Over the past two decades, I've worked across film, TV, gaming, and branded experiences —  leading creative strategy and execution for everything from award shows to AAA game launches. And if there's one undeniable truth in the market right now, it's this:

Games are no longer "entertainment-adjacent." They're setting the standard for what immersive, emotionally resonant marketing looks like — led by a cinematic game marketing strategy that puts worldbuilding and audience connection at the forefront.

And while we've seen film and television chase cinematic storytelling for decades, it's narrative-driven games - think: The Last of Us, Ghost of Tsushima, The Witcher - that are building entire fan ecosystems before a single frame hits the screen. That shift has profound implications for marketers, studios, and brand executives in legacy media, especially now, when they are obviously thrashing to find their audiences.

Games Don’t Just Launch, They Build Worlds That Invite Participation

I’ve led cross-platform campaigns for both entertainment and brand clients and I’ve seen how traditional rollouts (you know the ilk: trailers, press kits, media tours) struggle to match the depth of engagement game marketing now delivers by default.

The smartest game studios don’t just announce a title, they seed a world. Lore drops, dev diaries, character teases, and platform-native content aren’t “extras.” They’re narrative strategy. Community managers and developers become co-narrators. Audiences are immersed and become participants.

This isn’t about hype. It’s about invitation. And the result is an audience that feels something deeper than attention — they feel ownership.

Game Marketers Design for Fandom — Not Just Awareness

Where I’ve seen the most growth in the past few years is in brand storytelling that functions more like game design: world-aware, modular, and nonlinear.

Game marketing excels because it doesn’t just think in launch cycles; it thinks in lifecycles. It understands that audiences crave continuity, Easter eggs, emotional investment, and a sense that the story lives on, even after release day.

I try to incorporate this into every campaign I architect: how do we build emotional gravity across phases, touchpoints, and formats?

Legacy Media Needs to Evolve Its Campaign Thinking

Film and TV marketing still relies heavily on the “reveal” model: tease, trailer, release, review. It works, but it’s brittle, and it’s built for a passive audience that doesn’t exist anymore.

What if we built campaigns that respected the intelligence of the fanbase? That dropped story fragments. That introduced characters weeks before a premiere. That released the rules of the world long before the content hits.

It’s not that the tools aren’t available. The strategic model needs to shift, and the shift starts with creative leadership.

My checkpoint

Whether I’m working on a multi-screen experiential launch, leading a game marketing campaign, or developing IP-adjacent creative systems for a brand, I keep coming back to one simple question:

Am I marketing a product, or building a world worth belonging to?

The teams that embrace the latter build resilience. They scale more easily across platform, geography, and time. And most importantly — they stay in the conversation.

Final Thought: The Future Is Unwritten

Games aren’t the future of entertainment — they’re the present of marketing. They offer a blueprint for how to treat audiences as collaborators, not just targets.

As creative leaders and CMOs reimagine how IPs live across platforms, they'd be wise to study the mechanics of a cinematic game marketing strategy — what games say, how they say it, when, and to whom.

Because the most cinematic storytelling today? It might not come from a script. It might come from a game engine.

(ok, in fairness, I realize that games are, in fact, scripted, that line just sounds badass and allowed me to tie in the Joe Strummer homage.)