With all the potential people a game could reach, it’s important to be clear about the audience you’re actually trying to reach. Both in terms of your ideal player/muse, but also adjacent players.

I believe audience understanding should be holistic. This involves building a complete understanding of their identity, how to reach and find them, their psyche and underlying needs and desires, their broader lifestyle & cultural context, as well as their relationship to your studio and portfolio.

This is what I call the “5Rs Framework”.

Real: Is this a real community with a shared identity?

If you can’t name, find, or meet a person who meets your audience definition, they’re probably not real. And you need to adjust. The razors could be too broad, too narrow, or the combination of audience lenses that you’re using aren’t quite right.

Serving a game in an existing genre typically makes this a bit easier, since players often describe themselves using genre labels, monikers such as “FPS player”, or “MOBA player”. If players don’t describe themselves in ways that you’re ascribing to them, then that’s also problematic. For example, if you’re trying to serve “animal loving gamers”, essentially players who love animals and also love games, but this audience doesn’t refer to themselves in that way at all, then you ought to revisit. We’re looking for a community that exists whether your game is there or not. They have their own jokes, their own insider language, and their own way of looking at the world.

Another way to understand if this audience is real is trying to list a list of streamers, influencers, or celebrities who fit with your audience definition. While they might not be a perfect fit, if there is a loose fit, then the task of substantiating the audience becomes a lot easier. The goal is to be able to validate that this audience actually exists in the real world.

You’ll want to understand how they talk about themselves and their relationship to games in general. Do they even describe themselves as gamers? Is gaming core to their identity? Or is something that they keep concealed. Audiences where there is an established shared identity, and players are effectively already aggregated are going to be easier to study. If this audience doesn’t yet identify themselves in this way, and hasn’t met other players who fit this definition, then you’ll have the harder task of having to aggregate them in the first place. Disaggregated audiences are harder to distribute games too.

Since games often remain in development for a long time, you’ll also want to assess the general stability of this identity. Is it stable (e.g. Tactical FPS players), fluid (e.g. VR gamer), growing (e.g. Roblox Battlegrounds player) or in decline (e.g. RTS players)? My perspective is that stable, or growing identities are more attractive, and require less developer intervention to course correct. Fluid identities are riskier, but let you shape expectations from the ground up. Declining identities may only have short runways, but one upside is there may be few competitors.

Crucially, the dev team needs to be able to identify with this identity. It’s ideal if many of them share this identity. And if not, at least relate to this identity, through potentially being an older version of this same player, or having close friends/family who fit this identity. Development becomes a lot easier when you can just look in the mirror.

Reachable: How and where would we find these players?

It’s one thing to know who your audience is; it’s another thing entirely to actually find them in the wild. You can have the most vibrant community of players in mind, but if they’re hiding in a private Discord server, subdivided across many different games, and difficult to move over, then your marketing budget is going to have a very bad time.

Think of it like trying to find a specific friend at a massive music festival. If you don’t know which stage they’re at or what they’re wearing, you’re just wandering around hoping to find them in the wild. You might get some help from algorithmic storefronts, like Steam, but most of the time, you’re on your own.

The first thing to check is simple: where do these people congregate? The answer can’t just be “social media”. It’s likely to be much more fragmented and nuanced. Are there in a specific subreddit debating the meta of a 10-year old RPG? A digital forum dedicated to others with that interest? Do they all meetup at a once a year event where the most dedicated fans show up? Or are they part of a Discord where the devs of a rival game talk to them? If your team already identifies with this audience, this becomes a lot easier – you just know, since you’re likely already in those circles. But otherwise, it’s like detective work. You’re looking for signals. Maybe they all follow the same micro influencer who specializes in “stress-free” cozy games. Maybe they’re the types to spend hours in the comments section of TikTok for Roblox. If you can find the figurative neighborhood they live in, you’re halfway there.

How people find games has also changed. “Googling it” is often a second order activity; a thing you do after you’ve already discovered a game. Most of the time, the recommendation is coming from a close friend, or a cultural sherpa. Streamers still have some sway, but which ones help you find your audience best? What unintended audiences come with those streamers? You have to figure out who the gatekeepers are. Once you know who they trust, you can stop shouting into the void and start having actual conversations..

It is important to both understand the different sources of influences. That is, what are all the different ways a player could learn about your game. But equally important is to understand the strength of each of the sources, specifically for your player. You could then try to visualize this, in a sources of influence map, like the below, to get a sense for what your publishing approach should prioritize.

A lot of this gets easier if you understand what existing games, genres, and creators this audience already follows. If your game is trying to position itself for the city building sandbox player, then it’s likely that this player has played or is playing Cities Skyline. And therefore, they likely follow any game from Paradox Interactive or Hooded Horse. They probably have notifications turned on for creators like Keralis - who is basically the king of “look how pretty this bush looks” - or City Planner Plays, who brings actual civil engineering logic to the digital table. These players tend to only play on PC and expect a deep modding community, so you’d need to figure out how to meet that need as well.

Understanding if they’re reachable also involves examining what might prevent them from trialing your game. Barriers are likely to be audience or game specific, but to generalize, will likely comprise of some combination of the following: lack of social proof, niche appeal/position, perceived time commitment required, hardware limitations/spec, accessibility requirements, high backlog of superior games, price point, genre fatigue or lack of novelty, perceived complexity or learning curve, poor reputation or reviews, art style/theme/setting mismatch, or just not having the basic awareness of your title. I believe that it is critical that you understand what are the biggest barriers to trial for each of your audience segments, and start building bridges over those gaps long before a game is launched.

Reasons to play: What motivates them to play?

Often most importantly, you need to understand what motivates them to play in the first play. Richard Bartle created an initial classification called the Bartle Types. There are many derivations and other similar frameworks that stem from psychographic clusters. I tend to look at these, but also pair them with a few other angles, as follows.

Every game has its magic moment - the specific feeling players are constantly chasing. For the city builder crowd, this might be the ant farm moment. It’s the feeling of zooming out after three hours of detailed and creative work and seeing the tiny digital citizens using the bus route you painstakingly just optimized. It’s a sense of total, benevolent control. But for a horror fan, the reason to play might be the safe scare moment, that adrenaline spike you get when you know you’re being hunted, but you’re actually tucked under a duvet with a bag of chips.

Identifying what the core loop of joy is fundamental. Are they chasing the flow state where the world just disappears? Are they looking for social status by showing off a rare piece of loot? Or is it purely catharsis - the simple pleasure of smashing things after a long day?

Sometimes the strongest reason to play your game is that existing options (your competitors) are frustrating or under-serving your player. If your favorite shooter is overrun with toxic lobbies and predatory battle passes, that’s going to eventually run its toll. Marvel Rivals was able to capitalize on a frustrated pool of Overwatch players, and launched just as frustration was starting to reach a tipping point.

Understanding what makes the game worth it is also really important. We’ve all had that feeling of finishing a game and thinking, “Well, that was a waste of twenty hours.” To avoid that, you have to understand what makes an experience meaningful to your specific audience. For some, it’s a narrative gut-punch that stays with them for weeks. For others, it’s finally beating a boss that’s been kicking their teeth in for three days - that feeling of Perseverance and Mastery. It’s helpful to map these out, are players motivated by Achievement (stats, ranks, completionism), or Immersion (story, roleplaying, atmosphere). Once you know their DNA, you can stop marketing features and start marketing feelings.

Finally, what are the goals that they want to pursue? It’s easy to assume everyone wants to win, but that’s rarely the whole story. In a sandbox game, the goal might be “make it look pretty”. In a survival game, the goal might be “build a base so secure that I can finally relax”. Offering a number of different goals and then pathways within the game for different player types to pursue each of these is key. A player who runs out of goals is likely to stop playing.

Rhythms: What is their broader lifestyle & cultural context?

