How to identify million dollar ideas for your games studio
A framework that helped Mighty Bear identify Butter Royale as a winning game concept
When I speak to people outside the games industry two questions I often get asked are “how do you come up with game ideas” and “are you afraid you’re going to run out of ideas”?
Coming up with ideas is never the hard part. If you sit a group of game developers in a room brainstorming ideas in groups of 4–5 people you’ll probably have 2–3 new game concepts per group within the hour. Even without these exercises, we constantly have people pushing new ideas internally, as does pretty much every studio I’ve ever worked at.
The challenge is not generating ideas, ideas are cheap and plentiful. The real difficulty lies in making sure you’re picking the right ideas and refining them in such a way that maximizes your chances of success - choosing the right project can propel your studio to global stardom, the wrong one could have you stuck in development hell for years and cost you everything.
Going back to first principles
Taking a slight digression from game design and conceptualization, one of the books which had the biggest influence on how we run Mighty Bear was “Principles” by Ray Dalio. In it Ray Dalio writes about his approach to life and how he runs Bridgewater Associates* (one of the world’s most successful investment firms). One of the aspects of his approach which stood out to us was the way they use models and algorithms to inform the decision making process, so we built a model to help us choose between projects.
*We also wrote a Principles document which outlines how we operate at Mighty Bear, using Ray Dalio’s document as the original inspiration. If you’re interested in learning more, I wrote about it here.
Measure what matters
Our high-level approach is to do the following:
- Identify important criteria to consider when picking the next game — more on this below
- Score each concept from 1–5 against the different criteria (1 being the worst possible score and 5 the best)
- Weight the different criteria in terms of importance (Low, Average, High, Critical).
- Each level of importance affects the score by a different multiplier. Low = x0.5, Average = x1, High = x1.5, Critical = x2.
- Depending on the weighting of each item, the score for that line item is then affected by a multiplier. For example, if an item scores a 5 and in a category that is defined as “Critical” (which has an x2 multiplier) then the number assigned will be 10 (5 x 2 = 10)
- We debate what the scores should be in every line item for each game we’re evaluating.
- All of the different scores for every game get added up to give each game a final score.
- We compare scores to help inform the final decision.
Studio identity
We spent a long time identifying what really matters to us when evaluating a concept. Over time we’ve refined and evolved the criteria we use, and what makes sense for you is going to be unique to your studio.
As a starting point, here are some high-level considerations to help you flesh out and define your criteria:
- Does your studio have a specific thesis or type of game you’re building against? Our primary focus is on creating accessible, non-violent, multiplayer experiences so some of the things we consider include:
- What is your studio set up to build? The type of games you’d like to build for business or personal reasons, may not be the best fit for your team.
- What can you afford to build?
As you start writing out your own criteria and evaluating different games, you’ll find there are items you’ll need to add for the model to make sense for what you want to do. We currently score ideas against 30 different criteria, and this is a number which seems to be detailed enough without being excessively complex.
At the end of the exercise we have a summary section which tallies up the scores for the different games*.
*You can also choose to round them up/down to get a 0–100 score to make comparison easier.
Sharing is caring
In case you’re interested in using this framework, I’ve created a generic version of the template here. It should give you enough to get started on your own model for this methodology
One important thing to call out is that this exercise is designed to try and limit bias (eliminating it is impossible) and encourage people to think about and debate all the different criteria. Even the process of assigning scores will carry some bias and subjectivity into the process, so don’t delude yourself.
The best possible use for the framework is to identify clear outliers (either good or bad) and make an informed decisions based on these.
After evaluating all the different criteria, we’ve seen ideas which were not the top pick initially jump out as a clear winner. We would probably have never landed on Butter Royale without this framework.
We don’t solely use the framework to choose our next projects, the process and the data informs ~70% of the final decision. This has helped us make better choices and develop a deeper understanding of what matters to us. I hope you find it useful too!
