QUIVER GAMES

Quiver Games is a game development education and community venture that I founded to create game development makerspaces in Vancouver. Since 2022, I have completed the UBC Business Accelerator Program to bring this venture to life, created its entire brand identity from logos to websites and formed a Vancouver wide audience of game developers eager to more from Quiver Games!

QUIVER GAME INCUBATOR- THE GUILD

PHASE 1: The Customer, The Quiver Identity & Marketing Funnel

Quiver Games was created to solve problems for young developers to enter the games industry.

Through guidance of my business program mentors, I was able to outline my target customers which would also be the early adopters that I will engage with my initial marketing efforts.

These will be post secondary students ages 20-25, majority in technical fields aiming to enter the games industry.

Second, I needed to develop the vocabulary and visual language I needed to use to attract my audience.

Since game developers are also gamers most of the time, much of the language and tone of gaming accounts can be carried over to the Quiver Games brand. Which I was very familiar with. However, the purpose of the venture needed to be more clearly expressed through the language used. I came to themes of the hero’s journey and the climb to greater heights as prime motivations when creating original content for social media.

Purple, white and red accents turned to be a very potent color combination for digital illustration which would make up majority of early content due to lack of photography done.

Thirdly, I had to figure out how to develop the community I sought to create. Renting out real estate and expecting people to stumble upon it for their own game development dreams was madness. I had to engage my future customers where they currently gather:

  • In person University Clubs

  • Discord Community Spaces

  • Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

With these locations as my main points of entry to market my offerings, I came to the conclusion that while the final product is far away, I can create game jams that embody everything I want to my space to be. I then spent the next few months planning Town One, Vancouver’s first and biggest game jam since the pandemic.

PHASE 2: Marketing Town One

Building reputation from nothing is not easy! However, I set out to create the best marketed game jam event in Vancouver anyways which I implemented with the following pillars:

  • Consistent and ramping engagement

  • Key partner cross promotion

  • A well structured and customer oriented marketing funnel

I set up my marketing channels and website to capture every view with striking, optimized content that will push them along to conversion.

I engaged my customers once per week on all my channels for 6 months (which increased as the event day grew nearer.) I used social media posts and pushed forward to engage potential attendees in those key gathering places which saw a massive spike of engagement as the world was coming out of the pandemic. My outreach skills allowed me to create strong relationships with other organizers in the city to deliver cross promotion that was mutually beneficial. As the event grew closer, I integrated Instagram and Facebook ads to widen the reach and relevancy for the event.

The most effective part of my marketing content strategy were my custom made event pages that made potential attendees more likely to stay on.

TOWN ONE EVENT PAGE

The final piece of the marketing puzzle came on how to engage people that already registered. To promote advocacy and recommendation without our event, we allowed individuals to pre-sign up as teams if they do not wish to be sorted into one by us. Additionally we gave them either prizes and discounts if they:

  • They referred a friend

  • Signed up as a team of 5 or more

  • Signed up to to the Quiver Games newsletter

PHASE 3: Expansion and Development

Town One was just the beginning! I had so many more ideas to keep this amazing thing I created.

First I stepped back and cultivated everything that I learned from marketing Town One, what worked, what didn’t, and made standardized documents to drive future marketing cycles.

Additionally, I created more regular ways for my community members to engage with the Quiver brand online through online meet ups on our discord, spontaneous get togethers and of course, more event productions!

In August 2022, I sold out the Town One venue AGAIN with the Quiver Games Checkpoint, a game industry networking event.

Then proceeded to sell out 18 more venues after that 😅

The work never stops! With recent learnings and research on how to virally grow social media accounts, I began to outline many faults in my original marketing strategy.

  • I was posting not nearly enough times per week so I upped it to 3 times a week.

  • I wasn’t utilizing hashtag metrics and engagement properly.

  • I could be communicating a call to action better with each post.

  • I wasn’t taking advantage of new norms like Instagram Reels to drive engagement.

With these learnings, I am currently reinventing the Quiver Games social media strategy, creating more educational and fun content that I can push out very quickly and effectively.

With the Deventure, Quiver brought in 6 top industry lecturers to give hands-on informative workshops for our audience. For the first time ever in Vancouver, game dev attendees were able to learn about niche industry process AND apply them right away.

100 attendees left the Deventure with finished game systems, completed environment assets, sample music tracks and even whole game dev concepts!

AND MUCH MORE AFTER THAT:

The Deventure- November 2023

Quiver Games Checkpoint- Feb 2024

The Checkpoint industry networking event brought 100 students, game dev teams and entrepreneurs together around one thing. Connection. Through speed networking rounds, boothing opportunities and of course, pizza, we were able to get conversations going and major fun to be had.

2 people have received job offers at this event.

3 commercial game projects were launched at this event.

1100

Tickets Sold
(Sold Out)

THE CURRENT STATE OF QUIVER

20

Sponsors
and Partners

25

Portfolio Project
Supported

450,000

Social Media Impressions

850

New Discord
Members Gained

$40,000

In Revenue
Raised

PHASE 4: OUTCOMES AND LEARNINGS

Engaging this community is a dream come true for me. I deeply enjoy the connections that I gained and that I am able to impact careers positively with my designs and messaging. I believe this is where I fell in love with digital content design and I am blessed to continue to do it every single day.