Marketing a game is complex, unpredictable, and essential. It requires more than combat demos, social media posts, and review keys to be successful: It's about understanding the story, the world, the artistry of the game you are promoting. In some ways, according to Finji co-founder and CEO Bekah Saltsman, it has more in common with game development than you might think.

For the debut episode of GDC Side Quest, a monthly series on the Game Developer podcast, host Beth Elderkin talks with Bekah Saltsman about everything game marketing: What helped Tunic's surprise success, where to put your marketing budget, and what non-players should know about marketing a video game.

Below is a transcript from select parts of the interview. Listen here for the full episode, or watch the video on Game Developer's YouTube channel. Make sure to check out all the marketing talks coming to the 2026 GDC Festival of Gaming, celebrating the entire game ecosystem.

Beth Elderkin: I know you just announced Usual June, congratulations! Tell me what's going on with that game?

Bekah Saltsman: A lot, actually. So, we are in production right now—actually, outside of my office, we're doing “Big Screen Friday,” but it is Thursday because we have tomorrow off. But we're going through all of the new bosses that are coming in, new creatures that are coming in, the scenes that are getting put together.

So it's really exciting. The things that the team are showing off... it's just so cool. Looking at the first trailer, I was so blown away.

Beth: [The trailer] reminded me a bit of Beyond Good and Evil mixed with—we’ve had a lot of summer camp coming-of-age stories, particularly with femme-presenting characters. It's just been a joy to see because it just takes me back to when I was that age.

Bekah: I really want to play games about people in places that I'm familiar with. When we went into Usual June, that was a big driving force. Who is our main character? Where does she live? What sort of town is she in? What sort of extraordinary things does she get to experience? And as we filled out the cast of characters, characters through this town, and even the town where the game takes place.

Adam and I and a lot of our collaborators [remember] growing up and being around these flyover states in the United States. I'm in Michigan, I'm in the Midwest, and why are things sort of swampy and weird? And these weird sort of layered histories of, like, who actually founded your town? In the US it's kind of strange if you start digging in. I love telling stories about the sort of people that I would bump into in my own city and talking about the layered histories of these Midwest towns that have a lot of culture and a lot of history.

Beth: During my second GDC, I was still getting my bearings. I came in from journalism, so I knew video games and I loved video games—but learning the industry itself was very new to me. I remember putting together finalists' videos for the Independent Games Festival Awards and the Game Developers Choice Awards, and I saw the footage for Tunic.

I remember being blown away by the artistry because it felt both timeless and new. It had that mix of Zelda with things that didn't hand-walk you through it. You really had to get challenged. It was actually one of the first games I bought specifically because I learned about it at GDC.

The success of it really had a lot to do with social media, the campaigns that were coming out, word of mouth. What surprised you the most about the response to Tunic?

Bekah: I could actually give a four-hour workshop on what was weird about Tunic. You've already mentioned the Zelda component of Tunic and that is very right in your face. It has nostalgia just in its imagery. You can tell where its roots are. But until you play it, you don't actually immediately see the Dark Souls, Bloodborne component of it.

One of the main marketing components of [Tunic] is, like, “...and there's secrets.” You play as a fox with a sword, and there's secrets. And the whole point of Tunic is you, as a player, discovering those secrets. You can't, as a person showing the game, talk about the game. You can only talk about the experience you, as a player, are supposed to have going into it. So we really couldn't say a lot.

So, it used to be called Secret Legend. People couldn't remember what the title was called, it didn't search well, so people would be like, yeah, yeah, the Fox Game, which is a marketing problem if nobody can remember your title. So, before the E3 reveal with Xbox in, I don't know, 2018, maybe, the game was renamed to Tunic. But we still had sort of the same problem.

Because now we were an Xbox Console launch exclusive. Xbox was showing that original trailer that was still very Zelda-y, so what does a combat demo look like if we're going to drop people in? What does it look like to drop a longer combat-focused demo so we can signal to Dark Souls fans: “This is for you.” But also signal to these same Zelda people like, “Hey, there is combat in here.”

After that combat demo, which was maybe the year before the game launched, that was our countdown to launch. At some point we knew that we were gonna be shadow-dropping on Game Pass. We knew that, no matter what, people would be able to access this game for free on day one, and we needed to ensure that they didn't drop it right away. But we also needed to ensure that all of our reviews on day one understood what the game was. Because we could talk about Zelda. We could talk about combat. We could not actually talk about secrets, which is the entire foundation that this game lives on.

