Gaming marketing used to rely heavily on two channels: paid media and advertising. It no longer describes how a gamer in Rio de Janeiro or Mexico City today discovers a new title and decides whether it’s worth investing ten hours of their time. They turn to the trusted voice inside their phone.
On stage at Gamescom LATAM, Anthony Crouts, Senior Director of Marketing for the Americas at Level Infinite, sat down with Sergi Cerrato Recasens, CEO of MCR, a digital marketing agency that has worked with publishers across the LATAM region for years. The conversation boiled down to one idea: in Latin America, authentic creator partnerships are a growing marketing channel, and multi-title portfolios allow publishers to execute them well.
What Level Infinite is doing in America
Level Infinite is Tencent’s global gaming brand. Four years old, the studio was built to amplify the vision of a growing number of global studio partners and give these studios a unified presence as they perform for players, media and events.
“We have a lot of games in our content portfolio,” Crouth said. “What we’re trying to do is amplify the vision of our many studio partners. Give them a unifying presence so they’re not doing things alone.”
In America, this means regional teams are built on local connections, local talent, and two-way communication lines. Insights from the field flow back to the studio so that the next round of content is shaped by what players in this part of the world are actually responding to.
Creators are the new marketing channel, and authenticity is the price of entry
Crouth did not clearly explain the current position of content creators.
“KOLs and content creators have become an important segment,” he said. “We see it as an emerging channel. It’s a new marketing channel. If you look at traditional marketing channels—print advertising, TV advertising, internet advertising—key opinion leaders are an important part of the mix today.”
Infinite Level games are built on connections between players. Creators are people the audience already trusts and listens to, and decide whether a game is worth trying based on what they think. The job of marketing, as Crouts formulated it, is to find out what motivates players to want the experience. The creator is the bridge from the game to the player.
The problem is that the channel only works if the partnership is real. The rule of Infinite Level is that the creator must adapt to the game, not the other way around.
“It’s authenticity and trust,” Crouth said. “We don’t want to have any relationships with creators who are moving away from their respective brands, because they have credibility in the eyes of the audiences they interact with.”
That means a lot of groundwork before a partnership is established. The team investigates whether the creator’s voice, audience, and content style fit the specific title they represent. The creator has to actually play the game, enjoy it, and want to talk about it. “This is not a fake response. This is not a fake agreement. This is actually an informed agreement,” Crouts said. “It’s actually an interesting engagement.”
Creators who really love a game will still wishlist it three months after the launch window closes.
Localization is more than just language packs
The regional strategy developed by creators will only be successful if the game gives those creators something worth talking about locally.
“The LATAM and South America regions are important components of our overall global business,” said Crouts. “There are a lot of gamers here. We want to make sure we engage with them, and also customize the experience so they can connect with it on a personal level.”
The secret sauce is local teams. People in the region, reading what’s popular and what’s trending, and directing that information back to partner studios so that the games created, patched, and expanded reflect what local players actually care about.
The honor of the King in Brazil is clear evidence. Brazil is the first country outside China to get its own Honor of Kings server. The team didn’t stop there. The local content going into the game itself, beyond the Portuguese language package, is all shaped by what the regional team knows about its audience.
“We’ve been able to leverage the franchise, connect with key audiences here, and also develop the reach of a very active and strong content community,” Crouts said. “This isn’t just a generic game that we’re bringing to Brazil. This is a game that we’ve really developed and put original content into.”
For studio partners, the reward is games that grow in directions they wouldn’t find in their home offices. For a player in Brazil, this is a title made to suit his wishes. And for creators in those regions, it’s material they can talk about because the game reflects their cultural language.
Huge portfolio power
Crouts makes it clear that the portfolio itself is the multiplier. A title in itself should get every inch of attention. A title under a well-known brand has the support of its neighbors.
“When we look at our KOL campaigns, we have creators talking about certain games and they realize ‘Oh, there are two more games under the Infinite Level umbrella. Maybe I’ll try them too and introduce those other games to my audience and community.’ That’s the power of being under a strong brand,” Crouts said. “It’s all about content and bringing in additional content to amplify the effect.”
Cerrato takes the other side of the same coin: what a portfolio does for the small studios within it. He told Crouts that he has watched more than one studio grow faster after joining Level Infinite than he ever did on his own.
Crouts calls this foundation strengthening. A brand reaches users with one title, users discover two or three other titles under the same umbrella, and the creator economy around the brand begins to deliver multiple titles at once. Smaller studios gain visibility, marketing power, and cross-audience reach that they can’t afford to build from the ground up. The creators get a deeper library of content to talk about. Players are introduced to a game they would never have sought out.
That’s what a portfolio is really for. It’s not a wall of logos, but rather a flywheel that publishers struggle to turn on a single title.
When the community brings its own message
The final idea from the conversation ties the entire model together. Reach is not the end goal. Authentic communication is.
Crouth describes the moments he looks for at every launch.
“You saw engagement from the community and audiences talking amongst themselves about something they really liked, and it was a narrative that we wanted to be part of the game that was relatable to everyone, and you saw the whole thing happen organically,” he said. “That’s when you know you’re truly successful.”
This article is based on a live panel at Gamescom LATAM between Anthony Crouts, Senior Director of Americas Marketing at Level Infinite, and Sergi Cerrato Recasens, CEO of MCR.
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