Promotion of the Puzzle/Simulation Game The Signal State in Russia

There are over 60,000 games present on Steam today, and their number grows daily.

How to stand out from this multitude of projects and make Russian gamers choose to play our game, The Signal State? With such a question, the developer, The Iterative Collective, contacted our marketing agency, RMAA Games.

Since 2019, RMAA marketing agency has been helping developers promote games and solve similar problems in the Russian market.

For The Signal State, we needed to develop and implement a marketing strategy to promote the game to the Russian-speaking audience at launch.

The Signal State represents one of the most complex genres in PC gaming—the kind of fiddly logic puzzler with a very specific niche theme. Therefore, we first needed to determine its target audience.

We conducted a market analysis and identified two key audience segments:

• The first one is PC gamers who love puzzles and tech games,
• The second one is audio tech fans and bitmakers.

At the second stage, we identified the main promotion channels. Since Russia has its own unique digital ecosystem, the strategy for promoting PC games is very different from that in other markets, such as Asian, European, and American markets.

We must also take into account that this is the launch of a new product in the market. So we have to cover as many users as possible in a short time.

Based on these two factors, we chose VK thematic groups and YouTube influencers as the main channels for promoting The Signal State.

First Stage of an Advertising Campaign

The game was released in Russia on the 23, of September 2021. During this period, we posted:

When choosing influencers, it was important for us that they themselves offer us ideas and formats for future integrations. Thus, we solved several problems. The first is that the game was promoted by influencers who really fell in love with it. And the second one is that the influencer chose the format of interaction with his audience, as he is the best at understanding what his subscribers like.

Second Stage of an Advertising Campaign

To generate interest in the game, in October, the second wave of an advertising campaign was launched via VKontakte groups, providing broad coverage with minimal investment.

We selected the top dedicated videos we created together with bloggers from the previous stage and integrated them into advertising posts in the VK community. Advertising posts were placed in communities for gamers and for beatmakers.

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During the advertising campaign, we primarily sought to reach users at the early stages of the marketing funnel: Discovery and Consideration. But a properly built marketing strategy allowed us to reach users who are currently in the third stage - “Conversions”.

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