So we did something really risky. We basically set up an entire Discord server that we NDA’d press into, that we moderated as if it was our Finji community servers. We watched them in real time respond to the game in the exact same way that our day one players responded to the game. They were completely obsessed. They were already trying to translate the language.

We saw them get the secret ending in real time before launch.

It was a Saturday morning. I was sitting at my kid’s basketball game. They were so close to figuring out sort of that last secret in Tunic and, like, everyone was sort of popping in from the Finji side. At some point somebody's like, “Oh my God, I think we might be close. Look at all the Finji staff that are online right now on a Saturday.”

That's when we knew it was going to work.

Beth: A lot of that is messaging and marketing. But when we talk about game marketing, it often feels like it gets pushed to the back burner. Like, you have to have the game first before you can market it, especially if you're a smaller studio or a solo developer. What would your response be to someone who says, “I'm just gonna wait to do my marketing until afterward. It's not really a priority for me. I can use social media. It'll market itself.”

Bekah: On one hand, they're kind of not wrong. But also, they don't understand often that marketing—they're already doing it.

Your game is your first and best marketing tool. People say, “Well, marketing is doing advertising, marketing is posting on social media, marketing is whatever.” No, it's not. It's a good screenshot of your game. The game design is marketing and marketing is just weirder game design.

If you talk to any game designer, they're designing for the player. All a marketer is doing is designing the communication to talk to the player. I am not kidding. It's the same thing.

So it feels like it's more that you need to walk across a bridge to understand that there are minimum viable product—but for marketing for indies, there's a lot of things available to you. And you are already sitting on the most powerful marketing asset imaginable, and you work on it every day.

Beth: How would you advise developers to walk across that bridge? Because marketing isn't something that's necessarily going to be in their wheelhouse, especially if they're a one-person studio. How would you advise them to cross that boundary and get the game out there in the way that can help them get success?

Bekah: One of the first things is literally talk to people. We had an experience years ago: We published Panoramical in 2015 or 2016. Panoramical is sort of like a music game where you control the music, but you're also controlling the alien landscapes in the background. So it's almost less game and more of an experimental experience.

A person at a show was, like, “Hey, so this feels like the Fantasia of games.” And it's like one of the smartest things that anyone had ever said to me. I didn't say that, but telling me that Panoramical was the Fantasia of games, or the Fantasia of game experiences, was so eye-opening of how I should talk to people about Panoramical.

When you are making something, you have blinders on. What you think is interesting about your game is absolutely not the most interesting thing about your game at all, because you are a developer. You are building it.

If you go and talk to other people, listen to them explain your game back to you. That's half your marketing right there. They're gonna probably tell you half of your elevator pitch. They're gonna tell you what's gonna resonate with a player because it's possible that they are your future demographic and your future niche player or your day one purchase. My challenge for everybody, even when we take our games to shows, is listen to everything they say.

If somebody says a phrase that seems really smart, just jot it down, pull out your notepad. You're not looking for bugs, you're looking for words. And as an indie, that does not take very much time to do. I mean, that's what we were doing even 15 years ago.

Beth: I really love that analogy because it reminds me of common advice you hear when you're giving an elevator pitch: Talk like you're talking to someone at a coffee shop or at a bar. But this is one of the first times where I've heard that it might actually be a good idea to just let them pitch it back to you. So, instead of talking to the person at the bar or the coffee shop, you're listening to the person at the bar.

You mentioned that this was something that you were doing even 15 years ago. In marketing, things change so fast. Just three years ago, everything was Twitter/X and now it's really not. How would you say game marketing has changed in the past few years, especially for smaller developers?

Bekah: There's so many avenues to pay attention to and, like, thank God there's tools to assist with that. Because if I had to tell my social media manager, “Hey, you have to individually track Twitter, Bluesky, TikTok, Steam forums, Discord, Instagram.” Where else are we at? Game Jolt. Uh, I could just keep going forever. We post on so many places. If we didn't use Hootsuite, we would die.

But even with my tiny team, we have to be, like, “Okay, so where are we actually going to engage actively?” And then we have to build rules for every place of how are we going to engage with these audiences in these various places. We only have so many eggs and baskets, so which ones are we gonna put them in? We can post in lots of places, but that doesn't mean that we can or are expected to actively engage in all of those places.

It used to be way easier three years ago. I could just advertise on Twitter and be done with it. And it was so much easier to manage. But it's just, there's too many now, and each one of them has different rules. And how do you determine which ones are the best for your voice and the best for your audience?

