Belief Before the Game

When the studio’s intent shines through, and the game becomes more than a title – something powerful happens.

It’s Gamescom 2025. It’s the mainstage showcase, and your trailer is up next. The music shepherds the crowd. They’re leaning in. Then, within a two second window, your studio’s logo appears. In those two seconds, the Twitch chat explodes in hype-fuelled speculation – or regresses into a collective disappointed sigh, and sometimes, mockery and active disinterest.

Today, the smartest studios and publishers are building something deeper: trust, taste, and distinctiveness that travels across titles and mediums. You don’t need to know what FromSoftware is making next. You just know you’ll care. Its studio brand and its game brands co-exist in harmony.

But it poses a question: Does the studio define the game, or does the game define the studio? While great games are essential, a strong studio brand creates longevity – turning players into lifelong fans and can attract top talent. Unlike brands for beauty or cars – you can't brand your way to reputation in gaming today. Get the timing wrong and you’ll miss your chance. Too early with branding? Inauthentic and self-important. Too late with branding? Your reputation builds despite you, not because of you.

From our experience with publishers, titles and studios: most treat their Intellectual Property (IP) as products rather than brands. It's only when elevated to a franchise that proper brand management kicks in. That’s an expensive uphill battle, and even then – it's rare that a game itself is truly managed like a proper brand. The best strategy for studios is to treat their games as brands from the start – so the experience created for the player is the brand as much as its marketing and identity.

We achieve this by balancing two tensions. Game vs. Studio, and Creativity vs. Consistency. Then perhaps, we can brand our way to reputation in gaming in exactly the same way that you can with cars.

Game vs. Studio

Like a great author: each book stands alone, but the name on the spine carries weight across genres. Over time, their names may be bigger than the titles themselves.

Players may fall in love with a game, but they follow a studio (or publisher) when they believe in its intent or craft. Satoru Iwata’s Nintendo wants to put a smile on the faces of everyone it touches. Whether it's Legend of Zelda or Animal Crossing, we’re all bought into its universe of joy. A successful brand turns successful games into momentum – ongoing anticipation and trust – and into a hardworking asset.

This trust too becomes a shield. The Nintendo Switch 2 sparked online riots, but broke sales records regardless.

It buys you grace. When Rockstar delays GTA VI, it’s met with, “take your time,” instead of “something’s wrong”. Investing in branding is investing in a buffer that allows for honest dev vlogs, delays, and experimental design risks. Without a strong studio brand, it means every new IP launch becomes a zero-sum marketing challenge.

This tension is really about brand architecture, authorship, equity, and longevity. Whose name drives anticipation or trust – especially in a category led by either IP-dominant strategies or studio-first strategies (doable by studios who have serious cultural capital).

From experience, many studios need a coherent hybrid framework where IPs shine with the support of a masterbrand studio. There are a few risks if left unresolved:

1. Each game must build its audience from near-zero, wasting marketing investment

2. No studio ‘halo’ effect to carry the love from one success to another

3. Player confusion between publisher and studio roles in development

It’s about aligning studio and IP storytelling across social touchpoints, identifying a visual naming hierarchy, or designing UX signatures in marketing and in-game moments. Building that halo amplifies both your studio and your IP's perception beyond what they could earn alone.

If your next game flops, what’s left behind?
If your next game wins, who gets the credit?

You build trust with great games but you sustain it with a strong brand. That should be vision, portfolio architecture, identity, tone, comms – all working invisibly and incredibly hard together to earn your brand the benefit of the doubt.

And in this industry, that’s worth gold.

Creativity vs. Consistency

It’s easy to let your genre define your brand and box you in. Think A24, not Disney. Your studio brand can be a signature – a feeling, a promise, players can trust.

AAA companies often operate like production ecosystems, churning out multiple franchises across genres and markets. The result? Scale without signature. They’re seen as generalists. Instead they should strive to be perceived as multi-specialists. In its quest to diversify risk and revenue, players perceive that studios have lost the sense of why they exist creatively.

On the other end of the spectrum, some studios box themselves into a genre. They win short-term recognition but risk long term creative stagnation and are at the mercy of unpredictable player trends:

• For the studio: boxed into a genre they may no longer want to be known for

• For the game IP: inherits expectations that may limit it

• For players: each new IP feels like “more of the same” even if technically it’s new

So we see studio brands leaking into their IPs, reducing the distinctiveness of each game. Or, the IP ends up carrying the brand alone and leaving the studio no room to evolve. Take GameFreak (known for 30 years of Pokémon games), for example. It recently announced Beast of Reincarnation, a debut that sparked quite the noise. Here are examples from a Reddit thread:

• “I saw the GameFreak logo and yelled ‘GAMEFREAK?!’ aloud. This is their actual passion project 💔”

• “This throws my entire understanding of game freak as developers into disarray.”

• “The amount of people here who think that this game has been made by the same people as the Pokemon games is incredible.”

Perceptions – upended. How GameFreak works, what it works on, why it works, was never really understood. What can help studios and publishers in a similar situation is by building a hardworking studio and IP portfolio architecture, and in identifying the ‘what’ that can be built to future-proof your brand equity.

Ask yourself: If your studio disappeared tomorrow, what feeling would players miss most? Specialise in how you make players feel.

The Point: From an Attention Economy to a Trust Economy

So, why does it matter now? Because we’re entering a trust economy.

Players are stun-locked by endless releases, ads, and opinions. Despite being overloaded, they’re skeptical and savvy. They don’t always go for what’s most visible; they go for what feels honest, human, and earned. They go for what they trust. That’s Cyberpunk's redemption, not Concord's launch. It's Hello Games, less Activision-Blizzard.

So a studio brand becomes a signal of intent so you can say, “We made this. You can trust it.” You’ve pre-earned the most important currency – player goodwill – which can shorten purchase decision times and deepen loyalty. Your game IP branding inherits and upholds this.

At the same time, gaming is breaking out of the monitor. It's influencing cinema, music, fashion collabs, merchandising, retail, design. A strong studio brand creates a centre of gravity so that everything from collabs to screen adaptations feels intentional. Branded IPs (like League of Legends) can only scale across platforms if its identity and worlds are codified, consistent, and compelling. Now you’ll have a universe people want to live in, rather than a mere collection of transmedia IP content.

I’ve spent my life playing games and my career helping build the brands behind them. That perspective has shown me the magic that lies in the space between a game and its creators. When the studio’s intent shines through, and the game becomes more than a title – something powerful happens.

Sho Kubota, Strategist