Part 8: The Game Design Business

If it’s a thing worth trying, you should be a little afraid.

—SAMUEL R. DELANEY, BABEL-17

Game design rarely happens in a vacuum. Even the hobbyist game maker who releases her work for free online must decide if work on a game is worth the time and effort she will put into it. More often than not, a game’s creators hope to recoup the time and resources and turn a profit that they can then use to finance their next project. When game teams involve full-time workers who need to be paid, offices with rent and bills, and distribution channels that require certain financial objectives to be met, the business end increases in importance.

Designers can pretend to be “above” the discussion of dollars and cents. Many claim that because what they do is art, it cannot be contaminated by the base concerns of finance. This attitude is the equivalent of burying one’s head in the sand. Whether a designer admits it or not, every design decision has the possibility of affecting the bottom line. And the bottom line affects whether or not you get to continue to design games. Given the low probability that any individual game will make its money back, a small percentage of games must cover the costs for all of a studio’s work. Designer Dan Cook estimates that a successful game might need to make more than 10 times the average cost of making a game to keep a studio afloat (www.lostgarden.com/2015/04/minimum-sustainable-success.html).

For a designer or team not to do everything they can to ensure their work is financially successful is akin to fiddling while Rome burns. Unless the design makes the work sustainable, there will not be much more work to be had. With the vast volume of games competing for player dollars, the days when a team could just make something and rely on someone else or “the market” to find and reward them are long gone (if that time ever existed at all). The designer and the team must be acutely aware of the market considerations of what they do.

As the business landscape of games constantly changes, there are not a lot of timeless lessons that can be related. However, a few topics are relevant regardless of the current business conditions.