The video game industry is changing fast. Physical game discs are on their way out, digital distribution keeps growing, creators are becoming a bigger part of the customer journey, and gaming communities increasingly live everywhere from Discord to Reddit to Twitch.
Sony’s announcement that it will stop producing physical discs for new PlayStation games beginning in January 2028 is just one example of that shift. So we wanted to talk to someone who has been watching — and marketing through — these changes firsthand.
Want to know more about Sony’s move away from physical games and what it could mean for the industry? Watch the full episode here.
Meet Dwayne Waite Jr., a marketing and advertising professional at Schell Games and a longtime Daily Carnage subscriber. Dwayne has spent years working across game marketing, creator partnerships, experiential campaigns, VR, and community building.
We caught up with him to talk about what happens when the physical product disappears, why creators are becoming part of the storefront, what marketers can learn from gaming communities, and why other industries might want to steal a few tricks from game marketers.
Want to hear the full conversation? Watch the latest episode of The Daily Carnage Show to hear Shannon and Dwayne dig even deeper into creator marketing, gaming communities, experiential marketing, and where the industry is headed next.
- The game isn’t the whole product anymore. Community, IP, creators, and the experience around a title all play a role in how people discover and engage with it.
- Creators are becoming part of the customer journey. The right creator can introduce a game, demonstrate it, build community around it, and ultimately drive conversion.
- Experiential marketing matters even more when the product is hard to explain. VR is a particularly good example: sometimes people need to experience the thing before they understand it.
- Gaming marketers think about creators as professionals, not just influencers. The best partnerships consider what works for the brand, the creator, and the creator’s audience.
- There’s a lot for other industries to steal from gaming. Especially when it comes to building infrastructure around the creator economy.
The Conversation
If the physical product disappears, what exactly are you marketing?
Sony’s move away from physical game discs might sound like a distribution story, but Dwayne sees it as something bigger for marketers.
As games become increasingly digital, the product itself becomes less tangible. That means marketers have to think beyond the title sitting on a shelf and start considering the entire ecosystem around it.
“Whenever you are looking at developing a game, you have to take all of those features and attributes.”
That means asking: Is there a community around the game? Is the IP already familiar? If it isn’t, how do you introduce it? Which creators already have an audience interested in that genre? Are there Discord communities, Reddit threads, or other spaces where potential players are already talking about games like yours?
The physical box used to be part of that marketing equation. Now, the community around the game can be just as important. And ultimately, Dwayne says, it comes down to the experience you’re asking someone to spend their time on.
Gaming is a particularly interesting form of marketing because you’re not just asking someone to spend money. You’re asking them to spend a finite resource: their time.
Whether that’s five minutes, an hour, or an entire Saturday, the experience needs to feel worth it.
Gaming is becoming more experiential
That focus on experience becomes even more important with virtual reality.
Dwayne pointed to Schell Games’ I Expect You To Die series as an example. The game puts players into an escape-room-style spy experience where they use telekinesis to solve puzzles and get themselves out of increasingly ridiculous situations.
The marketing challenge? It’s difficult to communicate that feeling through a traditional ad. “You don’t get it until you’re in the headset,” Dwayne says.
He saw the same thing when working on Until You Fall, a VR sword-fighting game. The trailers could show the graphics and the action, but they couldn’t fully communicate what it felt like to put on the headset, feel the weapons in your hands, and actually fight through the game.
That made creators and live events particularly valuable.
Once people experienced the game themselves, Dwayne says, it became much easier to understand the appeal. They could play it, talk about it, and tell someone else about it.
That kind of word-of-mouth remains incredibly powerful — especially when the product is something that has to be experienced to be understood.
Creators aren’t just another media placement
For Dwayne, creator marketing has become a major part of the gaming marketing mix, but he makes an important distinction: he prefers the term content creator over influencer.
“Influencers is a hobby. Content creators, that’s a job.”
Over the past several years, Dwayne has helped build creator programs with different tiers of creators, budgets, platforms, content expectations, and tools for managing relationships.
The goal isn’t simply to find someone with a big audience and hand them a game. Instead, it’s about finding the right fit.
A creator needs to genuinely like the game. Their audience needs to make sense for it. And the partnership needs to create value for everyone involved. Dwayne describes it as a three-pronged approach:
What’s good for us should be good for the creator. What’s good for the creator should be good for the audience. And what’s good for the audience should ultimately come back around and be good for us.
That changes how marketers think about creator selection.
What makes a game good for creator marketing?
Dwayne says there are both internal and external characteristics that can make a game work particularly well with creators.
Externally, the creator needs to actually care about the game and its genre. The days of sending every creator a game key and hoping something sticks are long gone. Internally, the game needs to create moments worth sharing.
