Making a new game is hard. Most of the time you’ll fail, and a large part of success is out of your control. So you want to fail better. And failing better means adopting a specific mindset, and optimizing the cost of failure.
1) Adopt a “Red light by default” mindset
If you’re working on a new game you want to have a clear soft launch process. For 2 reasons. The first one is to provide guidance about what matters and what doesn’t, what’s good and what’s not – and ultimately what you should be focusing on to achieve success. The soft launch process should tell you what metrics are needed to produce a game that can be relevant for the business (and what that looks like depends on the situation – it’s not one size fits all). More on that in my next posts.
The second one – not discussed as often – has to do with looking forward and managing expectations. Your green light process should be red light by default. What do I mean by that?
When you’re working on a new game, you want it to work. And it’s natural to believe in what you’re doing and look for positive signs (even if they are virtual or possible signs that might appear in the future). New game development does have to run on positivity and hope.
However this hopefulness and positivity can be a double-edged sword. I think we’ve all seen the problems that can arise from wishful thinking in new games. The metrics are not quite where they should be, but the team is seeing encouraging signs in the data, or believes it has a strong plan to implement a feature in the next build that will turn things around. The problem is, thinking in terms of “what if”, in terms of what might happen has no end. If you’re looking for reasons to believe, you’ll never put a stop on the project. And we’ve all seen projects go on for much longer than they should have, and become a bigger and bigger burden on the company (including all the sunk cost fallacies that encourage continuing to work on a game). Because maybe the next update will turn things around. And how do you argue with that hypothetical scenario?
Everybody knows going in that failure is the most likely outcome of any attempt at making a new game. That means the default mindset should be killing games – encountering success is the exception. “Red Light by default” means you shift the burden of proof. You need to assume the game will be killed unless it can demonstrate – via actual and tangible metrics – it can survive in the market. In other words, you shouldn’t have a soft launch process to find reasons to continue. You should have a soft launch process to disprove the reasons to kill. Now, doing that you might end up killing a game that could have become something. But it’s important to remember that a) the odds of mistakenly killing a winner are much lower than the odds of continuing to work on a dud and b) in the long run you’ll be better off playing the odds. So set clear, objective criteria for success. And be ruthless to kill if your game doesn’t meet the metrics. Don’t look for reasons to keep on going.
2) Fail cheaper
Let’s assume making a game has 3 key factors 1) your success rate (what % of attempts become commercially viable products) 2) how much money each success will bring and 3) the cost per attempt. You’re in the mobile gaming business because you assume the value of any one success will outweigh the cost of all the attempts. So the graph below shows a business that makes sense.
| Cost of attempt | $1,000,000 |
| Value of success | $110,000,000 |
| Success rate | 1.00% |
| Overall return | $10,000,000 |
I would argue the value of success has to do with operations (live ops and UA). So when working on new games that leaves 2 key levers: cost of attempt and success rate. And when you look at those 2, focusing on minimizing the cost of each attempt is the way to go.
| Cheaper cost of attempt | Increase hit rate | |
| Cost of attempt | $750,000 | $1,000,000 |
| Value of success | $110,000,000 | $110,000,000 |
| Success rate | 1.00% | 1.25% |
| Overall return | $35,000,000 | $30,000,000 |
First, for a similar delta (-25% cost vs +25% success rate) the overall return is greater. Second, optimizing the cost of attempt (read: failure) is something much more controllable than increasing the success rate of your attempts.
Of course, this business only makes sense if you ultimately manage to release a success. But there is no systematic way to make a hit. And a lot of the success is out of your hands – your audience makes your game a hit, not you. On the other hand, you have a lot more control on the costs/speed of each iteration. You can reduce the resources or time spent on each phase. You can increase the threshold to move forward – and kill more/faster, etc.
So it’s very hard to find a way to convincingly say you’ve found the creative recipe to make more successful games. You can objectively show how your cost per attempt will decrease. And it will be very difficult to argue that optimization will decrease your hit rate. Especially if you’ve clearly defined the KPIs needed to have a business case. That’s next week
Alexandre Macmillan 
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