Killing Your Babies (Part 2/2) — A Gaming CEO’s Guide to Finding Your Team’s New Direction
by Colin Feo, CEO of Windwalk Games
So we finished our EOB/Windwalk retro and were feeling strong, confident, and introspective. But now, we needed to get back to work. The biggest question we had was, “How do we pick something new to start prototyping?” I bounced back and forth between two approaches:
- “I want to hide in my room for 2 days and make a 30-page grand vision document. <sarcasm> I am sure everyone will immediately love it. </sarcasm>”
- “I want to send my team off on an open-ended game jam. Maybe they will find something great?”
Both seemed like risky endeavors though. How could 1 person sitting in a room for 2 days “Babe Ruth” a plan for a good game? In my opinion, good games are rooted in a strong understanding of an audience, not the boss’s fever dream. On the other hand, would an open-ended game jam actually produce something viable? Our team is purpose-built to release certain types of games. Our retro had given us strong opinions on acceptable project scope and on what best synergizes with our chosen, community-led path to market. We clearly needed to allocate time to understand all the options in front of us and intelligently pick a direction that we could potentially spend years building and supporting. The first step was to write down what we cared about. No matter how cool someone’s idea was, it had to meaningfully address each of these pillars.
PILLAR 1: An Appealing Audience
What's the game’s TAM roughly? Is the audience big enough and are they willing to spend money?
- EG: My cat-themed, narrative-heavy, knitting simulator might not be a good idea for Windwalk, commercially speaking.
Is this a red ocean? Are there incumbent, community-based games that make it unreasonable to reach this audience?
- EG: We shouldn’t make a MOBA and compete directly with LoL and DotA. Sure they are well-capitalized, long-lived behemoths but those aren’t the primary traits that make them unassailable. It is their strong communities that present 95% of the moat. The gameplay is almost the least important part. Their players put massive value in the long-standing relationships they have built with friends and influencers in and around these games. Some other examples in this category include Space Station 13, PUBG, Fortnite, World of Warcraft, Terraria, and Minecraft.
PILLAR 2: Community-Building Friendly
Does this game appeal to the early power users who are instrumental in jump-starting a healthy, growing community? Our specialty is hunting down fervent users and building a snowball of a community that starts sucking in other players like a blackhole. Having crazy passionate users is the best thing you can do to make your game more appealing. Can early versions of this game attract and retain these valuable gamers?
- EG: This community-building focus is what has kept us from building games that launch initially on Mobile platforms. We haven’t seen evidence of this community-building behavior on Mobile in any meaningful quantity yet.
- EG: Match 3 likely can’t attract these crucial, early players.
PILLAR 3: Multiplayer
The game needs to be multiplayer. Multiplayer’s network effects make community-building 5000x easier. This also lets us utilize all of our awesome tooling and build something that many studios cannot lift technically.
PILLAR 4: Exciting and Efficient Updates
Does this game concept naturally lend itself to content-efficient, exciting updates? The best tool for growing a game community is regular, high-quality updates. Can this game concept be updated in this manner?
- EG: MOBAs have natural and highly developer efficient “content vectors”: new heroes and balance changes.
PILLAR 5: Team Excitement Fit
Is everyone on the team excited to build this game? Excited people build exciting games. If your game isn’t exciting it’s not worth building. ALERT ALERT: AS A SMALL TEAM YOU CANNOT IGNORE THIS PILLAR NO MATTER HOW “OPTIMAL” AN IDEA IS IN OTHER AREAS.
- EG: Imagine my surprise when my colleagues weren’t excited to build my cat-themed, narrative-heavy, knitting simulator.
PILLAR 6: Team Capability Fit
Can we build this? Does our team have the technology and skillsets to execute on this?
- EG: Let's not build an MMO as a small studio
Implementing A Plan
With the rubric created, we started with solo pitches from the team. The goal here wasn’t to find a perfect game. I needed to get people creatively loose and share information on what in the gaming market was exciting them. Our team is full of super-smart passionate people. Their opinions are valuable. What genres does Josh the engineer love to play? Why? What types of games does Richard the marketing guy think he can growth hack the shit out of?
Each member of the team, regardless of role, was required to present a 2-page game pitch every 2 days. Presentations lasted 15 minutes with 15 minutes of discussion afterwards. Post-presentation, pitches were anonymously rated by each team member based on how good of an idea they thought it was and how much they wanted to build the game in question. We then moved onto duo pitches. Twice a week two random team members were paired up and they had to create a 30-minute pitch for the team. The goal here was to pair team members with different roles and make them truly understand each other’s viewpoint. Here is a link to the templates we used for both the solo and duo parts of the pitch process: Windwalk Pitch Template.
Finally armed with a pile of highly rated pitches, we passed the most promising 5 pitches off to Richard and Shi, our growth guys. They spent a week digging up as much market information as they could about the genres and verticals we were honing in on. How could we make an argument for a pitch being a “community-based game blue ocean”? Which projects lined up with the tailwinds we have identified as a studio? Who are the big incumbents for each area? Armed with all of this information, my co-founders ran everything by our rubric. It didn’t take long to find a particularly compelling, high-leverage place to start prototyping.
I can’t wait to share with you how we are structuring our team and tackling prototyping in the next post. Subscribe below if you want me to ping you when that's ready.