We also run influencer campaigns when we launch stuff. We're not actively doing that right now, but our influencer campaigns are usually pretty experimental. Very fun.

Beth: If I could follow a bit about influencer campaigns. That is a newer entity in the marketing space, and it can be very successful, but it also could be very risky. Because you're kind of putting a lot of eggs in one basket, and influencer campaigns can be a little bit expensive. How do you make sure that you are picking the right influencer, that you're picking the right audience with it? What goes into that decision making?

Bekah: We always go into it with a strategy. I would never give money to one influencer. I would go in with, like, what is my budget, or what kind of budget can I pull? Sometimes that can be as low as $3,500, or maybe I am pulling $25,000 and woof that is a lot of cash to be dumping into an influencer campaign.

This was described to me by Aster [Wright], my community social media manager, so I can’t take credit for it. Aster said: “If we're looking at a small budget, we want to look for influencers who influence influencers.” Because those exist. So, if a certain influencer who has obviously a really wide audience, but also is setting the trends for other influencers. Even if they're expensive, even if they might take up 50% of your budget, that particular type of influencer is super useful.

But on top of that, we also are looking at cosplayers. For [I Was a Teenage] Exocolonist, this one was really fun. We did an entire cosplay budget. We contacted a bunch of cosplayers, we showed them the entire cast of characters, and we had a character video at this point. We were, like, “Which one do you wanna do?”

That might be one of the ones I'm most proud of. We had people on launch day who would never have played Exocolonist, and who were dev friends and stuff. They were, like, “Dude, I am seeing these Exocolonist cosplayers all over my social media. How did you do this?” And I'm, like, dude, I don't know.

Honestly, I love working with cosplayers in general. I think their work is incredible and they're often—especially when they're doing cosplay for themselves—they are some of your number one fans. Anyone who's willing to build that costume, put that many hours into it, and then wear it for your fans at a show just because that's their hobby, you should be working with these people. They are artists and they are literally doing the work for you.

Beth: We've been talking to game developers and game studios about how to get into marketing and understand marketing, but I want to close out by kind of going a bit in reverse. Because we also have a lot of marketers who are entering the game industry. What would you want them to understand about marketing games, and the marketing game audience?

Bekah: I love this question so much. So I was yelling, as one does, when you're sort of talking about your own discipline—like, yes I'm a CEO, yes I do biz dev, but my heart is in creating culture. That's what I'm most interested in. And the thing that makes me want to throw my computer out a window is when I pop onto anyone's store page, or I see anyone's marketing campaign, and it feels like what I am being sold is a television.

It is just a list of boring features. It's game as product instead of game as experience, game as culture. You don't see a movie being marketed as a television. They don't say like, there are going to be seven characters in this game and you're gonna get to talk to two of them and you're gonna get to go to 15 locations. You are welcome.

What are you doing? You can put that in some boring feature list somewhere else. What are you selling me as an experience? What you need to tell me is what emotion am I going to have? Why would I invite you into my living room to sit on my couch? Sell me the fantasy. Don't sell me a tv.

This is my art form. I don't make games: I create places for the games to exist. The people who make games are some of the most amazing people in my whole life. I am a better person because of all the designers and developers and collaborators and the indie development scene that exists. I am better because I've been surrounded by this onslaught of creative stuff for the last 20 years of my life.

So often, marketers are not coming to games from games, they're coming to games from outside of games. They're not developers, and they may not understand this. They may not have played games. They may have been like me—growing up in the 80s and 90s, I didn't even get to have my own console. I was a girl. I was not expected to play video games. Those were for the boys.

So they might be coming to games not really understanding what they are, or having a stereotype of what they are. And games are everything.

You have to approach them as culture, just like movies and music and art. And once you start doing that, you start asking the right questions. So, when you're pitching stories to media, you're not, like, “Here's my review keys.” It's, like, How does my game overlap culture? How does my game overlap movement? How does my game overlap politics? Because art is politics. You can't divorce humanity from the things you create. It's not possible. It's a reflection of humanity. That's what games are.

Developers should be doing this too. You should be more curious about the thing that you're making. You should interrogate why you put something in there, because it is likely a reflection of your own or the humanity around you. It's gonna help you write your press releases. It's gonna help you pitch media stories. It's gonna help you write your store text. It's gonna help you figure out what screenshot you should even use.

That is how you should be approaching this, from a foundational strategy point. It's a reflection of you. That's what you're making. That's what your team is making.

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