This is where we look at the clock and the calendar. A game isn’t played in a vacuum. It’s squeezed between a commute, a toddler’s nap time, in place of attending a university lecture, or first thing in the morning on a weekend. Where does your game actually sit in your player’s life?

Is your game a “second screen” experience? You know the type - the kind of game a player runs on a side monitor while they’re watching a Twitch stream or listening to a podcast. Or is it a “deep dive, main game” that requires total focus, a headset, and a four hour block of time? Whether your game is a primary or secondary experience will shape a number of key publishing decisions, so understanding this first is critical.

The length of an average session is going to determine the types of play patterns surrounding your game. If you’re building a game as a main game with marathon long sessions, you likely want to aim for an audience who has more time. Younger players, students, unemployed folks , and yes, potentially even retirees.

Games that have seasonal engagement patterns, like Path of Exile or Diablo IV, should expect their players will disappear and then return. Timing their seasons to coincide with the availability of their audience is important. You want to avoid launching a massive expansion or drop during the one week your core player base is historically busy. This means looking at the demographics and regional details of your audience, and understanding what periods are open windows and which periods to avoid. Eventually, you’ll also train your audience to expect your seasonal pattern, but at first you are likely better served adjusting to theirs.

You also should try to understand them beyond the screen. What else defines them? A player isn’t only a gamer, they also likely do other things. They might be a mechanical keyboard enthusiast, a Formula 1 fan, or someone who spends their weekends hiking. These “adjacent” hobbies shape their identity and, more importantly, their expectations. If your audience loves high-fidelity audio equipment, they’re going to notice if your sound design is thin. If they’re into DIY crafting, they’ll probably appreciate a highly customizable base-building system. When you understand their broader cultural context, you can stop guessing what “cool” looks like to them. You want to focus on areas that directly impact design or development. There is a risk overcooking on this element.

We also need to talk about their social unit. Is most of your audience already part of a massive community where the game is just a background for hanging out in a Discord channel? Or are they likely to be in smaller tight knit squads that have been playing together since middle school? Or is this a game trying to serve the Lone Wolf who uses gaming as a way to decompress from a loud job?

Understanding these rhythms allows you to respect the player. You aren’t just fighting for their “attention”; you’re asking for a slot in their life. The better you fit into that slot, the more likely they are to keep coming back.

Relationship: What is their relationship with your studio and place in your portfolio?

When we talk about Relationships, we’re looking at how this specific audience interacts with your studio and your broader portfolio. Are they complete strangers, or are they already living in your house?

If your studio is about to launch a massive, 1000-hour survival crafting game, and you already run a highly successful live-service survival game, you are asking players to make a brutal choice. They only have so much free time.

Will this new game cannibalize your old one? Probably. But you have to figure out if that’s constructive or destructive. Constructive cannibalization is when you migrate a player from an older title, where their residual LTV was low, to a new title where they are now on the early part of the LTV curve again. You’re placing them back into a game where they’re engaging and spending again. Destructive cannibalization is when you inadvertently let your most dedicated, high value players leave to a title that monetizes at a weaker level, softens their overall engagement, or otherwise reduces the goodwill they’ve ascribed to your studio. You have to understand the potential audience overlap, and what types of effects are likely to occur post launch between your new game and existing titles.

We also need to look at their current consumption patterns and perceptions of your studio. For the longest time, Blizzard fans would buy any product from the studio, without question. Many are still like that today. Their players trust the name. They trust the mechanics. They trust the jank, even. If you have that kind of history with an audience, you don’t have to spend millions just to prove your game is worth playing. But if you’re a studio known strictly for competitive racing sims and you suddenly drop a cozy farming adventure... well, that’s a whole different conversation. You have zero credibility with that new crowd. You are starting from scratch. This is why I believe studios tend to continue making the same types of games, it is a lot easier to build that initial credibility.

Finally, how does this audience actually benefit from your studio’s scale? What synergies make their gaming life easier? Honestly, gamers complain endlessly about publisher ecosystems. Nobody wakes up thrilled to install yet another third-party launcher, or having barriers between themselves and the game they want to play. But if logging into your ecosystem means they get benefits that they actually care about, they’ll tolerate it. Hoyoverse has an app called HoyoLAB, where fans of all their different games can congregate. Many of the character universes overlap with one another. The melting pot is actually conducive to the fandom the games want to create. If you have a massive portfolio, you should use it. Can you cross-promote in the main menu of your biggest hit? Can you bundle older titles to lower the financial risk of trying your new IP?

Wrapping up

Making games is hard enough without feeling like you’re throwing marketing darts blindfolded. When you take a step back and actually apply the 5Rs: verifying an audience is Real, figuring out how they are Reachable, understanding their Reasons for playing, matching the daily Rhythms of their lives, and mapping their Relationships with your studio, you’ll likely have the clarity to succeed.

If this resonated, or annoyed you in a useful way, I’ll be writing more about defining your audience, positioning your game, solving for advocacy, AI trends for publishers, and games distribution more broadly.

But… players are still talking about games. They’re still dragging their friends into lobbies. The linear world of “Player A invites Player B” still exists, and I plan on writing about that at some point. In this piece, I wanted to focus on something more chaotic and interesting: the rise of the “Aspirational Economy”.

This type of thinking requires us not only to examine what a player needs, but who they want to become. Most of my observations are with a focus on publishing to those under 21 years old, and largely stem from the teachings of Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory, and conversations with my colleague Chris Tom, who made me think more deeply about this topic.

A crisis of credibility and death of the single “influencer” tastemaker

If you’re marketing a game to young adults, it’s gotten a lot harder recently. This generation was raised in an era of disclosed placements and sponsored streams. They’ve grown to be skeptical. Therefore, they want to see that an influencer genuinely loves the game, avidly supports it, and is committed to it for a prolonged period. They also expect multiple influencers and creators to be doing the same thing. They rarely view a single influencer’s endorsement as a seal of quality.

One “god-tier” influencer alone isn’t enough to hoist and keep a game in the spotlight. Players expect a sense of perceived ubiquity. Where a game is only real… if it is socially validated across their entire ecosystem. Players need to see it on TikTok, it needs to pop up on the recommended YouTube feed, in the chatter of class/school, in the WhatsApp chats, on Reddit/forums, and in other places that players tend to congregate. Shroud, the popular FPS streamer, struggled with trying to individually build momentum for his own title, Spectre Divide. Even with him passionately pushing the game, without perceived ubiquity, the game never really took off. The product’s perceived gameplay gaps likely didn’t help its case either. I’ve observed a sharp decline in the power of any one single influencer — there are exceptions of course, but the general pattern is that players are less trusting of a single voice these days.

What I do think still goes along way is validation from the peer-group. These modern gaming peer groups are predominantly influenced by two key forces: a tastemaker within the social group (“The Cultural Sherpa”), and content on social media platforms (“Algorithmic Discovery”). Let’s explore each of these in turn.

Cultural sherpas and their role as internal mediators

If the single tastemaker is dead, who takes their place? It’s the internal mediator. In Girard’s framework, an Internal Mediator is someone you look up to who is physically and socially close to you. In gaming terms, this is the pioneering tastemaker of the Discord server or group chat (“The Cultural Sherpa”). They aren’t professional influencers with millions of followers; but they are the friends who always seem to know what’s going on in the gaming world, and what could be a promising new game for their various gaming circles to try.

For the under 21 demographic, the Sherpa is the primary architect of desire. They provide permission to play. While a pro stream might make a game look cool, it’s the Sherpa who makes it real for the group. They’re the ones that will get the group to download the game and give it a go.

The underpinning psychology is that players, particularly those that are still young and growing into the world, do not truly know what they want. Instead, they imitate the desire of others. While we won't readily admit it, we rarely desire something for its inherent, intrinsic value. Rather, we assign value to games because we see other people wanting to play them. Instead of a straight line between a player and the game, desire is triangular, involving a player, their Sherpa, and the game itself.

