Head of Publishing (Gaming)
What this page covers
Head of Publishing (Gaming)
If you are a Head of Publishing in gaming, you are constantly balancing many moving parts, from different titles and genres to shifting markets, while needing a clear view from the driver’s seat rather than scattered snapshots.
A careful first step is to step back from individual games and look at your portfolio as a whole, so you can see where you are now and decide where a structured, data-informed approach to user acquisition, creator work, and publishing support would be most useful for you.
In brief
- You may be looking for a way to plan user acquisition across several games at once, compare performance between genres and platforms, and avoid ad hoc decisions that leave some titles underfunded or underexposed.
- A format that can fit this situation is portfolio-level UA and creator marketing planning, where spend, channels, and priorities are considered across all your titles instead of game by game in isolation.
- Before starting, it makes sense to clarify how you currently plan budgets per title, how you track performance and attribution, and where creative testing, influencer work, or reporting is duplicated or inconsistent across your publishing teams.
What to do
As a Head of Publishing, you are responsible for multiple games at different lifecycle stages, often with separate teams, channels, and fragmented data. UA and creator campaigns can end up planned title by title, making it hard to see trade-offs, compare results, or explain why one game is scaled while another is stalled. You need a way to bring these views together without losing the specifics of each game.
A suitable approach is to introduce portfolio-level planning and optimization for both performance and influencer marketing. This means looking at budgets, channels, and priorities across all titles, using comparable metrics and a consistent attribution and tracking setup. It also means reducing duplicated creative testing and improving knowledge sharing, so learnings from one game or creator program can inform decisions for others in your portfolio.
To start carefully, you can focus on a limited set of titles and define a simple, shared framework: how you compare performance, how you allocate budget, and how you document tests and creator activations. From there, you can gradually extend this framework to more games, adjusting it as you see what works for your organization and where external UA, creator, or analytics support might be helpful.
What to keep in mind
Any portfolio-level UA and creator framework needs to reflect your actual catalog, markets, and internal structure. There is no single template that fits every publisher, and it usually takes several iterations before a new way of planning and reporting feels natural to your teams.
Limitations can include differences in attribution and tracking setups by title, varying data quality, and the challenge of comparing games across genres, platforms, and lifecycle stages. Influencer and performance data may also sit in different tools, making it harder to build a single view. It is important to acknowledge these constraints upfront and treat early work as a way to surface gaps rather than as a final solution.
Because of this, a reasonable next step is not to overhaul everything at once, but to run a focused exercise on a subset of titles. This lets you test a portfolio view, see how it supports your decisions, and decide where you might want deeper analytical, UA, or creator marketing support before rolling the approach out more broadly.