Week 4.02: Reflection — Creating a Viable Game Product

The underlying theme for this week’s study was exactly as stated in the title of this post: creating a viable game product. This involved a lot of research into why some games succeed where others fail. Perhaps unsurprisingly this isn’t just down to the game itself.

In many ways this reminded me of my own photography business. I wasn’t the best photographer in my area, nor was I the worst (although I like to think I was at the upper end of the scale). What was very evident was as soon as a photographer reached a certain standard, the quality of their images started to count for less and less as other factors took over: marketing, personality, amiability, style and many others. Back then I soon realised if I was to be successful, I needed to develop skills in marketing and sales pretty damn quick.

I feel the indie games industry is very similar in this respect. Just having a great game and tweeting about it is not going to cut it. In my Postmortem Analysis post I looked into two Virtual Reality (VR) games that were both released at about the same time. One is enjoying massive success with (what appears to be) a very vibrant community of players whilst the other is lagging far behind in sales. Clearly genre is a big factor here but the one enjoying all the success is also supported by a very active player community that is evident from the messages on their Steam page.

I don’t believe identifying a gap in the market is the correct approach. One thing I learned from my photography days is a gap in the market is often an indicator that there is no market. I still have the battle scars to prove it having invested a lot of time and budget into what our US cousins call ‘Senior Portraits’ yet we have nothing similar here in the UK.

With an estimated 93-95% of Indie Games making no profit , anything that can be done to improve one’s chances of success are worth investigating. Strategies to try that appear to help with this are…

• Identify a genre that’s on-trend
• Minimise development costs
• Making games you want to make, can make and will make enough money
• Early access releases to garner feedback from players that can be used to help shape the future of the game

…but doing all this won’t be enough as running a strong and effective marketing campaign is also necessary as I’m sure we’ll cover in a later week.

Guesstimating sales

A couple of very surprising info-nuggets came out of this week’s material based around guesstimating sales figures for games published on Steam. The first of these was the ‘Boxleiter Method’ that takes the number of reviews a game has on Steam and applies a multiplier to give a very crude estimate of the number of players.

The second of these was presented by Mike Rose in his GDC talk entitled ‘Let’s Be Realistic: A Deep Dive into How Games Are Selling on Steam’ that included a method of estimating first year sales revenue on Steam by Jake Birkett. This involves taking the games first week’s or first month’s sales revenue and applying a multiplier to give an indication of what it might achieve in the first year.

What am I going to make?

Part of this week’s activities were to run through the Lean Canvas. I struggled with the semantics of this at first, specifically around the separation between the game and the business (studio). At this point, the game is the business as it’s the only product on the table at the point of inception. In time, as more games are developed and released, the coupling will loosen as the studio owns a number of titles, with the option to sunset some of the earlier ones as the studio brand evolves and grows.

My approach to this was to work through the process on the understanding that, at the time of writing, the business would be the game but that relationship will ultimately change over time.

The more observant might realise this is a modified version of the Lean Canvas. When producing it, I realised the Lean Canvas and the Business Model Canvas were almost identical and added the three additional boxes from the Business Model Canvas to the top of the Lean Canvas template I created in Miro.

Conclusion

For my own game/business, I am very keen to continue with VR which locks me into a 3D game, which is against the advice we received on keeping costs down . Part of the rationale for this is I really enjoyed the VR development from the previous module plus there aren’t that many games available in the Oculus store (at the time of writing). This was further corroborated by a conversation I had with a publisher at EGX London recently where she confirmed the same.

Furthermore, based on the market analysis we did for module 720 and data obtained from Statista, VR is very much a growth market with revenues expected to increase by 50% in the next two years to $2.4b . Granted this is a very small market compared to the global games market that is estimated to grow to $240b in the same timeframe

Looking back at the Venn diagram of Figure 1 above, this is certainly a game genre I want to make and am able to make. The biggest unknown is whether it will make enough money. The research, information and figures I’ve obtained so far suggest it could but that is not a guarantee.

My strategy going forwards is to run the concept and early prototyping as part of this module with the intent that, if the numbers stack up, I can take this forwards into the dissertation project for further development.

List of Figures

Figure 1. CLARK, 2018 Identifying Game Ideas — Screengrab from YouTube presentation

Figure 2. CLARK, 2018 Early Access and Updates — Screengrab from YouTube presentation

Figure 3. GDC & JOHNSON, 2018 Boxleiter Method of Guesstimating Sales Figures — Screengrab from YouTube video

Figure 4. GDC & ROSE, 2018 Jake Burkett formula for estimating sales revenue — Screengrab from YouTube video

Figure 5. THORN, 2022 Early draft of studio business

References

Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash