Anni Valkama
Playtonic Games
Anni Valkama is an award-winning and award-nominated indie games marketer with more 50 titles under their belt. They're currently a brand manager at Playtonic Games where they look after the marketing for the Yooka-Laylee franchise along with various titles under Playtonic's publishing label Playtonic Friends. Anni also runs two not-for-profit industry initiatives, GameDevsNorth and Social Link. They've previously delivered talks and hosted panels on indie publishing, games marketing, and EDI.
Anni Valkama is speaking at the following session/s
Indie Marketer’s Lament: Stop Winging It!
Marketing, that mysterious hard to describe elusive entity that far too often enters the consciousness of an indie developer when it is already too late. But what is it exactly that marketing does? Why it is not just tweets or a trailer? When should it start? And why is it necessary for a title's success in the current climate of gaming?
Intended for audiences with minimal or no prior experience with marketing games, this talk goes back into the very basics, covering marketing research in its simplest terms, importance of assets such as key art and your Steam page, planning an effective marketing timeline and activities, how to effectively spend your marketing budget and/or free tools at your disposal, and breaking some hard truths around marketing, or lack there of, versus the commercial success of a title.
We would all love to have just that one viral tweet that sets everything into motion, but in a climate where nearly 14,000 games launched on Steam in 2023, are you willing to risk it?
Session Takeaway
- How to go about planning and executing an effective marketing plan for your indie game
- Examples on how to spend your marketing budget
- What free tools and opportunities are available for you if you have minimal or no marketing budget to work with
- Marketing should be involved in a project from the very beginning, not only near launch
Session speakers