Think moments that make someone laugh, scream, get surprised, feel clever, or have an “aha” moment and ideally, those moments are easy to turn into content.
A great game for creator marketing can produce a 10-second TikTok, a Twitch clip, a YouTube Short, or a much longer piece of content without losing what made the moment interesting in the first place.
Some genres naturally lend themselves to this. Horror games can create big reactions. Multiplayer games can create funny, unpredictable moments. Strategy games can produce impressive plays.
The key isn’t necessarily the genre. It’s whether the game gives people something worth watching.
Why do people watch other people play games?
If you’ve never been a gamer, watching someone else play a video game can seem a little strange. Why watch someone else play when you could just play yourself?
Dwayne compares it to sports.
You could throw a football yourself. You could kick a soccer ball around. But people still spend hours watching other people do those things at an elite level. Gaming works in much the same way.
Dwayne used Until You Fall as an example. He’s not particularly good at the game’s hardest difficulty, but he loves watching people who are. There’s something satisfying about seeing another player accomplish something you couldn’t. It’s fandom.
And that’s part of what makes creator marketing so powerful in gaming. You’re not just watching an advertisement for a game. You’re watching someone participate in something you already care about — or might want to care about.
The creator might be the new storefront
So what does the customer journey look like now?
It’s rarely as simple as seeing an ad and buying a game. Dwayne’s version is much more circular.
Someone might search Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or even ask an AI tool for recommendations. They might hear about a game from a friend, then see it on social. From there, they discover a creator who is playing it.
Maybe the creator shares a key giveaway. Maybe they mention that the game is available now.
The potential player goes to Steam or Meta, checks the price, watches a trailer, looks at screenshots, reads reviews, checks Reddit, talks to friends, and maybe adds the game to their wishlist. Then they might wait for a seasonal sale.
They might see the game again in a newsletter. They might watch another creator play it. They might come back to the store page. Eventually, they might buy.
The important part is that creators aren’t necessarily sitting at the end of the funnel anymore. They’re woven throughout it.
Measuring creator marketing beyond clicks
That also means measuring creator campaigns can’t stop at views or clicks. Dwayne looks at different stages of the customer journey and gives each one its own measurement window.
For awareness, that might mean looking at views and engagement over 36 hours, one week, 30 days, 60 days, or even 90 days. That’s important because content can take off well after it’s published.
For consideration, marketers can look at things like UTM clicks, wishlists, engagement, and sentiment.
And for conversion, creator or promotional codes can help connect a campaign directly to sales. Dwayne also pays attention to the sentiment within comments, not just the number of comments.
The idea is to understand what the creator actually did for the brand at each stage — rather than forcing every campaign into the same measurement framework.
Reddit is part of the marketing mix
For gaming marketers, community listening also extends well beyond traditional social platforms and Reddit is particularly important.
Dwayne’s team monitors gaming, game development, and VR communities, using Reddit Pro to understand what content is performing, what conversations are gaining traction, and what people are talking about. And they’re not just watching.
They participate.
For Dwayne, community marketing isn’t about posting exclusively from a brand account and waiting for people to respond. His team members actively participate in relevant conversations and communities.
That’s especially valuable as search and AI systems increasingly surface information from community-driven platforms like Reddit.
The community isn’t just somewhere to distribute content. It’s a source of insight into what people actually care about.
Gaming audiences are changing, too
One of the biggest shifts Dwayne has noticed is the relationship between players and live events.
From the consumer side, gaming events can be a huge part of the experience. They’re an opportunity to discover games, meet other players, and spend time with a community, but from the studio side, they’re increasingly expensive.
That creates a disconnect: players may see events as integral to gaming culture, while studios have a harder time justifying the cost.
Dwayne also sees an interesting split happening in the games themselves. On one end, there are enormous games that players can spend hundreds of hours playing.
On the other, there’s growing interest in shorter, more “snackable” experiences — games that can be completed over a weekend or played with friends for a few hours.
With thousands of new games appearing on platforms like Steam, discoverability becomes increasingly difficult.
That makes community, creators, and a strong portfolio of experiences even more important.
What can marketers outside gaming steal from the games industry?
Dwayne has an answer for this one. Creators.
More specifically, the infrastructure around creators.
He argues that gaming has been ahead of much of the broader marketing industry when it comes to treating creators as actual business partners.
Gaming audiences have been spending discretionary time with creators for years, which has pushed game marketers to build more sophisticated systems around creator relationships.
That means thinking about different creator sizes, different platforms, different budgets, different types of content, and different roles throughout the customer journey.
For marketers outside gaming, there’s a lot to learn from that approach. The opportunity isn’t just to find an influencer and ask them to post. It’s to build a creator ecosystem that works for the creator, their audience, and the brand.
And honestly, that’s a pretty good lesson to take from gaming.
