The Most Common Game Dev Delusions

push to talk #32 // the sweet lies we all tell ourselves, whether you're an indie upstart or an industry titan

Occasionally a game comes along and succeeds in ways so astonishing that it sets a new upper limit on what seems possible. Stardew Valley made a whole generation of game devs think, “what if that could be me?”

There’s an oppressive air of uncertainty in the games industry right now.

You can feel it especially when you talk to teams preparing to launch new titles. When I grab drinks with industry friends—whether it’s a solo indie or a grizzled industry vet—I keep hearing the same thing:

I feel like I’m doing all the right things. But I don’t know if this is going to work.

That’s how the conversation starts. But then you get to the spicy part.

Which is: everybody loves to talk about the “obvious” mistakes other devs have made with their launches. We can admit this, right? We all love picking apart the reasons a game flopped. We chuckle knowingly and say “what were they thinking!” while knowing on some level we’re just as vulnerable.

One guy, an industry legend whose games I’ve been playing since high school, expressed this perfectly. He was talking about the game he’s getting ready to launch, and he said: I’m pretty sure we’re at least not doing anything stupid.

And this kinda got me thinking. So much of the marketing advice you see for games online is about what you should do. How to approach influencer strategy, positioning, trailers, your Steam page, and on and on. And all this is valuable.

But what are the biggest mistakes you can make as a game dev—the blunders that are easy to miss when you’re working really closely on something, but that feel obvious, at least retrospectively, to outside observers? Wouldn’t it be useful to name and label these mistakes, so people know what to watch out for?

And maybe more pertinently, how do those mistakes differ at various scales of game dev: from small indies up through AAA industry titans?

So for today’s essay I’ve put together a list of mistakes, traps, and even (if it’s not too harsh of a word) delusions¹ that have given me trouble in my games marketing career, and that I’ve seen troubling other devs as well.

In an attempt to keep myself out of even more trouble, I’m mostly avoiding naming any particular studios or giving specific examples in this post.

So let’s kick it off, starting with the smallest teams.

Solo Devs and Small Indies (1–5 Headcount)

Most Common Delusion:
My first game will be a masterpiece.

Exception to the rule: Stardew Valley dev Eric Barone. God, I wish I was him.

If you lurk around game dev subreddits long enough, you’ll see dozens of posts that read something like: “After 7 years of work, I’m finally ready to release my first game!”

You ought to get nervous when you see that. Because 9/10 times, you click the post to see more and:

• The art style’s weak (usually it’s a non-artist solo dev doing it all themselves)

• The game mechanics are incomprehensible (because the dev spent half a decade iterating themselves into a corner)

• Important polish elements like UX/menus look outdated or just busted

The reason this happens is that—past a certain point—the length of time spent on a project doesn’t correlate with better quality. Usually it just means you got lost down a bunch of rabbit holes and had to keep restarting.

Worse, spending years on a single game without shipping means you’re not learning as quickly as you could be. And if you’re not learning and improving rapidly, you’re less likely to ship something that’s competitive on any really meaningful axis like visual style, mechanical depth, or conceptual originality.

Many successful solo devs or small indie teams will tell you that completing and shipping lots of smaller games dramatically increases your learning rate.

Derek Yu, the creator of Spelunky, put this best:

"Finishing games gets easier with each game you finish, and the more games you finish, the better you will understand what it takes to make a successful game."

—Derek Yu in Indie Game Dev: Death Loops

So if you’re a solo dev, your first couple of games should only take you a couple of months to make. Maybe three. Then, once you’ve learned how to scope a project and deliver, you can allow yourself to spend six months on something.

As you’re learning, you’ll start to get more ambitious. But your goal is still to find an audience and ship multiple games they love. Only then will you have a real chance at shipping something like a breakout hit.

That’s almost certainly not going to happen until you’ve shipped a few duds.

Derek Yu didn’t have a widely-known hit until his 6th game, Aquaria. His 7th was Spelunky. He and half a dozen collaborators are now working on UFO 50, a collection of 50 original games—a project so ridiculous in scope that only someone like Yu could ever be trusted to finish it.