But being the Sherpa comes with a massive amount of reputational risk. Every time a Sherpa says, “Hey, we should all get on this,” they are making a social bet. They’re putting their necks out. If the game is a banger, their status as a tastemaker goes up. If the game is cringe or a ghost town, they lose social capital.

Because of this risk, the Sherpa is rarely a true early adopter in total isolation. They are looking for a safety net. They need to feel that if they lead their friends into this new world, they won’t be left standing there alone. If they’re going to climb that mountain, they’re gonna want to know that it’s going to be worth it. Perceived ubiquity is what gives them this confidence. If your game is perceived as having velocity, durability, and watchability, particularly through easy-to-share short form content, then the algorithm and buzz on all the platforms gives them the “cover fire” they need to convince the group.

Algorithms as a cog in the wheel of Discovery

We’ve had algorithms recommend new games to us for a while now. I still check out my recommended games on Steam religiously. But for younger players in the West, my belief is that the algorithms that they’re paying attention to are more likely to be Shorts, Reels, Twitch, Snapchat, and, Reddit, TikTok. I have a somewhat cynical view of these social media platforms. They are deeply and covertly rogue. And it’s not accidental; it’s by design. Behind their veils, they’re sophisticated desire-generating machines.

The Sherpa often gets pulled into these desire generators and searches for that one game that stops the endless scroll. Most of the time, they’re trawling through scraps of content. Short, 15 or 30 second clips, often with some exaggerated aspect of a game. I call them scraps, since they’re often in Decontextualized format, which is basically this idea that the content has been remixed, or selectively cut down, often with the original content and creator obfuscated, or presented in a “reaction video” style format. Only the good parts are shown, to incite the maximum emotional response possible. Typically, something really funny, confusing, scary, hype, controversial, or angry. The identity of the person creating the content is often secondary to the payoff that the Sherpa is looking to see on the screen.

Just watch the following clips and see if you can piece things together. They’re all designed to play into the fundamentals of human emotion…

For a game to satisfy the Sherpa’s need for Perceived Ubiquity, the game needs to be seen as being socially salient. When the Sherpa sees these scraps popping up across multiple platforms, the algorithm is essentially validating the bet. It signals to the Sherpa that the game is socially recognized by the zeitgeist.

Arc Raiders demonstrates this phenomenon quite well. Clips of Arc are super readable, you don’t have to even play to get a sense for what is going on. Extraction as a genre tends to have a lot of boring, inventory management type moments. It has always surprised me why folks enjoy watching the long-form content on Twitch for games like Escape from Tarkov. By contrast, in a decontextualized short form clip, you can bottle up the magic of hours worth of gameplay into seconds. Extraction tends to have some of the highest highs in gaming, so it’s no surprise that content creators are up chasing this audience, with Arc’s rising salience and inherent watchability acting as a beacon for those who want to create content.

Here’s the unorthodox observation I’ve had lately. Viewers aren’t the ones chasing streamers. It’s the streamers who are chasing the audience. TheBurntPeanut’s meteoric rise has a lot to do with what the algorithms recommend. His decontextualized clips are all extremely popular. The algorithmic platforms don’t care what content you’re consuming. As long as you’re doom scrolling. They want to place content that will keep you hooked. TheBurntPeanut realizes that Arc as a game provides an excellent foundation for emotionally resonant, highly shareable clips. He combines this with a ridiculous personification as a peanut and a light hearted, fun, exaggerated approach to streaming. The algorithms love him. They realize he’s able to capture the attention of the broader zeitgeist, and therefore keep surfacing his content to players who will consume it.

The side effect is that Peanut is now audience trapped. If he tries to start making content for other games, or anything else that doesn’t reflect Arc’s rise in the zeitgeist, then the algorithms will penalize him and tank his performance. When he tries to stream another game (e.g. Arena Breakout in the image above), the algorithm penalizes this behavior. It realizes the content is not what his audience wants to see, and is less effective at retaining users, so it shows it less to them. This is why it’s extremely difficult for new games to “win over” dedicated gaming streamers. Their monetary livelihoods are often inextricably linked to the health of the gaming community they cast their original banner on. This is why folks like Tyler1 will never stop streaming League of Legends - he is chained to the algorithm. This is also why Roblox influencers rarely leave the platform, since once you’re in the Roblox part of YouTube, it’s very difficult to leave.

I spoke a lot about the Sherpa’s consumption of the algorithms content, but what the regular player in a peer group or squad consumes also matters. They might not actively seek this information with the same level of vigor, but they are recipients and light consumers of this content. Both sides depend on the algorithm to validate a game’s perceived ubiquity. If you see a peanut shaped Vtuber shouting about a game incessantly multiple times throughout a day, and then be told by your Sherpa friend to try it at school, on Discord, and with multiple clips on WhatsApp, that’s a pretty hot lead that you’ll likely act on.

The potential of becoming someone

Once the algorithm has created the smoke (ubiquity) and the Sherpa has pointed to the fire (permission), then you ask yourself: “Why stay?”. This is where we need to examine the core of human desire. Borrowing from Girard, we recognize that humans don’t just want things; we want to be people. Marketing can’t just be about meeting unmet needs, but also fundamentally about selling stories, identities, and entire lifestyles. This is what is called the Aspirational Economy. The primary currency is potential. A game’s role is to provide this potential.

There are multiple forms of this, but the one that I tend to gravitate towards stems from Girard’s theory of Mimetic Desire. Where he argues that we don’t choose our own desires. We copy them from others. We don’t want to reach Challenger in League of Legends for the sake of it, but because our role models - the Sherpas, the creators, the “cool” players - want it. We want to feel what they feel.

This is what fuels a player’s desire. For some, it’s moving from being a “mimic” in a social group to being the Sherpa in a different social circle. These players want to be highly skilled at and knowledgeable about a socially salient game - so they can become the person that friends look up to. They may even want to eclipse the original Sherpa who brought them in, which gets into the concept of Mimetic Rivalry. This is where two players desire the same, non-shareable status, leading them to compete against one another. This effect is why I think social gaming groups often splinter. It’s not strictly a bad thing for the game though, since someone leaving a group to become a Sherpa in a different group is likely a net positive for the game overall.

For others, it’s about becoming the god on the mountain. While players know they likely won’t become the next Faker, the goat of League of Legends, the potential that they could be is the engine that keeps the ladder populated. This is similar to the acting industry in Hollywood. The industry doesn’t survive on the 1% who are stars, but on the 99% who believe there is a clear, meritocratic path from “nobody” to “somebody”. Competitive games that create clear scouting grounds, open qualifiers, and a series of grassroots and feeder systems tend to benefit from this form of aspiration. If these paths start to feel closed, fixed, or unfair, the potential evaporates, and the mimetic engine stalls.

The last form of potential is to be the creative authority. The BurntPeanut approach. Where a player doesn’t want to be the best player in the world, but just the most entertaining person playing this game. Tyler1 in League of Legends leaned into this same aspiration. Jyxnzi from Clash Royale too. They’re relatively good players, but they’re entertainers first and foremost. In a world of clones, players want to be the original form that others mimic. When games keep the same set of influencers as the face of the game for long enough, you end up calcifying the landscape. Then, new players don’t build this creative authority aspiration.

Games should try to inject volatility into the system such that calcification doesn’t occur. The algorithm will work against you though, since as we discussed before, they don’t really care who is keeping players engaged, as long as they keep them scrolling. The established creators tend to have an advantage and will be hard to unseat.

The danger of an uneven playing field and the need to inject volatility

Looking at long-standing competitive games, I see this trend towards calcification. This happens when the top of the hierarchy - the same pros and creators - remains unchanged for years. While stability can be a sign for a healthy professional scene, it can inadvertently signal to new players that all the seats are taken. If the people at the top are being provided unfair structural advantages, like differentiated access to developers, this takes away potential from players. The objective is for all players to perceive an equal baseline of potential – even if absolute parity is not always possible, or even prudent, to maintain.

