WHY PC GAME MARKETING SHOULDN’T STOP AT LAUNCH


By Mike Gallagher, Founder of Untitled Advertising M


ost studios treat launch week as the finish line. Months of work funnel into one big day, the graph spikes, and


then the marketing effort quietly winds down. The trouble is that launch sits much closer to the starting line. The money, and the players, mostly arrive later. The numbers make the case plainly. On mobile,


more than 75% of global revenue now comes from games over two years old, and PC is drifting the same way. Roughly 86% of Steam attention sits with games that already exist rather than this week’s new releases. Look at when wishlist buyers actually purchase, and the picture sharpens. Of the wishlisters who ever buy, only about 13% buy within the first week. Another 13% buy across the rest of year one, and around 3% after a year. So roughly half of your future buyers convert after launch week, while they are still deciding. Go silent and you abandon them at the exact moment they were making up their minds. When a strong launch collapses anyway, it is rarely bad luck. It


is usually one of four avoidable mistakes: having no system to keep fresh reviews coming, confusing getting found with getting kept, letting your Steam presence go stale, and running launch as a one-off sprint instead of an ongoing routine. The contrast between Schedule I and Lethal Company tells the whole story. Both were genuine viral hits. Schedule I peaked around 459k concurrent players, then went quiet on updates and lost roughly 80% of its players within about a month. Lethal Company peaked lower at 240k but kept shipping content, holds a 98% positive rating, and still ranks among Steam’s most-played games years on. Same explosive start, very different ending. The difference came down to follow-through. The fix is a simple retention engine with four


parts that work together: product updates give a reason to come back, community gives a reason to stay, store presence gives a reason to be found late, and a communication rhythm gives a reason to be remembered. Community is the most powerful and cheapest lever of the four. Connected players stay dramatically longer, and small retention gains compound into real lifetime value. A late buyer typically converts only after several touches: a clip,


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a creator revisit, a Steam update, a friend’s nudge, then a sale. Every one of those is earned rather than bought. Your job is to build a system that keeps those touches happening on a schedule. Channels feed that engine, and they carry different


levels of trust. YouTube is the one source players broadly trust, while paid ads sit dead last. So weight effort toward earned, human coverage, favouring micro-creators in your genre who will revisit your game on every update over a single expensive macro video. Spread short-form across platforms rather than leaning on TikTok’s organic reach, which collapsed in 2025. One underused channel is your own Steam page. If you are running paid ads at launch, hold off on


rebuilding the page on day one. Wait about a week, let the creative gather data, identify which messages are converting, then rebuild the page to lead with those winners. The ad is the promise and the page is the payoff. On one title we worked on, aligning the page to the winning ad messages lifted store-page conversion from 2.5% to 10%, with the same traffic and the same spend. The throughline is this: attention did not disappear after


launch. It moved to where players already spend their time, in communities, creator feeds, and friends’ recommendations, and most studios simply stopped looking. Build the retention layer, and the long tail is yours.


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