanest example of this. InnerSloth, which is a tiny studio, put it out in June 2018 and for two years barely anybody noticed. Then in the summer of 2020 Twitch streamers started playing it with each other. Viewers watched, wanted in and then pulled their friends in. CNBC reported it got downloaded almost 84 million times on iOS and Android in September 2020 alone, per Sensor Tower. The studio even cancelled a sequel they had planned so they could keep supporting the original. No ad campaign did that. Players did.

What turns a player into an advocate

It has to be better with your people

Among Us is boring by yourself and pure chaos with friends. Couch games, squad shooters, co op survival, the games that spread are the ones you can't fully enjoy without recruiting somebody. If it's better with friends then players become the recruiters.

Give players something to make

Fortnite figured out that players want to build too. Epic says creator made islands now make up 47% of Fortnite playtime and creators have been paid more than $1 billion since the creator tools launched in 2023. Those creators are stakeholders now. Every island they promote is promoting Fortnite. When players own a piece of it they sell it like it's theirs. Because it is.

Share the bag

Fortnite puts 40% of the net revenue from its Item Shop and related real money purchases into a pool that gets paid out to islands based on engagement, according to Epic. That's a game literally paying its community to keep people around. Creator codes work the same way just smaller. Support a streamer and now the streamer has a reason to keep repping the game.

Make it watchable

Some games are just as fun to watch as they are to play. The ones built for clips, chaos and reactions get free promo every time somebody goes live. Among Us was basically a talk show with a murder mystery attached so of course it blew up on Twitch.

Give the community a home

Discord has more than 200 million monthly active users and gaming communities are the backbone of it. When players have somewhere to organize, trade tips, make memes and argue with each other the game stays alive in between sessions. That's where advocates get made. The game ends when you log off, the community doesn't.

The pushback

Yes, you can't manufacture word of mouth and plenty of studios learn that the hard way. A lot of games chase the built for streamers formula, peak for a month and then vanish. Hype without depth burns out.

Advocacy cuts both ways too. The same players who carry a game will turn on it fast when a studio breaks their trust. A bad patch, predatory monetization, a broken launch. Communities give and communities take. The games that last earn it every season.

Somebody put you on

The culture has always moved like this. Somebody puts you on and then you put the next person on. That's how music spreads in our communities, that's how fashion spreads and gaming is no different. The players doing the recruiting, the clipping and the building are the real marketing department and they deserve to be treated like it. So what's the last game you put somebody on to?