No matter how good you think you are at making games, you are not yet as capable as you will be after finishing and shipping half a dozen well-scoped games.

And of course there are exceptions to this rule. But you can count them on one hand. Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone does exist, but we are not him.

So start smaller.

Sidebar: The FAST FAST LASER LASER Story

Here’s some deep personal lore for you: A story about the risks of putting too much pressure on yourself to succeed with your first game.

Almost no one—including people I’ve worked with for years—knows this about me, but back in college I founded a games studio.

My best friend from childhood and I assembled a small team of college buddies and online collaborators, somehow convinced our hometown dentist to fund us, and—over the course of maybe 18 months—shipped two indie games which both flopped horrendously.²

The first was an Xbox Live Indie Games title called FAST FAST LASER LASER. It was a 4-player local multiplayer game, kind of like old-school Bomberman, except with lasers and lightsabers.

This is what it looked like:

When I look at this now, 12 years later, it’s obvious we had no shot. But at the time, we were dreaming big. We honestly thought that if we could just get a bunch of people to be aware of the masterpiece we’d made, we might sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

The hard truth is, even if we’d shipped a much better game, our plan had fundamental mistakes that made success unlikely. Almost no game on XBLIG sold well, partly because it was flooded with goofy student projects like ours. And there has never been high demand for local multiplayer games. I also had no real plan for making people aware of the game’s existence. All of this worked against us.

But even disregarding the marketing issues, the game just wasn’t good enough. Of course it wasn’t. It was our first game!

There were plenty of signs this was the case before the launch.

Publishers weren’t interested in picking it up—though we asked! Press didn’t care—though we pitched it! And most importantly, players weren’t drawn to the game, because it just wasn’t as compelling as we thought it was. We were amateurs.

The second game we launched went pretty similarly. It was an iOS-only high-score puzzler called Orb Combat Simulator 2019 (we released in 2013, and the running joke in all our marketing copy was that it was a very successful puzzle game from the future). As far as I can tell all evidence of its existence was deleted from the internet when I stopped paying my annual App Store developer fee and GoDaddy bills for our studio’s website.

At the time, this experience felt like a pure failure. The dream of becoming a game dev crushed. But the lessons learned from shipping those games mattered, in part by showing me how much I didn’t know.

That sparked a curiosity about marketing and game dev that I’ve been chasing and feeding ever since.³

Now let’s scale things up a bit.⁴

Startups and Indie Studios (6–60ish Headcount)

Most Common Delusion:
If we can just get influencers to play, we’ll go viral.

Conventional game dev wisdom is that Among Us is a game that “popped off” because of influencers. But recently Innersloth CEO Forest Willard did a very interesting interview that complicates that simplistic narrative.

You just gotta get the streamers playing, man!

A huge portion of the global games industry suffered from this collective delusion for a few years. Both big studios and small ones. I think it really accelerated with the streamer-heavy “Beyoncé drop” of Apex Legends in 2019, and shifted up a gear after the creator-led revival of Among Us in 2020.

Suddenly, every exec was walking around yelling what’s our influencer strategy?

The core insight wasn’t wrong—in the new internet creators really do matter for getting the word out about your game.⁵ But at some point that insight got twisted into a dank blend of hopium that everybody was huffing. The belief wasn’t creators matter. It was nothing else matters. IF WE GET NINJA TO PLAY WE’RE GONNA MOON!! 🚀🚀🚀

And that was always crazy. I think a lot of the industry has broken free from the spell at this point and adopted a more rational stance of “no such thing as a silver bullet.” But for smaller teams with relatively limited marketing budgets, there’s always a really strong temptation to think there might be a miracle “pop off” moment for your game, if the stars align just right.

If fine to hope. But the danger comes when you start to really believe it.

That kind of delusion can lead you to slip up and make avoidable mistakes, like failing to create an original go-to-market plan. Instead, just put your game out there, try to copy all the best practices that other studios have employed, and hope for the best. “It’s all luck in the end!” you tell yourself.