This applies even to just core fans of a game. If they feel their status is “fixed”, they will become protective of the way the game is played. Becoming more and more an insular group, rather than a welcoming committee. This is the feeling you often get when you boot up a competitive game that’s been around for decades: Call of Duty, DOTA, League, etc. My rationale is that these games do not inject enough volatility into the system, which would otherwise function as a decalcifier. A lot of their veteran players expect the game to be played a very specific way, and the developers have only introduced incremental changes over a long period due to a fear of disrupting the delicate balance. So new players who are coming in are expected to follow rank, or be called out for not following the standard way to play.

Games that are able to refresh potential and inject volatility tend to get the Aspirational Economy roaring again. When games like Overwatch drop 5 new heroes in a single patch, this creates a massive step change in the meta. Deadlock is benefiting from this same volatility right now too. Even the most established Sherpas need to reprove their mastery, Creators get another chance at convincing the algorithm they’re content is worth pushing, and there is a fresh opportunity for new players to jump in during a period of re-learning. Another way would be through highlighting a broader range of voices - not just the existing “Kings” of your game - but rising creators and neighborhood experts, ideally through your own channels, away from the cruel patterns of the algorithm.

The overcorrection is that you inject too much volatility. The fundamental hook of the Aspirational Economy is the promise of becoming someone. If a player invests hundreds of hours to attain a certain status - becoming a “lore expert” or “top affliction warlock” - they are essentially buying into a specific identity. If volatility is too high (e.g. the meta shifts so violently that last month’s expertise is now worthless), that identity loses its value. The currency of potential can’t devalue too quickly, there must be some durability to the status. Without some level of stability, there is no “Being” worth chasing.

In summary, the idea is that a game should be perceived as fair for all, and if things start to get too stable, try to inject volatility that gives Aspiration a quick refresh. But critically, there needs to be an equilibrium here. You want to shake the tree to see what new fruit falls, but you have to leave the tree standing long enough for the players to climb it.

Algorithms are junk food; touch some grass

Finally, we must recognize the limits of the digital scroll. Desires that emanate from the digital space alone are Thin desires. They are fleeting, mimetic, and easily broken by the next shiny object. This is why you often see players cycle through all the various friendslop games (Lethal Company, REPO, etc). To build a game that lasts decades, you have to create Thick desires. These are the deep, intrinsic motivations that come from mastery and real human connection.

Successful games are able to move beyond the screen and into the real world. Whether it is local grassroots tournaments, large esport events, merch that you can buy in a store, fan meetups, watch parties, LAN parties, movies, shows, and broader pop culture, these physical touchpoints help to reinforce a player’s identity. There’s nothing quite like attending your first League of Legends World Final.

To be clear, this isn’t about advertising esports. That’s certainly a pinnacle experience. What’s more important are the regular, more frequent touchpoints, the ones happening IRL in the player’s local areas. It is much harder to walk away from a community that knows your name, recognizes your mastery, and expects you to show up Tuesday nights. Games should be building an ecosystem around the game that enables this type of identity reinforcement to happen, ideally in a scalable manner.

A game is just a software product. But if you can transform the game into a lived culture. Then the identities that players have been chasing start to reinforce. When you see others with that same aspiration, it reminds you of why you picked this path in the first place.

Parting thoughts: shaping aspiration

If there is one takeaway I’d like to end with: you should try to be a form of cultural engineer. This means being able to build an ecosystem that: respects the Sherpa’s reputation, feeds the algorithm’s hunger for scraps, and most importantly creates and protects the player’s potential to become someone.

Don’t just ask what players will do in the game. Ask who they will be.

If this resonated, or annoyed you in a useful way, I’ll be writing more about defining your audience, positioning your game, solving for advocacy, AI trends for publishers, and games distribution more broadly.

I wanted to look at games positioning through the lens of the original 1981 marketing classic by Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. Interestingly, the book was written before a gazillion games were being released every year, yet its core premise - that the human mind has a finite capacity for information - is more relevant in 2026 than ever before.

What even is positioning?

According to Al Ries and Jack Trout:-

Positioning isn’t what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.

I’m just going to refer to prospects as players, because who wants to be referred to as a prospect anyway? The general argument here is that we live in an over communicated society, where players are being bombarded with signals about what to consume, what to play, and why. They’ve developed a mental filter to ignore the thousands of these signals they receive daily. To break through, you need to find a way to occupy a specific, simplified “slot” in a player’s mind. To win, games need to find a way to stand out. Not strictly by being bigger and better, but by being clearly defined.

The challenge with Positioning

To understand why positioning is so difficult in 2026, we have to look at how the perception of games has evolved.

In the 70s, 80s, 90s, you could often win by just having a feature nobody else had. “We have a physics engine!” or “We have 64-bit graphics!” was enough. This was attribute based positioning. Because technology was moving so fast, the novel tech often could be the position. You could occupy a vacant coordinate on a player’s mental map simply because no one else was physically capable of being there yet.

But today, the rise of standardized engines and tools, makes it so everyone can have access to high-end physics. Everyone can have 4K textures. You still have to meet the expectations the audience has for features, but it’s not sufficient to stand out. One way to identify your position is to use a technique developed by Green and Carmone called Multi Dimensional Scaling, or more simply perceptual mapping. There is a statistical way to do this, but there is also the more simple way of essentially, plotting games on a mental map based on a set of experiential, or defining axes for a game you’re trying to position. For example, if you were trying to position an MMO, there are a ton of potential axes, but we might choose to examine potential positions using the following axes:

The goal would be to try and identify a potential untapped space. You might need to try a bunch of different potential axes. For example, looking at friction (Hardcore/full loot loss vs. Accessible/Safe) or Economy (player driven sandbox vs dev driven themepark). There’s an endless set of permutations. The team will likely disagree on what the best sets are, and what the definitions should be. One thing I’ve found helpful to guide the selection is that focusing on a set of axes that are going to be highly relevant for your Muse. They should be the axes by which the player often evaluates the space, or “The Mental Ladder” they’ve ascribed to a category or set of games.

Finding your spot on the Mental Ladder

Players effectively categorize games into different parts of their mind. Tactical shooters are over here. Sports games are over there. League of Legends might be so significant it occupies a massive spot, potentially eclipsing even their recognition of other MOBAs.

We can think of these as “mental ladders.” The role of the publishing team is to shape which mental ladder the target audience places the game on, and which spot the game should try to occupy. Ries and Trout argue that for every category, there is a ladder with roughly three rungs:

1. The Leader: The game that “owns” the category name. Often the first game a player thinks of when a category is mentioned.

2. The Challenger: Games that are similar to the Leader, but differentiated in a few, select key axes.

3. The Specialized/Niche: Games that are significantly different from the Leader, often competing for specific sub communities, or have failed to challenge the Leader sufficiently. Games may rest here for a little before falling off entirely.

A game needs to be able to relate to other games on the same ladder, particularly with the leader. One common approach is the “against” strategy. This is where you stop trying to be “better” than the leader and instead try to be “different”, or solve for the leader’s critical pain point.

EA’s Battlefield doesn’t try to beat Call of Duty at being a tight, 6v6 arena shooter. Instead, it positions itself against the constraints of the arena. It took an aspect of the leader that works for that audience, but reversed it such that a similar game concept would be appealing to the rejectors. The critical piece here is that as a challenger, the game still needs to relate to the leader, and be comprehensible by others who have Call of Duty at the top of their mental ladder for Arena Shooters.

The “Better Trap” and the Power of the Prototype

The hardest pill for a developer to swallow, and one that might cause an ego bruise - is that being “better” isn’t a winning strategy. In academic psychology, this phenomenon is known as Categorization Theory.

