Preparing a business plan for a game on Steam

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 hope witty remarks.

All the final documents can be found here.

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Review of the book "The Signal and the Noise"

Nate Silver — the author of "The Signal and the Noise" — is widely known for his successful forecasts, such as the US elections. It is not surprising that the book became a bestseller.

As you might guess, the book is about forecasts. More precisely, it is about approaches to forecasting, complexities, errors, misconceptions, and so on.

As usual, I expected a more theoretical approach, in the spirit of Scale [ru], but the author chose a different path and presented his ideas through the analysis of practical cases: one case per chapter. Each chapter describes a significant task, such as weather forecasting, and provides several prisms for looking at building forecasts. This certainly makes the material more accessible, but personally, I would like more systematics and theory.

Because of the case studies approach, it isn't easy to make a brief summary of the book. It is possible, and it would even be interesting to try, but the amount of work is too large — the author did not intend to provide a coherent system or a short set of basic theses.

Therefore, I will review the book as a whole, provide an approximate list of prisms, and list some cool facts.

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