That’s a dangerous way to think. Because it means you might start to abdicate responsibility for choices that can drastically impact your go-to-market. And so you start making mistakes.

Some examples of mistakes I’ve seen impacting studios at this scale:

1 ) Failing to predict your first 100–1,000 Steam reviews

Launching with a mixed or negative review average on Steam can be deadly for your future prospects, and is entirely preventable if you hold large-scale playtests before launch and listen to what those players say.

There are really no exceptions to this rule: If you’re a midsize studio you have to know what your first 1,000 Steam reviews will say, or you’ve failed the basic test of understanding your audience.

If you can’t attract thousands of playtesters before launch to validate your assumptions, that’s a sign you aren’t going to have players at launch either. And if you’re doing large-scale playtests, assume that what you’re hearing is 50% nicer than what Steam reviewers will say and adjust accordingly.

2) Betting the house on game #1

This one’s similar to the delusion that most commonly affects smaller devs, as covered above. There are studios out there with exactly one bullet in the gun, no backup plan, and eight years of runway burned. It could work, but the odds are not great.

3) Self-limiting genre and visual style

You generally shouldn’t make pixel art RPGs unless you’re a famous Japanese game dev or Toby Fox. There are plenty of other limiting genres and visual styles, but you’ll have to DM to get those opinions out of me.

4) Assuming players care that your co-founders worked on their favorite game from 2007

They do not.

5) Blindly launching as free-to-play

There are cases where launching as F2P makes sense, but plenty where it doesn’t. If you’re on mobile and have traction is Asia, it might work. But if you’re making a PC or console game in a relatively niche genre and don’t have a realistic way to succeed in regions where F2P dominates… it’s hard to justify.

For some studios, the F2P thing is so baked into the culture and history that teams are defaulting to F2P in cases where it doesn’t make sense. A lot of game dev brains are just running on 2019-era firmware when it comes to this issue, despite the fact that very few Western devs have successfully launched a new F2P game in the last five years.⁶

Perennial sellers exist. $30–$60 games that sell 10,000 copies every week for years on end exist. You can make hundreds of millions of dollars with a paid game. And you can then take that game free-to-play at literally any point down the road. There are other options. None of them guarantee success, but you’ve got to weigh them properly.

What do these five mistakes have to do with influencers?

Of course you can make any of the mistakes above without having ever specifically fallen for the “maybe we’ll pop off because of influencers” delusion. But the point is that magical thinking and hopium can dramatically affect your go-to-market planning, particularly for midsize studios that have to count on some amount of highly unpredictable organic pickup for their games.

Thinking “we’ll pop off because Northernlion loves us” is not a marketing plan for the same reason that thinking “we’ll pop off because we’re former leads at BIG-GAME-STUDIO” is not a marketing plan. In either case, you risk failing to make an original and well thought-out GTM strategy because you’re hoping for a silver bullet.

AAA / Major Studios (80–??? Headcount)

Most Common Delusion:
Players care about our brand.

Blizzard’s miracle run in the 2010s defined the way game developers think about brand.

Alright, here’s the section that’s going to get me in trouble. I think widespread games industry obsession with building a shiny studio brand has led otherwise great companies to make a bunch of goofy decisions.

First we’ve gotta tease apart the idea of “brand” and what it means to people generally in the games industry.

What Brand Is

It’s really hard to talk about brand as a concept because so much of the terminology around it is nebulous. It’s a tangled network of poorly-defined ideas that impacts everything from your company’s ability to hire great talent to the abstract things people associate with your logo.

There are some concrete ways of defining its value. Data insights people love to do these surveys where they ask “How likely are you to play [X GENRE OF GAME] if it’s made by [Y STUDIO]?” If you run surveys like this at sufficient scale, you’ll notice that some game studios get much more positive responses than others. It’s quantifiable. You can put it on a chart.

But there are other, more ethereal aspects of brand—things that you know matter even though they’re almost impossible to define.