Eleanor Rosch developed the idea of the “Prototype”. This is the most representative member of a category in a person’s mind. When someone says “Hero Shooter”, the brain immediately pulls up Overwatch. This prototype becomes the yardstick against which all other Hero Shooters are measured.

If your pitch is like “we’re like with Overwatch but with better gunplay”, you’ve already stacked the odds against you. You must come across as different, not better to the prototype. Even if you are similar in many aspects. Many players, particularly those already familiar with the original game, aren’t going to switch for something that is only marginally “better”. Being “different” is what is important.

For Marvel Rivals, they picked two key axes to be “different”. First, a focus on a 3rd person perspective, which brought the familiar look and feel of Marvel fan favorite characters to the fore. Having the Marvel IP and deploying it in an immersive and resonant way created a significant “difference” in potential players’ minds. Second, by focusing on a younger, youth audience. By leaning into the creator economy and fandom culture, through prioritizing share of voice in short form content, they positioned the game as a lifestyle and socially salient brand for younger Gen Z. Even the name Marvel Rivals, appears to have targeted the popular FPS Roblox Rivals.

Arc Raiders: The Ladder Pivot

Let’s talk about Arc Raiders. This game is a fascinating example of a “mid-flight” positioning correction. Originally, it was set to be a Free-to-Play co-op horde shooter. But then Helldivers 2 dropped and basically sucked all the oxygen out of that specific room. Embark Studios did something incredibly gutsy: they looked at the “Co-OP PVE Shooter” ladder, saw it was full, or difficult to find a unique differentiated position, and jumped to a different ladder entirely. There were likely other reasons for the pivot, but I suspect this was a significant one.

By shifting to a $40 “Premium Extraction Adventure” Shooter, they found a massive, unoccupied gap in the market. On one side, you have the “Hardcore/Sweaty” rung occupied by Escape from Tarkov. With games like Delta Force and Arena Breakout: Infinite, all competing for rungs on that ladder. On the other hand, you have the “Arcade/Shallow” rung of Call of Duty: DMZ. Arc Raiders is aiming right for the center of the “Immersive/Atmospheric” hole. With an appropriate balance of PVE and PVP. They are betting that there’s a huge audience of players who want the high stakes of extraction but are tired of fighting against extremely unforgiving stakes and the mil-sim aesthetic. They aren’t trying to be “The next Tarkov”; they are positioning themselves as the “Accessible-yet-Premium” alternative for the person who wants a gorgeous, immersive world that actually respects their time.

The Niche of One Trap: when you become too exclusionary

Rise and Trout tell you to sharpen your message until it’s a needle. But in publishing games, a needle that is too thin might not carry enough blood to keep a studio alive. There’s a balance to be struck. Or you risk alienating a large potential of your addressable market.

There is a risk of “over-segmentation” and developing a position that’s so specific, something like a “hyper-realistic, permadeath, victorian era underwater city builder”. When your position doesn’t overlap or has appeal with any significant player clusters, you might be positioning for a ghost town.

To scale without dulling the needle, one approach might be using a “Core and Halo Approach”. The Core is your uncompromising hook. The thing your muse and target player must perceive about your game. For Elden Ring, the core is “Uncompromising Difficulty”. This is the sharp point that penetrates the “Action RPG” ladder and separates you from the crowd. The Halo would be the positions that broaden appeal without betraying the core. They need to be complementary and things that your target player still values. For Elden Ring, my interpretation of the Halo would be “Open World Discovery”. By wrapping their Core in a Halo, they shifted the game’s position to also be appealing to clusters of players who also value exploration. They kept the needle sharp, but made the needle much, much bigger.

The Law of Sacrifice: The importance of saying no

Even with a Halo, you still have to sacrifice. You have to be brave enough to be “not for everyone”. Dark Souls sacrificed the casual market to own “Achievement”. VALORANT sacrificed mil-sim FPS players to own “Stylish”.

The key is to not sacrifice anything that is fundamental for your target player. By focusing on a representative muse, and fully understanding what’s important to them, you’ll know what sacrifices need to be made. The danger is trying to own spaces that your target player doesn’t care about, this runs the risk of being perceived as “fuzzy”. In an over communicated world, the mind has little room for fuzzy brands. You have to be brave enough to exclude as much as 90% of your potential addressable market, in order to fanatically own the 10% that will love your position. The numbers are illustrative, but you get the point.

Becoming optimally distinct

One of the concepts I’ve found helpful is this idea of being “Optimally Distinct”. You need to be similar enough to the category leader/prototype to be understood, but different enough in one one or two extremely valuable axes for your target audience to be preferred. Stray too far from familiarity and you can’t be understood (e.g. Highguard). But if you don’t differentiate and add novelty in a way that is meaningful for your player, you’ll be labeled generic. Getting this balance right is difficult.

Positioning is a pre-production task. It should dictate what features you build, inform your publishing strategy, and most importantly, what you’re willing to let go of. You can’t market your way out of a “Me-Too” product. You have to position your way into a player’s mind before you even ask them to download your game. The Battle for the Mind isn’t just about being seen; it’s about being remembered for something optimally distinct.

If this resonated, or annoyed you in a useful way, I’ll be writing more about defining your audience, positioning your game, solving for advocacy, AI trends for publishers, and games distribution more broadly.

The final “one more thing” slot at The Game Awards can be considered the Holy Grail of marketing: a ticket to instant prestige and viral hype. But for Wildlight’s debut shooter, Highguard, it was the start of a nightmare. Sometimes the biggest stage just gives people a bigger target to hit.

Context and the poisoned chalice

Highguard is a recent shooter release from Wildlight, a studio with a serious pedigree. The team is mostly made of former Respawn talent. We’re talking 60 of the 100 or so devs who were there for the Apex Legends launch or soon thereafter. In a recent public interview, the founders said their original plan from Day 1 was to run it back with the Apex launch playbook: the shadowdrop.

Industry whispers suggest that TGA host Geoff Keighley, a long-time friend of Wildlight’s founders, personally advocated for the game to take the show’s coveted closing slot. But when the trailer failed to land, the prestige of the platform worked against it. Instead of awe, the audience felt confusion; instead of hype, they felt a vacuum. This void was immediately filled by a rabid mob of “anti-advocates,” eager to dogpile on a game that hadn’t yet found its voice.

Did Wildlight drink from the poisoned chalice? Probably. Was there an antidote to quell the mob? Potentially. Let’s dig in.

Why the internet started a dogpile

​Most dogpiles don’t start because people just spontaneously decide to hate a game. They happen because nobody really knows what to do with it. When a title drops without a clear answer to who it’s for, or why it’s different, the internet asks a very specific question. It isn’t “is this good?” It’s “what is this supposed to be?” And if that question hangs in the air for too long, it turns into something much harsher: “who asked for this?” At that point, players aren’t talking about quality anymore; they’re questioning the game’s right to exist.

In Highguard’s case, the trailer felt rushed. It failed to define a clear identity. It’s just not obvious who this game was made for. One of the founders, Dusty, said in an interview that the game is for “all shooter players.” That’s too broad. It’s a category so large it means nothing. My theory is they aimed for a massive audience just to make the forecasting spreadsheet look good for investors. If they had focused on a sharper, more specific target player, and tailored the trailer to them, could Highguard have had a better shot at reaching its people?

The positioning risk with iterative development

There’s also the way the game was built. Like many live-service projects, the team likely used iterative development. Where the team generally iterates quickly with a learning, design oriented mindset. But, when a team builds based on their own tastes without a sharp “target player” in mind, you get a product that’s an aggregate of everyone’s ideas.

