Ravi Vijh

The Recommendation Era: What AI-Driven Discovery Means for Video Games PR

There has been a quiet but persistent conversation as to whether PR still matters. Influencer spend went up, storefront algorithms got smarter and the focused turned to how every action linked directly to sales over building awareness through PR. Studios began routing budget elsewhere and many communications teams found themselves having to justify their existence in ways they had not had to before.

That conversation is worth revisiting, because the way players discover games is changing again.

A growing number of players are now using AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity as their first port of call when looking for something to play. Unlike a storefront algorithm, these platforms do not serve ads or optimise for commercial placement. They draw on the body of written material that exists around a game: reviews, forum threads, editorial features, community posts. The studios with a rich written record tend to surface. The ones that only ever ran a two-week launch campaign tend not to.

This is good news for video games PR, but it requires a different way of working. Short campaign bursts tied to release windows are not well suited to how these systems pull information. What actually builds visibility in this environment is sustained narrative work over time, the kind of ongoing thought leadership and community presence that most PR teams have historically been told they cannot afford.

This session will walk through how ChatGPT and Gemini actually form game recommendations, what signals they weight, and what a video games PR campaign built to take advantage of that looks like in practice. 

Session Takeaway

• Delegates will understand how platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity form game recommendations, what they draw on, why some games appear consistently and others do not, and why earned media is better placed than advertising or influencer spend to build that kind of visibility.
• Delegates will leave with a working framework for planning a video games PR campaign built around sustained narrative and thought leadership rather than a launch window burst, including how to structure content, brief collaborators and sequence activity across a longer campaign arc.
• Delegates will have a practical starting point for auditing their game's current AI recommendation visibility and a set of tactics they can bring back to their studio or agency and act on straight away.
• Delegates will have the language and evidence to make the internal case for restoring or increasing video games PR investment, including a clear argument for why the discipline is better positioned than it has been in years to demonstrate genuine discovery value.

Session speakers