Linus Otten, 28, Marketing Manager
We welcome you to the first piece of a series of short interviews with the people that bring our games to life. Here you’ll get a peek inside the minds of the creators, designers, developers, marketers, and every single element that is involved in delivering our products to your hands. In today’s interview we’ll introduce you to our beloved colleague Linus, Marketing Manager at Bytro, and responsible for making it easier for players to find our games.
What do you do in your job as Marketing Manager?
While I also work on presenting our games to the public in the best possible way, my main focus is scale. Understanding who likes our games and for what reasons is key. We leverage that information to find potential players for our games and make them love the flavor of grand strategy multiplayer that our titles represent.
What makes working at Bytro special?
A common goal. When looking for a job one of my major concerns was competition amongst the workforce. While I like being competitive, I don’t think a company benefits greatly in playing employees against one another. Whether it is comparing their results against each other, pointing at hours worked compared to colleagues – neither of these metrics strengthen motivation and are rather damaging.
Working at Bytro is great because we all share a goal that we have inherent reasons to work towards. Providing a game that is fun to play, a solid technical foundation to prevent interruptions in the experience, engage and acquire user to generate a healthy playerbase to ultimately support a workplace that we all like to go to (or think about from the safety of our homes) 5 days a week and make it better every day, month and year.
The team is growing in size and variety. Several professions are found in our teams ranging from developer work, data science, marketing, finance and a great HR department. We are also quite international with many unique people to meet and we fit it all into a tower that is shaped like a refreshing beer and gives the greatest view over Hamburg.
What did you do before working for Bytro?
Living in a small apartment located in the beautiful 3rd district of Vienna studying Communication-Sciences and preparing myself to influence the gaming marketing landscape.
Which project holds a special place in your heart?
Launching on mobile was a transitional moment for our team and myself. Seeing our game grow across hundreds of thousands of new devices, having to rethink my work quickly and reaching an audience that was waiting for a game like ours, but lacking a viable alternative before, was amazing.
Over the following months and years it proved to be a highly important step to stay relevant and keep growing, although our heart and core business still is anchored on Desktop PCs.
What do you do in your free time?
Either grab my running shoes, sit down and enjoy competitive matches in Counter-Strike or lie on the balcony and read a good biography of someone that I believe I could learn from. Sometimes, if I can’t sleep, I get up in the middle of a night, put a good 80s action movie on and mumble the quotes alongside it – which I used to do almost every night when I was a student.
What is your favorite videogame?
It is tough to nail it down, but the one game I always come back to is Counter-Strike. I do play a lot, but when it comes to Single Player I am always excited for a new game from From Software – hopefully we’ll see Elden Ring soon!
How do you keep motivated and productive during quarantine?
Don’t forget to go outside (as much as you are allowed to!). When the time came and we started working from home I had a very rough transition. Usually I wake up at 5:30am, drink a coffee and go for a run, the gym or play some video games in the morning – sometimes I repeat this in the evening as well. In the first few weeks of home-office it was very difficult for me to stick to my rituals and ultimately I felt very tired and overworked for most of the days. Where I always thought that home-office something to work towards, I realized that over longer periods of time it drags me down.
So I fought hard, getting up early again, trying to separate work from free-time harder and got back to my original self – motivated and productive.
So, don’t treat your day differently just because you work from home and pay even more attention to keep your rituals intact!
What advice would you give to the people trying to keep their work teams united and motivated while working remotely?
Communicate with video and audio! I am very much a digital person and don’t put too much effort in meeting someone face to face. So one would think that not going to work and the overall quarantine changes little for my life. And that is true, but still the distance in communicating with others shows harsh effects. Just reading what colleagues and friends write without the context of their “person” created distance, misunderstandings and sometimes conflict.
Try to bring as much of the “person” back into the conversations. It will help keep the teams united.
Thank you so much, Linus!
Want to be on board?
You can find further information about our job openings at bytro.com/career. Your contact person is Susanne Zander. If you are currently not looking for a new challenge, we are happy to invite you to follow us on Social Media!