The devs have probably played for thousands of hours; they know the history of every choice. Often with very clear, well thought out reasons for why they make sense. But a new player? They don’t have that context. All those compounded choices just increase the mental load. This is a huge problem when you’re trying to invent a new genre label like “Raid Shooter.” Players don’t have the same background to sense make. The product has to be positioned in relation to what they already know and can comprehend. If there isn’t a set of schemas, lived experiences, or memories that players are familiar with, they just end up confused. And if that morphs into apathy, that’s where real trouble begins.

The creator economy and “Concord 2.0”

​This whole mess is made worse by the environment games launch into now. The creator economy loves fast, emotionally charged takes. Calling a game “mid” or “generic” is an easy way to signal you have good taste without doing much actual work. The algorithms eat it up.

​The Highguard reveal triggered those “another hero shooter” eye-rolls instantly. Whether the game is actually good almost doesn’t matter to a creator looking for clicks; the early discourse was already locked into the most efficient framing possible: “Concord 2.0.” Moreover, players themselves write scathing reviews without even really playing the game for more than 30mins, in the hope of getting featured in a creators “video essay” or “reaction video”.

​It lands harder because many players are already frustrated. Live-service games ask for a lot of time. Aggressive monetization makes people suspicious. We’ve seen too many big releases promised for years only to be shut down in months. Players now hawk Steam charts and Twitch viewer counts to see if a game is worth their time. The default stance isn’t excitement anymore, it’s often skepticism…

What else could they have done?

​The TGA slot was probably worth a fortune. Supposedly, Kotaku reported that a 60 second spot is about $450k, and a 3 min spot is over a million dollars. So a final slot would likely be higher. For a new studio with a new IP, you’d have to be incredibly bold to say no. But if the game was ready to ship, they should have stuck to the shadowdrop plan and released it the moment the trailer ended.

​Instead, we got 45+ days of radio silence.

​Players were left to fill that void with their own questions. Even if they were locked into a January 26 release for platform partnership reasons, they should have strongly considered moving it up.

The other option would have been to defend the game publicly. Look at Marathon. They got a lukewarm reaction early on, so the team dug in and chose to push back the launch significantly. In subsequent messaging, they were honest, showed the inner workings, and humanized the devs. It looks like they’ve actually turned a corner, with them flirting with the top 10 sellers chart on Steam lately. The jury is still out, but it does seem like things are heading in the right direction.

Wildlight might not have the cash for a long delay like Bungie/Marathon could likely afford. Many of the COVID era gaming ventures seem like they’ve been told funding is drying up and that they need to ship. What’s odd is that they did announce a 12-month roadmap. To me, this suggests they had some wiggle room to push back launch if they really wanted to, and truly fight for their game’s reputation before perception calcifies.

Lastly, what was also odd was the decision to go ahead with wine-ing and dining influencers in a behind closed doors event. This was also followed by paying those influencers to stream, on Twitch, at launch. This puts everyone in a weird spot. If you’re a paid creator, do you really want to defend a game in the middle of a massive dogpile? Probably not. You just play the game, keep quiet, and take the check.

​Meanwhile, the folks who weren’t invited are already annoyed they missed a payday, so they double down on the negativity. In a world where players already don’t trust “sponsored” content, this just dampened the trust even more.

A hard lesson learned

​For what it’s worth, I’ve tried Highguard. It’s a decent game with some rough edges. Of course, there are some issues with the gameplay itself. That’s reflected in the public reviews. But I’m a believer that perception often shapes reality. The vibes were heavily working against Highguard.

I really feel for the devs because you can tell this was a passion project. But here’s the lesson I’m taking away: if you don’t define your game’s story early, someone else will.

​In the current ecosystem, that story is probably going to be a negative one. Without real advocates who feel like you’re speaking directly to them, there’s nobody to push back when the negative narrative takes hold. You have to lock in your true believers before you try to go broader. A game can be perfectly competent and still lose because no one was willing, or able, to stand up for what it was trying to be.

If this resonated, or annoyed you in a useful way, I’ll be writing more about defining your audience, positioning your game, solving for advocacy, AI trends for publishers, and games distribution more broadly.

Honestly, it’s a solid way to work. You know your own brain. You don’t need a focus group to tell you if a mechanic or design feels like a chore because you’re the one playing and feeling that pain at 2AM. If there are a million people just like you, and they actually have the headspace to switch to your game, it might be best to follow that path. Plus, when you’re building and playtesting the game, you’ll be sure to have a blast.

But here’s the challenge: what happens when you shouldn’t be developing for yourself? Maybe you’re building in a genre you used to enjoy but has since faded out of the zeitgeist (e.g. RTS games), or perhaps the “you” of 10 years ago isn’t the person buying and investing time in games today. Or you’re just a League of Legends diehard, but you’re on a dev team making a cozy farm sim. That’s when I believe the mirror breaks, and it’s no longer clear who you’re building a game for. And you try to figure out who to serve.

The trouble with player segments

If you’re starting from a blank page, you might try something like a cluster analysis. Where you start quantitatively grouping players by common factors. Or more often you start reverse engineering your audience from players who actually resonated with your game in early playtests or concept tests. The end result is a set of segments, or personas. Things like “Competitive Achievers” or “Social Explorers”. These are certainly helpful, and they definitely give you a picture of different potential motivations and types of players you could serve. They are great for understanding the landscape, but they’re often a bit too cold and generalized. And often encapsulate a population far too large to be considered a “bullseye” player.

You end up trying to please everyone in a 20% slice of the market, and the result is often a game that feels a little…beige. If you try to build your game for a “segment”, you risk making something that no one actually loves, even if a lot of people like it. You get NPS scores in the 7s and 8s, but very few 9s and 10s. My opinion is that a 7 is a death sentence in a crowded market. It means they didn’t hate it, but they won’t tell their friends about it. So what gets you to those 9s and 10s?

I’m a strong believer in going sharper. You need a muse.

What is a muse?

The muse isn’t a group or a segment. It’s a specific, single, individual.

Think of them as the ideal advocate for your title. If this person loves your game, they’ll become your strongest supporter. They usually sit inside one of your segments, but they have a set of unique behaviors or characteristics that stand out. You should be able to define them clearly:-

• The basics: Age, life stage, gender, and where they live

• Observable habits: What gaming platforms do they prioritize? What time do they play? For how long? Who do they play with? What are they playing right now (and why are they slightly bored of it?), and what are their typical spending habits? Where do they hang out IRL and online?

• The “why”: These are the psychographics and underlying motivations. You won’t be able to observe these, but you need to develop an initial hypothesis. What actually drives them to play? What frustrates them? What job does your game fulfill? What makes an experience feel meaningful and worth it?

Some examples

Let’s look at a few outside examples. I’m speculating here, but it’s likely helpful to see how this focus manifests in the wild. Note, it’s entirely possible these games didn’t have a muse, but that seems highly unlikely based on the sharp choices they made.

Arc Raiders: the Unc Raider

Looking at their game, I don’t see “general shooter fans”. I see a muse who massively values their time. They probably grew up on sci-fi films with a specific 70s/80s aesthetic and prizes nostalgia. The Unc, as you’ve likely guessed by now, is probably male, likely 30-40 years old, and working a full time job. The design and art style leans heavier on Western region preferences. These Unc Raiders are PC focused and likely have a strong preference for accessing games through Steam. They’re someone who wants the high stakes of an extraction shooter but with a level of polish and “cool” that the genre often lacks. My take is that Embark clearly tried to distance from the core extraction community, and likely wanted to win with those that have never played an extraction shooter before. Looking at the responses of creators who are diehard Escape from Tarkov fans for example, many of them appear to still prefer Tarkov’s laser sharp focus on PVP and mil-sim aesthetic, and for the most part eschew Arc Raiders.

