Why Did We Launch A Podcast?

It is no mystery that content creation represents a massive push for marketing and branding. In a world where 4.95 billion people use social media, and 90% of people shop from brands that they follow in their networks, having a positive, accessible image on true-and-tested public squares like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is a crucial part of every business effort to stay relevant.

Podcasts count themselves among the forms of content that have become increasingly popular throughout the 21st century. The numbers speak for themselves: with an approximate audience of 460 million people growing by the minute and more than 5 million podcasts worldwide, podcasts turning into a new learning and marketing niche doesn’t seem that far-fetched.

When you review and disaggregate these figures, scrutinising for any indicators on gaming, you find only 14,000 podcasts discussing pertinent topics in gaming. Even fewer of these gaming podcasts deal with the state of the industry at large, with most of them talking about new game releases, focusing on niche markets, or just taking over the hobby route.

Seeing these numbers, we thought there was an outstanding opportunity to give audiences a sneak peek into what makes the video game industry tick. To portray the successes, learnings, and inner workings of what now is the fastest-growing sector in the entertainment industry and make a case of why people should join or stay.

Welcome to the story of how Hidden Levels with Haptic was born.

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Humble beginnings

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The idea of adding value to the Haptic brand and our audience starts with our late 2023 rebrand, a topic you’re already familiar with if you have been following our blog. Since we began to create Hapti and our brand universe, we have been acutely aware of how transmedia narratives, social media presence, and content creation are fundamental to nurturing a growing community.

Nevertheless, hosting a gaming podcast was a daunting task from the start. Save for a few members of our Marketing team, we didn’t have experience creating live content or streaming, and most of our Recruitment team – intended to be the hosts from the start of the process – weren’t expert broadcasters, to begin with.

So how did we solve this?

We simply welcomed one of the best podcast producers in the European video game industry, Jordan Lound, to our fold to let him guide us.

As an expert contract recruiter and podcast producer for one of the leading tech and gaming recruitment agencies in the Nordics region, Jordan brought the right amount of expertise, a head-on attitude, and a comprehensive understanding of the networking and infrastructure needed to start such a project.

Through a gruelling process of three months, our Marketing team, the team at Gin Büro, and Jordan worked closely with our Recruitment team to get the best ideas possible for the podcast and start doing some test episodes to acclimatise everyone to the idea.

After such an endeavour, we outlined our reasoning, mission, and topics:

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• Our Mission:‍
  • The "Hidden Levels" podcast by Haptic aims to bring knowledge of ongoing industry topics to the forefront for our community. Talking to experts across the gaming sector, we strive to bring stories and insights into how things work in games, as well as the learnings and successes of some of the greatest minds in our industry.
• Steps to Achieve This:‍
  • We strive to provide top-quality content that is difficult to find online.
  • Hidden Levels features industry leaders and craftsmen with a unique look at video games.
  • We aim to keep things simple: our podcast is as valuable to industry pros as to new hires.
  • From art to marketing, engineering to production, all disciplines have a voice here.

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With our pitch deck and briefing done, the next step was simple: getting ourselves to work.

Through our vast +8K network of contacts and talent, we dedicated ourselves to finding the top voices in the industry, knowing that our launch episode had to be proportional to our ambitions.

Fortunately, we found the answer in our extensive network at one of the largest emergent gaming hubs worldwide: Barcelona. As one of Spain’s largest and most technologically advanced cities, Barcelona has been growing consistently as a haven for video game developers of all scopes and budgets, and we deemed it to be a fantastic opportunity to jumpstart our podcast.

The rest, as they say, is modern history in the making.

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Our promise to the video game industry

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Through the last two months, we have consistently delivered great content on Spotify for our audiences to delve into video game development. Our initial episode, ‘Barcelona Rising: The Path from Indie Haven to Major Global Gaming Hub’, drew significant attention to the Barcelona dev scene with a stellar guest list – and, as it remains our most listened-to episode to date, it is a fantastic entry point to our podcast.

Since then, eight episodes more have aired, with our tenth episode premiering this week! We have covered several topics, from culture in game studios to video game production, including art direction, marketing, storytelling, and more.

But this is just the beginning. We intend Hidden Levels with Haptic to become one of the best video game podcasts available in the market, with global reach and special features and episodes that will only increase the unique scope of our offerings.

Our podcast is now available on Spotify and Castbox, with upcoming releases on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. We will make all channels available on our main podcast portal when ready.

Coming soon, we will air an ambition years in the making called Studio Spotlights: long-form conversations focused on a single video game studio, showing its history, rise, and continued growth in the ever-changing state of the industry. Expect to read more about these in our social media in the coming months.

And we are only getting started: in the medium-to-long term, we also intend to go live in video form through Spotify and YouTube! We’ll announce each of these steps concurrently through our social media, which means only one thing: start following us if you haven’t already!

Until then, you can find a new episode of Hidden Levels with Haptic every Wednesday at 2 pm, GMT 0:00, on Spotify and Castbox. We’ll meet you there!

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