Best game marketing agencies compared and the four jobs a game launch actually needs

Game marketing is four separate jobs sold under one phrase, and almost no agency is good at all four. Store page and platform work decides how many people who find your game buy it. Community and creator work decides how many people hear about it. Paid user acquisition decides how cheaply you can buy the ones who do not. Launch public relations decides whether anybody writes about it. Pick the agency that is strong at the one which is currently costing you the most, and rank candidates on evidence of titles they have shipped in your genre and on your platform rather than on a general reputation.

The four jobs, and which kind of game needs which

Job	What it moves	Matters most for
Store and platform	The share of people who see the page and buy or install	Every game, and it is the cheapest lever on this list
Community and creators	Awareness before launch and retention after it	Premium PC and console titles, and anything with a wishlist
Paid user acquisition	Volume, at a cost you can measure against revenue per player	Free to play mobile, where the model only works if the arithmetic does
Launch PR and influencer seeding	Coverage in the week that decides the chart position	Anything with a dated release and a press list

The ordering matters. Buying users for a game with a weak store page is paying to send people to a page that does not convert, and no amount of creative testing fixes that. Fix the page first, because it is the one job where the work is finished rather than ongoing.

The criterion to rank candidates on

One test, applied to every agency identically, and it is specific enough that most shortlists reorder.

1. Name three titles you have worked on in my genre, on my platform, and say what you did on each. Genre and platform both matter, because a studio that has launched a mobile puzzle game has learned very little that transfers to a premium strategy title on Steam.
2. Show me a before and after on one measurable thing, in a client's own account rather than in a case study deck.
3. Tell me what you would change in the first thirty days, having looked at my store page.
4. Say who owns the ad accounts, the store developer account and the measurement data.
5. Tell me what you will not do, and who you would recommend for it.

The fifth question is the most informative. An agency that names the boundary of its competence is describing a real practice. An agency that claims all four jobs at the same standard is describing a sales position.

We publish no ranked list of named game marketing agencies here. Rankings in this category differ from source to source and many are paid placements, so the only ordering worth having is the one these five answers produce for your title.

The store page is the job most studios underspend on

For a premium title the store page is the whole funnel, and the elements that decide it are small and finite: the capsule art, the first thirty seconds of the trailer, the short description, the tag selection and the review state. Wishlists are the measure to watch in the months before launch, because they predict the first week more reliably than reach does.

A studio can do most of this itself with discipline, and the sequence, from the store page through the wishlist to a timeline that starts a year ahead, is set out in our page on indie game marketing. Read it before hiring, because it will tell you whether you need an agency at all or a contractor for six weeks.

Paid acquisition, and the number that decides whether to do it

For a free to play title paid acquisition is not a marketing decision, it is a model decision. It works when revenue per installed player over a defined window exceeds the cost to acquire that player, and it does not work at all when it does not, no matter how good the creative is. So the brief to any agency pitching acquisition starts with your own revenue per player and retention at day one, day seven and day thirty, and an agency that does not ask for those numbers first is not going to be useful.

Game inventory is also where much of this media is bought, and the buy splits into distinct products: network buying for installs, placements inside the game world, and platform level deals. Those are compared in our page on advertising in video games, which is the page for a buyer on the other side of this market.

Creators and community, where the rulebook is not the agency's

Creator work in games runs into rules set by three parties at once: the platform's own policies, the advertising disclosure rules in the territory, and the publisher's own key distribution terms. An agency that handles this well will talk about disclosure before it talks about reach, because an undisclosed paid placement is a problem for the studio rather than for the creator.

Where the work is competitive gaming rather than games generally, the category is different and so are the rules, with three separate rulebooks in play. Those are set out in our comparison of esports influencer marketing agencies.

Fee models in this category

Four are common and each has a tell. A monthly retainer is right for community and store work, which is continuous. A percentage of media spend is standard for acquisition, gives the agency a reason to raise the budget and should be capped. A launch project fee suits PR, and should be tied to a dated window rather than an open commitment. A revenue share is occasionally offered and is the one to read most carefully, because it makes the agency a stakeholder in decisions about your game's economy.

Whichever you agree, the accounts and the data stay in your name. A game has a long tail and a sequel, and the account history is the asset that makes the next launch cheaper.

Questions studios ask before hiring a game marketing agency

Do I need a games specialist or will a general performance agency do?

For acquisition on mobile a strong general performance agency can work, because the mechanics are the mechanics. For store pages, community, creators and launch PR, the category knowledge is the product, and a general agency will learn it on your budget.

How early should we hire?

For a premium title, far earlier than most studios do, because the wishlist is built over months and cannot be bought in launch week. For a free to play title, once the retention numbers are good enough that paid acquisition would not be pouring money into a leaking game.

Is localisation marketing or development?

It is both, and it is usually budgeted as neither. The scope, what game localisation actually includes and how to brief it are covered in our page on a video game translation agency. Decide it before launch, because retrofitting a language is far more expensive than planning one.

What should a first month report contain?

Store page conversion, wishlist additions or installs, cost per install where paid is running, and retention. A report built on impressions and reach cannot tell you whether anything worked.

Who owns the creative the agency makes?

You, on payment, including the source files for trailers and key art. These assets get reused for years across store pages, press kits and platform features, and licensing them back later is an avoidable cost.

The recommendation that happens outside your store page

Every job on this page is about a surface you can see: a store page, a video, a creator's stream, an ad placement. Players also ask for recommendations in a place no game marketing report covers, by typing something like a game they liked into an assistant and reading what it suggests next. That answer is assembled from what has been written about games rather than from store metadata, which means a title with coverage and a clear text description of what it is gets described, and a title with only screenshots does not. Checking what the assistants say about your game, and about the two titles you are most often compared to, costs nothing and takes a few minutes. AI Knows Us does that reading across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews and reports which names come back. A studio needing enterprise controls should know that tryprofound.com/pricing, read on 21 October 2026, publishes SSO/SAML and SOC 2 compliance and up to 9 answer engines tracked, against the five surfaces we read and a pricing page that lists neither.