Before Alex Hayter helped market sword fights for a living, he helped hide sponges at conferences. The objects carried notes inviting whoever found them back to an educational-games booth, where the reward was sponge toffee. For another campaign, he worked on homemade arcade cabinets that toured Toronto with a game about building a gas pipeline. For a Facebook game built around tricking someone into saying a particular word, he arranged a press interview inside the game itself.
The tactics were small, tactile, and slightly odd. They were also early evidence of the idea that would organize his career: promotion works better when it carries the personality of the thing being promoted. Marketing did not have to arrive as a polished interruption. It could be a game, a prop, a joke, or an invitation.
Hayter made that case explicitly at Toronto's Gamercamp in 2014. The talk was called “Weirded Out,” and its argument cut against the habits that made many developers suspicious of marketers. His alternative was not anti-commercial. It was more demanding. A campaign should help people understand the creators behind a game and give them a reason to care. Weirdness, properly aimed, could signal recognition: the studio knows what makes its audience laugh.
“Marketing doesn't have to be gross, and it doesn't have to be boring.”Alex Hayter, 2014
The marketing department with “other stuff” attached
Hayter joined Torn Banner Studios in 2015 as Senior Brand Manager. He later summarized the role with a joke: the person who did all the marketing, communications, and other stuff. When he became Brand Director, the description remained almost the same, except that he now had a large amount of help. The line is funny because it captures a familiar reality inside independent studios. Titles can be neat. The work rarely is.
His path into that room ran through Toronto's game community. He worked with Spongelab Interactive, Pop Sandbox, and Blot Interactive. He volunteered as a community manager with the International Game Developers Association from 2012 to 2015 and helped promote the 2013 Level Up Showcase, where more than 50 student games from 12 institutions met an audience of more than 500 people. He had already learned that a scene is built by repeated acts of organization: the event, the introduction, the booth, the follow-up.
At Torn Banner, that community instinct became a distribution strategy. Chivalry: Medieval Warfare crossed over with Killing Floor 2, Payday 2, Rocket League, Depth, and Natural Selection 2. Some partnerships produced new weapons, helmets, characters, or paid content. Others traded flags, fan art, or a social-media mention. Hayter's point was that the scale of the exchange mattered less than whether it delighted two overlapping groups of players.
He took the idea to the Game Developers Conference in 2016 under a direct title: “Collaboration, Not Competition.” A game can only travel so far inside its own community. A neighboring studio can offer a ride into another one, if the exchange gives players something worth noticing. It is the cooperative version of audience acquisition, measured not only in impressions but in goodwill.
The useful part of getting it wrong
A clean career profile would move from clever campaigns to a successful sequel without stopping in 2017. Hayter's public version does stop there. Mirage: Arcane Warfare, Torn Banner's bright, magic-infused multiplayer experiment, underperformed. The studio had stepped away from medieval combat to explore ranged fighting and an unfamiliar setting. Later, Hayter explained that the product struggled to communicate what it was at first glance. Inside the project, creative direction had spread across too many paths.
He has not treated that chapter as an embarrassment to edit out. On his eight-year Torn Banner anniversary, he called Mirage's lessons humbling. In a longer discussion of Chivalry 2, he went further, describing the failure as a blessing in disguise. The studio had survived an experience that might have closed a smaller company. More important, it had gained a sharper understanding of product clarity, coherent direction, and the danger of moving too quickly from one success to its sequel.
That last point matters. In 2016, before Mirage launched, Hayter wrote about why Torn Banner was not rushing directly into Chivalry 2 after the first Chivalry sold more than 3.5 million copies. The safer commercial move was obvious. The studio chose a detour because it wanted fresh eyes on its combat system and a creative break from a world it had inhabited for years. The experiment did not produce the hoped-for commercial result. It still changed the team that eventually made the sequel.
Letting the audience into the workshop
Chivalry 2 did not emerge from a sealed room. Torn Banner began public alpha testing in March 2020 and continued monthly rounds through April 2021. Tens of thousands of active testers played, reported bugs, and told the team what landed. Hayter described that process as one of the studio's biggest areas of improvement since the first Chivalry suddenly found an audience larger than its creators were prepared to manage.
The tests were not a focus group stapled onto the end of development. They sat inside a loop. Players tried the game. The studio watched both the friction and the delight. Designers adjusted systems. Marketing and community teams explained what was changing. Then players returned. After launch, Discord, forums, statistics, and live tuning kept the loop moving.
The community feedback flywheel
Some signals were practical. Console players wanted a server browser. Veterans missed the arrow cam, a view that follows a fired arrow like a tiny medieval action camera. Other signals were wonderfully unserious. Beta players picked up wagon wheels and bells, formed groups around flaming chickens, and squat-danced between fights. Those moments supported a “fun first” design goal that Hayter could state in a sentence while designers built the systems underneath it.
The balance was deliberate: a lower skill floor and a higher skill ceiling. New players could hold a block, use prompts, and understand why they died. Experienced players could study stamina, counters, footwork, subclasses, and weapon behavior. The outer promise stayed clean. Hayter called the desired feel a bar fight with swords. The inner machinery could remain deep.
“Even if they get killed a lot, each time they understand what happened.”Hayter on teaching new Chivalry 2 players
The public shorthand for Chivalry 2 was cinematic medieval combat. The “Battle of the Bastards” episode of Game of Thrones supplied a recurring emotional reference: one person somehow surviving while armies collapse around him. The Lord of the Rings films offered another shape, especially for team-objective maps that should feel like a group has completed an epic journey. Those references made the ambition legible without requiring a design document.
The result reached one million sales within two months, according to Torn Banner. The figure is tidy. The route to it was not. It ran through a mod-born studio, an underperforming experiment, a larger team, a publishing partnership, a year of recurring tests, and the discipline to make a technical combat game readable as chaotic fun.
A new title, the same unfinished loop
Torn Banner moved into a different kind of chaos in 2024. It acquired fellow Toronto developer Lever Games and launched No More Room in Hell 2 in Early Access, shifting from medieval multiplayer to eight-player cooperative horror with permadeath. Early Access created a new version of the feedback problem. The team had promised a game that would evolve in public, which meant criticism was not an interruption to the plan. It was part of the format.
The studio's April 2025 Reanimation update brought new maps, revised combat, new zombies, inventory changes, and community-suggested loading tips. In 2026, Hayter discussed the value of building features in smaller pieces so feedback could be more reliable. The setting had changed from castles to a zombie outbreak. The operating idea remained familiar: expose work, learn, and respond.
In August 2026, Hayter announced that he was becoming Torn Banner's Chief Marketing Officer. He marked the promotion without pretending the learning was finished. Eleven years in, he wrote, he was still learning new things every day. He also gave credit to the team and returned to the studio's durable ambition: make the games it can dream of.
The promotion formalizes a job Hayter had already been widening for years. His public work moves easily among campaign, community, product positioning, studio culture, and live operations because players experience those things together. A trailer makes a promise. A tutorial either keeps it or breaks it. A Discord post can reveal a design problem. A flaming chicken can reveal what people love.
The useful lesson is not to make every campaign weird. Forced weirdness is another costume. Hayter's better standard is fit. Let the marketing inherit the game's humor. Let partnerships become content. Let feedback reach the people who can change the experience. Admit when the promise and product do not align. Then keep the loop open long enough to learn something.