Media and entertainment
Gaming
Making and monetising interactive entertainment.
Four businesses that share an audience and almost nothing else. Players find games through store charts, streamers and friends, so none of this is about installs. The people an engine can send you are publishers, sponsors, platform partners and the reporters who cover them, and they are all asking craft and money questions that the people holding the answers never wrote down.
Where the answer is being lost
The hard questions get answered by everyone but the practitioners.
A brand manager weighing a first esports deal types "How do esports teams make money in India" and gets a reply stitched from tournament recaps and old funding stories. A producer at a publisher types "How do you pitch a game to a publisher" and gets the advice every consultant already wrote. The teams and studios who live those answers appear in neither. What follows is a shortlist drawn without them, a sponsorship budget placed elsewhere, and a slate spent waiting on introductions that do not arrive.
How we win this
The programme for gaming
Installs are not the job
Players arrive through store charts, streamers and paid campaigns. No amount of published writing changes that, and we will not sell you a story where it does. The buyers an engine can actually put in front of you sign contracts rather than in-app purchases: publishing heads, sponsorship leads, platform partner managers, co-development clients. Every artefact below is built for one of them.
Craft writing is the credential
The retention teardown, the porting note, the postmortem on a shipped title. Peers read these, which is why studios write them at all. The publishing head deciding whether your team knows what it is doing reads them too, and takes them more seriously than a capability deck. It is the one proof of skill you can publish while the pitch itself stays private.
The record is rich and it names somebody else
Gaming is not short of public data about games. Store pages, fan wikis, results databases and press archives describe titles in more detail than most industries manage about anything at all. What that record rarely carries is the company that built or operates the thing, because the storefront, the trailer and the coverage belong to whoever published it. So the answer comes back detailed and wrong: the game described accurately, the work attached to a name that is not yours. The job is correction rather than exposure. Put the credits, engines, platforms and operating role somewhere a machine can hold them, then go and fix the third-party entries that currently say otherwise.
The lines we hold
Real money gaming gets factual, dated, counsel-cleared material about the legal position and nothing that reads as an inducement to play. Esports fan communities get your own people speaking for themselves or nobody at all, while developer forums are a room your engineers are already welcome in, and we treat those two as opposites rather than as one social channel. Publisher pitches stay where they belong, under the agreement you signed.
The mix that carries it
Foundation
Entity and schema engineering
Structured data and entity definition so engines know exactly what you are, where you operate, and what you are credible in.
Content
Answer and comparison pages
Cost, process, eligibility and comparison pages built for direct extraction, not for a reader who scrolls.
Content
GEO blogs and authority content
The definitive written answer to the questions your buyers put to an engine, structured so it can be lifted and attributed.
Authority
Original data and benchmarks
Proprietary numbers, surveys and benchmarks — the most-cited asset class there is, because nobody else has them.
Authority
Digital public outreach
Earned mentions, trade coverage and third-party citations — the corroboration a model checks before it names you.
Authority
Directories and profile consistency
Every listing, registry and profile saying the same thing, so the entity resolves to one business instead of three.
The constraint we work inside
Two ceilings sit over this sub-category. Real money gaming carries advertising restrictions and a legal position that keeps moving, so material there stays factual, dated and cleared by your counsel. And publisher pitching is confidential, so we publish craft and capability, never the deal on the table.
Specialisations
4 total
The pitch is different for each one, because the buyer, the trigger and the rules on what may be published are different for each one. Open the one that is yours.
Retention dips after a live event and your growth lead spends the week in dashboards. Meanwhile a publisher scouting live-ops capability is reading somebody else's account of how that problem gets solved.
The question deciding this today
“How do you improve day thirty retention in a mobile game”
- Who they sell to
- Players on phones, usually free with in-app purchases
- Who signs
- The player, and the studio's growth lead
- What starts it
- Launch, retention drop, platform policy change, live event
- Cost of staying invisible
- Users acquired expensively and lost immediately
Ask an engine "How do you improve day thirty retention in a mobile game" and it answers with confidence, drawing on analytics vendors, user acquisition blogs and consultancy posts. Those are the firms that publish, not the studios that solved it inside a running title. The same holds for soft-launch benchmarks, economy tuning and platform policy changes. So when a publisher, a platform team or a network shortlists studios with live-ops depth, the engine names the people selling tools rather than the people running the game.
What we would run
- 01GEO blogs and authority content
A run of live-ops teardowns written by the people who ran them: the retention curve on a named title, the day thirty fix, the economy change that followed it, and the two things tried first that did nothing.
Publishing heads and platform partner managers use craft writing to judge whether a team has genuine live operations depth before they agree to a call.
- 02Original data and benchmarks
A retention benchmark built from your own titles and published with its method stated: cohort definition, what counts as day thirty, which genres and which markets it covers.
Every retention figure in circulation comes from an analytics vendor aggregating other people's games, which is why the ones in circulation do not agree with each other. A number computed from titles you operate, with the cohort rules stated, is a different class of source, and a publisher weighing whether you know the genre will measure your claims against it.
- 03Reddit
Your engineers and live-ops leads answering the narrow version of the retention question they have actually solved, in the developer and genre communities, under their own names and with the detail your agreements allow.
The reply an engine assembles for that question leans on developer threads, because that is where the working detail sits and the vendor posts do not go. A thread has to earn its place there or it is removed, so this is participation rather than posting, and done properly it puts a named person from your studio inside the answer.
What we would not recommend
- LinkedIn. The mobile growth feed there is largely ad networks and measurement vendors selling to your UA team, so a studio posting into it spends most of its effort addressing its own suppliers. Performance marketing is what actually grows this business, and the writing budget goes further in the teardowns and the benchmark, which are still retrievable a year later.
- Instagram. A mobile game's Instagram is a creative surface attached to the ad account. Assets are cut for a test, judged on install cost and pulled the week they stop working, so nothing there stands still long enough for anything to quote it.
- X. That account is your service desk. Outages, event rollbacks, patch notes and apologies. It does a job we would only get in the way of, and its contents read badly when a machine lifts them out of the hour they were written in.
- Reviews and testimonials. Store ratings are the only review corpus a mobile studio has, and they sit inside the platforms rather than in a form engines retrieve as testimony.
What a lead looks like
The first message comes from a producer rather than a business development person. A publisher has a title in soft launch that is losing players faster than it can buy them, and she wants to know whether your team would run live operations on it: what access you would need, how long a diagnosis takes, and whether you work for a fee or a share of revenue. Your account of the economy fix on your own title is what told her to ask.
What we measure
- Inclusion in live-ops craft answers
- Your people named in developer threads engines quote
- Benchmark cited by name
- Publisher and platform enquiries logged
What changes
A producer at a publisher asking whether your team could take live operations on a title in trouble. A media planner putting your organisation on a shortlist because your inventory page answered her template without a call. A platform fund checking your credits before a meeting that is already booked. A payment partner reading your legality reference instead of guessing at it. Fewer cold decks into inboxes, and more first conversations that begin after somebody has finished checking what you shipped and who ran it.
Start here
See who gets named in gaming today
We put your buyers' real questions to the live models and come back with the businesses they name, the sources behind those answers, and the gap between that list and yours.