Hiring a CMO for Games Companies

Marketing leadership has always been critical to the success of games companies. In today’s industry, the role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is more important than ever. Having worked in executive search for over twenty years, and with fifteen years spent working with games companies, I have seen how a great CMO can transform a company’s commercial performance. I have deep experience of hiring CMOs for games companies, having placed the CMOs for games companies such as King, Miniclip, Star Stable and Outplay Entertainment.

Games are one of the most competitive forms of entertainment. Players have near-limitless choice, and capturing their attention requires both a great product and great marketing. In many free to play businesses, marketing is as commercially important as the product itself. The CMO is the executive who sits at the intersection of brand, performance, product, and community. The best CMOs combine creative vision with analytical precision, building teams that can both inspire players and measure exactly what works. Hiring a strong CMO remains essential for many games companies.

In mobile and online gaming, the CMO’s role is deeply data driven. User acquisition and CRM are at the heart of most marketing strategies, and both are functions where small improvements can yield massive commercial results. The most successful CMOs in this space know how to optimise marketing spend across dozens of channels, run a sophisticated approach to lifecycle management, and connect these efforts directly to revenue outcomes.

Data science and analytics underpin this work. Modern CMOs need to understand how to interpret data, structure experiments, and make product and marketing decisions grounded in evidence. It is not enough to have a good creative idea, it has to be validated and refined through testing. The strongest CMOs in online and mobile games often have strong data leaders around them and know how to use those insights to guide decision making.

PC and console publishers have traditionally been more brand focused. Marketing campaigns often resembled Hollywood movie launches, with heavy investment in trailers, creative advertising, and events designed to generate excitement and drive strong day one sales. That kind of brand building is still important, but the industry has shifted. More and more PC and console games are now live service titles.

Live games require a marketing approach that is closer to mobile gaming. Building strong communities, running ongoing events, and iterating based on player behaviour are all critical. A successful CMO in this space today cannot simply think in terms of big launch campaigns. They need to understand online marketing, analytics, and community management at a deep level. As PC and console games become more like live services, the gap between mobile and console publishing has narrowed and the best CMOs are those who can straddle both worlds.

The economics of growth in games have become more complex. Data privacy regulation and platform changes have reduced the reliability of third-party identifiers, making performance marketing harder to measure and optimise. As acquisition costs rise, CMOs are expected to bring more rigour to measurement, incrementality, and creative testing, and to be clear about what can and cannot be attributed.

The strongest CMOs respond by building durable, first-party relationships with players. That means investing in owned channels and community, improving lifecycle marketing, and creating a measurement approach that works even when tracking is imperfect. In practice, this shifts marketing from a campaign mindset to an operating system: acquisition, onboarding, retention, reactivation, and community working as one connected loop.

The post Covid environment has been a sobering one for many games companies. The exceptional growth of 2020 and 2021 has slowed, competition has intensified, and budgets are under greater scrutiny. Investors and boards are examining commercial performance more closely than ever. This has increased pressure on CMOs to deliver tangible results in acquisition, retention, and monetisation, not just awareness.

The companies I work with increasingly want CMOs who can move the needle quickly on commercial metrics without damaging long-term brand trust. Creative flair remains important, but it has to be coupled with the ability to run data driven, test-and-learn campaigns that show measurable impact, and the judgement to make the right trade-offs when time and budget are limited. A modern games CMO is as much a growth leader as a brand steward.

AI is beginning to reshape how marketing functions in games companies operate. User acquisition is becoming more automated, with bidding strategies and creative testing increasingly guided by machine learning. Generative AI is being used to create marketing assets at speed and scale. Predictive analytics can now anticipate player churn or spending patterns with more accuracy than ever before.

For CMOs, this shift means two things. First, they need to understand how to integrate AI tools into their marketing stack without losing the human judgement that ensures campaigns resonate with players. Second, they need to build teams that are comfortable working in this new environment, where creativity and data science are increasingly intertwined. The CMO of the future will not just be a storyteller, they will also be an orchestrator of complex, technology-driven marketing systems.

The games CMO role has become a hybrid job. Great CMOs are part storyteller, part performance marketer, and part technologist. They need enough fluency in analytics and tooling to ask the right questions, and enough taste and judgement to protect brand quality in a world where assets can be generated and iterated at speed.

This is one reason the role can be fragile. When expectations are unclear, for example whether the CMO owns growth end-to-end or primarily brand and launch, CMOs can be set up to fail. The best hiring processes define decision rights and success measures upfront, and ensure the CMO has the team structure required: performance and UA leadership, lifecycle and CRM, community and creators, brand and comms, and increasingly, AI-enabled creative and analytics capability.

We have placed the CMOs for both large global games companies such as King and Miniclip, and entrepreneurial games companies like Star Stable Entertainment, Outplay Entertainment, and others. At King, for example, I placed Alex Dale as CMO. He went on to help take the business from around $50m in revenue to more than $1bn, playing a central role in King’s $5bn IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

As well as CMOs, we regularly hire the senior leaders who report to them. This includes Heads of User Acquisition, Performance Marketing leaders, CRM executives, and Brand Marketing leaders. Our work at Star Stable has included both their CMO and CRM leadership, strengthening their marketing team at multiple levels.

This track record gives us a nuanced understanding of what makes a great marketing leader in games, whether it is a global CMO or the executives who specialise in the key disciplines beneath them. There are many subtleties to hiring a CMO for a games company; it is often wise to choose a partner with a strong previous track record of similar hires.

Hiring a CMO is one of the most important decisions a games company can make. The role has become more complex as the industry has evolved. The best CMOs today are part creative leader, part growth hacker, part data strategist, part community builder, and now also part AI adopter. They need to inspire their teams and players, but also be comfortable in the detail of analytics, technology, and commercial performance.

At Neon River, we understand how rare and valuable those leaders are. With our deep experience in the games industry, and our track record of placing world-class marketing executives, we are well positioned to help companies find the CMO who can transform their growth.

I'm Peter Franks, the founder of Neon River, an executive search firm specialising in hiring senior leaders for games and technology companies. I have over 20 years of headhunting experience and have helped some of the world’s most successful games businesses hire exceptional leaders. You can reach me at peter@neonriver.com.