Katherine Welsford helps her company Bossa Studios launch new releases and expand their ever-increasing audience in her important role as Marketing Manager. Bossa Studios are an award-winning games company famous for comedic games including their popular Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread. We asked Katherine, some key questions about getting into the games sector.

Explain your role like I'm 5 years old

I show people video games and give them reason to buy the game. 

Take us through your average day at work. 

I normally start by seeing how many people have seen our adverts over the last few days (like trailers or key art) and checking how many people have bought the game. I'll then talk to the game developers (the coders) and find out what they're working on. I'll then normally have one or two projects i'm working on - like planning trailers, or organising stands at EGX or talking to influencers about getting them playing our games.

I'll then also work on website analytics (seeing how many people have seen our page or bought our game) and then work out how to get more people playing the game - find out what the players are enjoying and let the team know to make more of that!

What was your educational and career journey into your current role? 

I left school and went to university to study physics at Queen Mary UOL, graduated, went to train as a teacher of physics, then retrained as a data analyst (looking at data outside of games), moved to a marketing data analyst (looking at marketing data outside of games), then a marketing executive (managing adverts outside of games), then moved to a marketing manager (inside of games!). I stayed really in-touch with the games industry throughout all of this - founding & running a video gaming society at university, then volunteering with gaming groups in London (e.g. LG & Special Effect).

What is the most rewarding thing about your role

Its really great to be the "face" of gaming. Its a lot of work, but its really satisfying when someone tells you how much a game you worked on changed their life. Its also really rewarding to be able to see a designers game become reality - to show the world the amazing stuff other people have done. (although in a super nerdy way, my role specifically requires some analytics & data management and I find it amazingly rewarding when i compile code and it just works!)

What other roles do you work with the most

I tend to work with commercial and producers - we often work as a three on deciding what games should be made, and what games the public want!

What's the most challenging thing about your role? 

Its often really difficult to predict how well a game is going to do - you sometimes have to give bad news to a developer that the project they've been working on isn't resonating with fans. 

What software or digital tools do you use the most? 

I personally use a lot of Ad Management tools - Facebook, Google, Reddit, and a lot of social media tools, all of which change every year! This year we started to use TikTok! Knowing the basics of data management is important too - understanding excel and being able to use it to show data is important!

What are the key skills needed for you to work on to do your role?

There's so many different parts of marketing but broadly you need a good head for numbers and a lot of creative ideas as well as a bit of project management. At larger companies you'll only have to do one or the other - you might only manage influencers or only email - but at smaller companies you might be doing the lot, so being a bit of a self-starter is important

What advice would you give to your younger self looking to get started in the industry?

Keep sticking with it and keep your head in the games industry - volunteering with Special Effect meant I had to keep my eyes on video games news, which was how I found out about the role I have now!