Do not hand your money to marketing grifters

If someone in the games industry tells you to target a local market and says you need to learn the dynamics of that place, you can be sure that person does not understand the first letter of marketing, and probably has a package to sell you built on local marketing, a prehistoric technique left over from traditional brick & mortar marketing.

Whatever a person like that is explaining, you can google it in two minutes. They take that two minutes of information, beat it into word salad and stretch it over 15-20 hours, call it training and ask for money in return. I am talking about people who cannot even do the most basic reading on game marketing.

There are people who think they are consulting with 10% of what I write here and ask for absurd money for it. On top of that they talk down to developers and think that is how they add value.

They present this as separate work region by region in particular, as if every market had its own dynamics and you could only learn them from them. But if you are making an indie game your target is global on day 1 anyway. Do it in Konya, do it in Karşıyaka, do it in Kamchatka, nothing changes. It is 2026, you do not need to work with someone in a region to get information about that region. A 1-2 hour googling session is almost always enough, and that holds even for China. Anyone who believes in searching finds the way into China too.

Local marketing has its place, of course, but only on very specific games. Learning a market’s back to school date or its holiday dates does not mean you have done local marketing. It means you have picked up two minutes of google information.

Stay away from the ones who hedge themselves by pointing at low level local games. They love using games that are barely more than an itch demo as examples. They say “look, these ones did not make it, because they did not know marketing” and think they have done analysis. The game did not sell because it was bad, but saying that does not suit them, so they carve work out of it for themselves. When they say “we worked on that game”, ask how many copies it sold, and if the subject changes you already have your answer. Even the games they brag about usually did not sell. At that point the subject moves off the game and onto their own CV, I was there, I saw this.

Marketing in the games industry develops through collective knowledge, and every piece of information you can think of is already out there. Nobody is selling you the thing behind a closed door, because there is no closed door.

The only thing that can be bought is the interpretation of that information. My advice is this, do not take advice from anyone who has not been inside an end-to-end production on a game. From what I have seen, games succeed in spite of these people, not thanks to them. That is why at the end of the day all advice leads to the same road, just make a good game.

The only reason these people survive in the industry is that you do not know how to reach information. All of it is out there and free, but reading takes hours of your time and paying takes a minute. So what feeds them is not that they hide the information, it is that you cannot be bothered to go looking for it.

Before you work with someone who introduces themselves as a marketer, ask for three things. The game standing behind them, a publicly published case study they brought you, and the net positive on that game. If they cannot give all three as clearly as possible, do not work with that person. If they have no single publicly published case study and no conclusions from it, run the other way.

What they are selling is not information, it is your belief that you cannot reach that information.