2020 in video games: Galaktus' Mateusz Szukajt on online marketing, community-driven games, and innovations from small teams
Poland-based Galaktus PR Agency specializes in public relations and marketing services for gaming and tech brands across Europe and the USA. We caught up with Galaktus CEO Mateusz Szukajt to discuss what 2020 meant for the company and the industry.
Mateusz Szukajt, Galaktus PR Agency CEO
How did 2020 treat the company?
It’s been obviously a difficult year for us because a big part of our yearly income was from servicing brands at huge gaming events like IEM Katowice or Gamescom and we all know that didn’t happen in 2020. Fortunately, we were busy with other projects. Marketing budgets got moved from offline activities to online marketing, influencers and so on. We signed several new clients. so this year will actually be better for us than 2019. We grew our team with a few solid specialists and are happy that we finally launched our board games studio and quality assurance department. I’m sure if we weren’t in gaming and didn’t have strong ground in games, PR, sales, marketing, esports and hardware we would be in a much worse position. Thankfully, our strategy of being a very wholesome and interdisciplinary gaming company paid off, and we’re more than thrilled to see what 2021 can bring us.
What new trends in your niche would you say deserve attention?
When it comes to PR and marketing of games and hardware, I guess bringing budgets to online marketing shifted the normal scenario a brand goes with when going for a premiere, launch day or just an intense sales period. Having a strong team of influencers was always a must but it turned out it’s even more important than we thought. Facebook is no longer a center of a brand’s communications and it’s all about community — Steam, Discord, Twitch and Twitter.
Any general trends across the video games industry that stand out to you?
Seeing that top-tier games of the year (apart from a few AAA games) are Among Us, Fall Guys, Animal Crossing and Hades, I’d guess the more community-driven a game is, the more chance of succeeding it has. Innovations in gameplay come from smaller teams, and I think we’re finally understanding that a AAA sandbox is not the only high-end experience gaming can give us. The gaming world is more versatile than ever, and I believe the new generation will surprise us with even more innovative and engaging games than we think.
As a company, what are you going to strategically focus on in 2021?
Our focus will be to grow our international team and the range of services we provide on the European scale and in the US. Our focus will be to strengthen our QA department and eventually start ourselves in games publishing since it’s always been close to whatever a gaming agency, such as ourselves, does.
What game releases got your attention this year?
That was obviously Hades that blew me away and took a bit of my life. I’m an old-timer PC-guy so an intense experience Hades delivers was the one I was looking for a long time.
