Preparing a business plan for a game on Steam
Earning millions is easier than ever. I'll tell you how :-D
When I posted my final presentation [ru] (slides) for World Builders 2023 (my posts, site), I promised to tell how I made a roadmap and a financial model for the game. So, here they are.
At the end of this post, we will have:
- A brief strategy of our company: what we do, how, and why.
- A table with our beacons — successful games roughly similar to what we want to make. Similar in gameplay, team size, budget, etc.
- A composition of the team we need to assemble.
- A roadmap — a development plan for our game.
- An outline of our marketing strategy.
- A financial model — how much we will spend, how much we will earn.
- A large number of my caveats throughout the post.
- Jokes and
I hopewitty remarks.
All the final documents can be found here.
«Slay The Princess» — combinatorial narrative
My favorite version of the Princess.
It's hard to impress me as a player and even harder as a game developer. The last time it happened with Owlcat Games in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, when they added a timer to the game's plot.
But Black Tabby Games managed to do it. And they did it not with some technological complexity but with a visual novel on a standard engine (RenPy), which is cool in itself.
I'll share a couple of thoughts about the game and its narrative structure, while I'm still under the impression. I need to think about how to adapt this approach to my projects.
ATTENTION: SPOILERS!
If you haven't played Slay The Princess yet, I strongly recommend you to catch up — the game takes 3-4 hours. You'll not regret it.
Two years of writing RFCs — statistics
Slightly more than two years ago, I became a Lead/Engineering Manager for Palta's payment team. I left the company at the end of 2023 for another sabbatical [ru].
It is time to sum up. I will start with my favorite initiative.
From the first month, I promoted the idea of preceding major changes with text documents — RFC — Request for Comments.
In this post, I will analyze two years of applying this practice to share the experience, summarize the results, and have convincing arguments for my next job.