Fellowship: Former Raider Dad

With Fellowship, just looking at the website, Steam page, and their trailer, it should become clear who this game was trying to win with. The muse feels like the “Former Raider Dad”. Likely 30 - 40 years old, and a diehard PC purist. This is someone who loved the complexity of World of Warcraft raids back in the day, but doesn’t have six hours a night to prog raid every week. Even the UI helps you feel right at home. They want the boss fights, the team coordination, and the chase of sweet loot, but they want it in bite sized format. They’re happy to jump in and play solo and are looking for ways to connect with others. They’ve got the money to spend, so would rather skip the grind wherever possible.

With those examples, you could argue that a significant portion of the product team was looking in the mirror and developing the game for themselves. That’s fair. Let’s look at one example where the muse was likely very different from the core team.

Kim Kardashian - Hollywood: The Aspiring Fashionista

The developers at Glu Mobile were veterans used to building gritty shooters, like Deer Hunter. They weren’t the target. To make this work, they had to trade their own tastes for a deep understanding of celebrity social ladders. Their muse is likely an 18-25 year old, and a devotee of celebrity culture. They likely grew up on reality TV, “fit checks”, and the specific social hierarchies of the 2010s. A lot of the game is trying to replicate and play out their underlying motivations. A way for them to express their identity. The big hack here was obviously having Kim review and approve almost everything in the game, effectively acting as an IRL muse.

Why having a muse makes your life easier

Setting a muse adds significant clarity across development and publishing teams. Here’s why:

• Sharper positioning: when you’re writing your game description, or thinking of the key messages to hit in your announcement trailer, you can’t be everything to everyone. You need to figure out who you want to be happiest. A muse lets you say, “This game is for this person”. It makes your hooks way more effective.
  

• Clearer values: It defines what your game stands for. Players should be able to look at your game and be able to perceive who it’s trying to serve. If your muse cares about “fair play” above all else, you don’t even need to consider pay-to-win mechanics. If your muse is a “time poor parent” who only gets forty five minutes of peace after the house goes quiet, your core value becomes: respect for time.
  

• Distribution foundation: You can start to intuit where this player hangs out, where they tend to congregate IRL or online. Should you focus on aggregating them all into Discord, Marvel Rivals style? Or should you focus on a niche set of creators? Or try to flood the market with short form content because your muse is a teen and you need to beat the algorithm?
  

• Nucleus of your community: Every healthy community starts with a “hardcore” pioneering group that sets the tone and narrative for your game. Whether you like it or not, your first players become the gatekeepers. If your muse is someone who values sportsmanship and deep theorycrafting, your early Discord conversation will reflect that. Other players who join later may not always mesh with the pioneers. The product team also starts to hyper-serve this initial core, steering the product in that direction, so it’s critical that initial core is who you’re trying to serve in the long-term. It’s much easier to moderate and nurture a community that your game was supposed to serve in the first place.
  

• Accelerated decisions: This is the big one. Making games, whether that’s creating them or publishing them, is the art of compromise. There’s never enough budget or time to do all the things you want to do. Should we raise the environment quality to gold, or add a new social feature? If your muse really values immersion, you fix the environment. The decisions start to become obvious, and teams can work with greater agility. The muse becomes the tie breaker.

The potential traps (and how to avoid them)

It’s not all sunshine and roses. If you pick the wrong muse, or use this concept in the wrong way, you could lead the project right off a cliff.

• The muse must be attractive and winnable: You might have a muse who is “the ultimate MMO player”, but if they are currently 15,000 hours deep into World of Warcraft, they might not actually be willing to switch and consider your game. The Muse should also represent a meaningful audience size. If not today, at least over the coming years. There needs to be enough of them to actually pay the bills.
  

• You need to capture more than just the muse: Most of the time, if you’ve been specific enough, your muse alone doesn’t represent an audience size that is sufficient for your game to be economically viable. That’s intentional. But in selecting your muse, you should be thinking through how they’re going to help you reach and chain lightning into a broader audience. The muse should provide the cultural street cred to “validate” your game, and pull the tourists or adjacent audiences in. They’re sorta like the “gatekeepers of what’s cool”. Win with them, and the rest follow in.
  

• Avoid the average: If you take a hardcore PVE player and a competitive PVP player average them, you get a Muse who doesn’t exist. Real people often have contradictions; “averages” aren’t spiky enough. You start making PVEVP games that feel like a soup with too many ingredients. That was my impression when seeing Eldegarde…
  

• Don’t pick an influencer as your muse: Unless you are literally building a game for them, their needs are going to be different. They probably care about “watchability”. Your average player just wants to have a good time. You should use influencers or creators within the context of what your muse might consume though, since you are trying to understand their broader consumption patterns.
  

• Don’t ignore the unintended parties: Here’s a funny thing about games - sometimes you build a game for the Muse, and you end up attracting a huge audience for reasons you didn’t predict. CEO of Arrowhead Shams Jorjani talks about Helldivers 2 and their unintended pool of Call of Duty players in this podcast, which had some useful nuggets. If the team had pivoted to satisfy the “run and gun” habits of the COD crowd, that might have diluted the very friction that made the game a hit for the original, intended audience. Don’t lane-swap halfway, stick to your muse and be grateful for the stowaways.
  

• Getting the whole team on the same page: If your marketing team thinks the Muse is a Gen Z competitive gamer, but your design team thinks the Muse is a Millennial nostalgia-seeker, decision making is going to be painful. The whole team needs to “embody” the muse and empathize with them. They need to understand their entire psyche and why they play games. Ideally, you’re hiring and filling critical taste-making roles with people who are this audience, or have significant ties to them.

Closing thoughts: hold the muse fixed

Once you’ve decided on your muse, your job is to speak the language of this audience. Go talk to people who fit this profile. Consume the content they consume, on the platforms they prefer. Run playtests specifically with this audience. Develop a persistent player pulse. Hire tastemakers who are or have strong ties to this player.

If your Muse isn’t vibing with your game, you have a problem, even if the rest of the team is having a blast.

Being laser focused means shaping the product around them. You hold the muse fixed, rather than search for a different audience once the game is halfway done. In a crowded market, being “good” for everyone is precarious. Being “perfect” for a dedicated core is how you build a community that can advocate for you and help you reach a broader audience eventually.

If this resonated, or annoyed you in a useful way, I’ll be writing more about defining your audience, positioning your game, solving for advocacy, AI trends for publishers, and games distribution more broadly.

To answer this, my argument centers around the idea that we’ve been progressing through different eras of game publishing. With each era change, new rules, methods, strategies rear their head. Game publishers that have progressed through the eras and can masterfully apply the lessons of each of them, tend to emerge victorious.

Era 1: Mass Media

Before the digitization of games publishing, the most important thing for games to do was to solve for reach. The goal was to be everywhere: linear advertising, billboards, retail shelves, game stores, and so forth. The loudest game usually won.

Large publishers at the time, think of companies like Electronic Arts for example, commanded significant control of a game’s ability to reach its audience. Without them, games couldn’t really reach their audience efficiently. In many ways, having the available capital and relationships to increase reach was paramount. Media scale was the moat.

Communication with players tended to be more of a monologue. Information would flow outward, but feedback flowed back slowly, if at all. There were only very limited, direct player channels. And though communities existed, they were rarely mobilized or thought about in the way we do now.

At the heart of this was the fact that there was an acute scarcity of supply in games. We just didn’t make as many then, as we do now. Discovery was constrained by shelf space, media slots, and calendar moments. Players weren’t being accosted with games left, right, and center. This meant attention would cluster naturally. In a way, the limited shelf space, fixed TV and magazine spots forced almost a sense of brutal prioritization. You were either visible or you weren’t. Distribution itself filtered the market. Marketing amplified that filter.

While conversion likely wasn’t tracked in this way it is today, let’s say that in most cases you’d get a 1-4% conversion. Then the idea was just to drive as much volume and reach as you could, and you’d eventually be successful. Conversion was really difficult to control since there wasn’t really a way to personalize your unique value proposition. Tailoring your creative and messaging was cost prohibitive and often not even possible, not until the digitization of games, which really started to kick off in Era 2.

