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.
Preferences of strategy players
Looking at the survey data and trying to find something useful.
Recently I've conducted a survey about the preferences of strategy players.
In the previous post, we cleaned up the data, and in this one, we will try to find insights within it.
In this post you will find an interactive dashboard with a bunch of charts, where you can compare two samples of your choice. There are many samples — for every taste and color, so feel free to explore and share the patterns you find on Telegram and Discord.
But be careful with conclusions. There is little data, in some cases very little. For example, the difference between the sample sizes of male and female respondents is about tenfold => you should be very careful in interpreting the differences between them.
In general, do not take this post as a full-fledged study. I'm sure many analysts would have torn my hands off for such a thing. Then sewed them back and torn them off again :-D Use the post as an interface to the data, and make your own conclusions.
Cleaning up the results of the strategy players survey
The survey was targeted at the fans of strategy games. It seems, I was able to find audience quite accurately.
Recently I asked you to fill in a survey about strategy games.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to do this. It's time to share the results.
363 respondents filled in the survey. 304 answers remained after data normalization and cleaning.
There will be two posts:
- This one — about the methodology of data collection and processing, and their cleaning. Cleaned data will be shared.
- The next one — about the analysis of the results.