Era 2: Personalization

With the advent of digital distribution, players could now access games immediately through digital platforms like Steam, and eventually the app stores of mobile phones. This ushered in a new wave of games, with the supply of titles rapidly rising from a few hundred titles in the early 2000s to tens of thousands today. Digital distribution turned game supply from a trickle into a flood. That rapid growth in available titles reshaped how players discovered and engaged with games, and shifted the bottleneck to trying to find the right player for your game.

Steam, PlayStation, and other digital distribution platforms began aggregating large player audiences and using engagement, purchase, and social signals to recommend games they believed players would like. Discovery increasingly shifted from editorial judgment and broad marketing beats to algorithmic recommendation. In this era, publishers started to become more specific about who they were trying to reach, and tried their best to control the perception and message those players would receive about a prospective game.

The platforms themselves diverged in how they monetized that influence. Some, like Sony, offered differentiated or premium placements that could be directly paid for. Others, most notably Steam, limited the ability to buy reach or effectiveness outright, instead rewarding engagement signals and player behavior, and of course, inherently good games. This lowered the barrier for independent developers to reach audiences directly, who could now do so without a traditional publisher acting as a gatekeeper.

Publishing technologies also started to improve dramatically. Programmatic advertising, lookalike audience targeting, automated bidding, lifecycle marketing, and other similar approaches finally allowed publishing to tailor specific messages for many different player segments at scale. Or as we saw eventually, let the algorithms operate that independently, with the publisher’s role somewhat reduced to feeding the system an inordinate amount of creative assets and copy so an endless set of permutations could be tested, in the hope of finding the perfect message or creative for a player’s circumstance.

Many of the early mobile pioneers, like Supercell, Playrix, King and a handful of others, benefited from arriving early to a structurally favorable, nascent market. Distribution was frictionless, competition was limited, and the app stores themselves were still learning how to surface games. These publishers built close working relationships with Apple and Google, spent an inordinate amount on “user acquisition”, and were able to capture significant market share of mid-core and casual audiences before the paid programmatic market became saturated.

Just as importantly, they mastered lifetime value economics. By rigorously managing how much they were willing to pay to acquire a player relative to what that player would generate in revenue over time, growth became something that could be modeled, and to a degree, engineered. Marketing shifted from reach and volume, to personalization and optimization - pulling spend up or down based on measurable return. For a period, this created the illusion that growth was a solvable equation, not a fragile balance dependent on timing, market conditions, product differentiation, and crucially, a deep understanding of the player.

At its peak, this approach worked extraordinarily well. Personalization, optimization, and disciplined spend allowed publishers to scale with confidence. Growth felt measurable and controllable. If the numbers penciled out, success wouldn’t be too far behind.

But this era also trained the industry to overestimate its own agency. As competition intensified and supply continued to flood the market, the same levers produced diminishing returns. Acquisition costs rose sharply, and unless a game was prepared to monetize extremely deeply - and be backed by significant capital to reach scale (as seen with titles like Monopoly Go from Scopely) - success became increasingly elusive. At the same time, players grew more skeptical of advertising and became harder to persuade through manufactured messaging alone.

Crucially, players stopped behaving like endpoints in a funnel. As gaming became more mainstream, players became stronger, active participants in networks: talking to each other, forming opinions, and shaping perception well outside the reach of any single campaign or algorithm. Players have always shared their passion for games, but nowhere at the same level of scale as we see today, where games are often the primary 3rd space for young people. Discovery ceased to be something publishers could just engineer directly and instead emerged from player-to-player dynamics they could only influence indirectly. This shift marked the transition into what I describe as the third era of publishing.

Era 3: Community

In Era 3, community isn’t just something that forms after a game is successful. My belief is it’s actually one of the things that produces game success in the first place. In this mental model, growth doesn’t flow predictably from awareness to conversion. It compounds through a flywheel where engaged players become advocates, advocates drive discovery, and discovery brings in more engaged players. The central challenge in this era is not reach or efficiency, but solving for advocacy.

Players, not the platforms or publishers, create the majority of reach, and in many cases determine a game’s ability to convert at all. Streams, clips, Discords, social feeds, group chats, and friends do more to drive discovery than ads, store placements, or media spots. This isn’t “word of mouth” in the old sense, but rather word of mouth at internet scale. And largely outside a publisher’s direct control.

One useful way to frame this shift is through the lens of “belonging”. Players are more likely to advocate for games that feel like theirs - games that reflect their own values, taste, or identity, and connect them to others who feel the same way. When they are satisfied with the game, but also have that sense of tribal belonging, that’s when you’re able to create advocates. Satisfaction and gameplay resonance definitely matters, but it isn’t enough. Advocacy emerges when enjoyment is paired with identity. These are the players who explain the game, defend it relentlessly, and recruit others without being asked.

This reality fundamentally changes the publisher’s role. Control effectively gives way to influence. Communities interpret and shape a game’s meaning in ways no campaign can fully predict or manage. Publishers can’t dictate the narrative, but they can shape the conditions under which it forms. Who you invite in early, what behaviors you reward, the norms you reinforce, and the kinds of moments the game reliably creates all now matter enormously. This is especially true if you’re making a live service game, where you’re very much shaping the product with players.

As a result, my belief is that product, community, and marketing all collapse into a single system. Publishing isn’t just something you layer on at launch. It has to be embedded in game systems that generate stories, tools that enable ease of expression, and live moments that players react to together. If the game doesn’t naturally create conversation, and reach a sense of cultural salience, no amount of after the fact community “management” can force it to spread.

Era 3 also raises the cost of ambiguity. Broad appeal often produces weak advocates. By contrast, a sharp audience definition (being explicit about who the game is for and why) is far more likely to produce avid advocates. That means getting specific: the player’s age and life stage, the games they already play, their broader cultural context, where they congregate, the deeper motivations driving their play, and understanding the relationship they have with you or your IPs. Most importantly, it means understanding why they would stop playing their current game, or scrolling TikTok, to make room for your game.

What comes next

Don’t be fooled though. The mistake would be to think these eras just outright replace one another.

The reality is that all three eras are still very much in play today. Successful publishing blends all three. Reach still matters. You still need moments that go wide and create baseline awareness. Personalization and optimization still matter. Funnels still exist, and economics still have to work. But neither is sufficient on its own. Advocacy and community, in my opinion, should be the dominant ingredient.

The strongest publishers don’t reject earlier-era tools; they use them in service of something larger. Broad beats create entry points. Riot’s season start cinematics still pop off each year. Targeting players more specifically is still a great way to reduce friction. But sustained growth, that doesn’t break the bank, comes from players who care enough to speak on your behalf. To get there, the publisher’s role needs to move upstream -- deeply embedded with product strategy. Such that you can design the systems that allow advocacy to flourish.

One could argue we may be approaching the edge of Era 4. As young players - particularly those many new games are trying to win - show increasing signs of loneliness and isolation, some are turning to AI as a substitute for human connection and belonging. Early research suggests a meaningful portion already uses AI for social interaction and companionship. As more cognitive and social offloading occurs, it’s worth asking whether discovery itself could shift again. With some of the human nodes in a player’s network being replaced by AI intermediaries? A world where an assistant or companion understands your gaming tastes better than anyone else, and where developers try to manipulate the levers by which AI understands and recommends your game to players. That’s a topic for another piece though.

For now, the takeaway is simpler: advocacy has become the hardest, most valuable and least substitutable part of publishing. But the best publishers can blend approaches from all three eras.

In future essays, I plan to go deeper on advocacy itself - the specific concepts game teams should try to understand and prioritize against.

If this resonated, or annoyed you in a useful way, I’ll be writing more about defining your audience, positioning your game, solving for advocacy, AI trends for publishers, and games distribution more broadly.