The specific part of brand that’s most troublesome for me is the status and ego aspect. I don’t know what brand marketers are actually calling this part these days, so I’ll just give an illustrative example.

Aside from Nintendo, one of the strongest brands the game industry has ever seen is Blizzard, particularly during the late 2000s–2010s era when they were on a ridiculous hot streak of releases like Starcraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Overwatch. It was an insane run—the kind no studio could keep up forever.

Around that time period I heard this exact quote from other game devs probably 50 times:

“When people think of Blizzard, they think quality. They know whatever Blizzard ships, it’s gonna be good. It’s gonna be polished.”

Part of this is just “brand reputation” which you can in theory quantify in a bunch of different ways. But if you could have seen the way people looked when they talked about Blizzard—the faraway look in their eye—you could see there was something else going on too. It was inspiring for game devs, and players to. They’d go to Blizzcon, buy the merch, and stand and cheer. For game developers!

That’s so intoxicating for a creative person. You want to make things that people cheer for. You want to work at a place with a reputation for quality.

This stuff matters!

BUT—

Players are fickle, and reputations are fragile. One bad launch or one poorly worded announcement can flip the narrative. The same venues where players once gathered to celebrate your creations can turn into a nightmare realm that people use to grandstand and roast you. I’m not gonna link the clips. You know the clips I’m referring to.

That’s the dark side of brand identity. The bigger your brand gets, the more there is to lose.

The good news is, if you lose it you can earn it back by getting your shit together and shipping great games. And if you do that, players will show up again, because that’s all they ever really cared about in the first place. Their love was always for the games—touting the brand was just a way of expressing that. For them, the brand was never the point.

So if you keep your talented team together and ship great games, you can win those people back. The most obsessed, loudest haters never stop hating, of course, but even they’ll show up with cash in hand if you’re shipping bangers. And the brand reputation will follow.

One example: We’ve all seen how EA gets talked about on Reddit. But does that actually matter? Look at the numbers College Football 25 just posted. Hell, look at what happened when EA broke with FIFA and released a totally rebranded EA SPORTS FC 24. It was 2023’s best-selling video game in the UK. They flushed a decades-old brand down the drain and came out looking like geniuses. It was bold. And it worked!

In some ways, EA is a weird example to use to prove this point, because the brand equity EA has built over decades helped them sell millions of copies of these games. People bought CFB 25 in part because of fond memories of the old EA SPORTS NCAA series from a decade ago. The EA brand is, clearly, enormously valuable.

That’s why I’m trying to walk a tightrope here. I’d never say brand doesn’t matter. But there’s a real risk of obsessing too much about the status and ego part of brand identity. It comes with downsides. It can make you fearful.

When a brand starts taking punches online, people who’ve made that brand part of their identities can feel actual, physical pain. If you’re proud to work at STUDIOX and you proudly display that brand name in your online bios or (God forbid) in your display name, attacks on it feel like attacks on you. Your ego. You start to feel like you need to get back that feeling you had when you were loved.

And so what do you do? You overcompensate. You start thinking “our next game has to be our biggest and best one yet.” And a vicious cycle kicks in:

• You hire a ton more people so you can deliver on a grand vision that’ll win back your reputation and prove the haters wrong.

• Except then scope creep kicks in, and you start failing to hit milestones on time. But it’s okay because the next game is gonna be so great.

• Then the culture and efficiency of your team changes because you added so many new people, and weirdly it feels like you’re not making games any faster or better than before despite doubling headcount.

• And now you’re three years in and the game is still years away, and the budget has ballooned out of control because of the headcount and long dev cycle, and so you really need this game to hit it big when it comes out because otherwise the studio’s survival might be on the line.

The pressure ratchets up. It gets harder. You start to wonder why you’re even in this industry. And maybe the game finally drops after seven years and it does amazingly, but then what are you gonna do? Another decade-long tour of duty to ship one game?

It’s not healthy. It’s how you get burnt out.

Coda: In Defense of Delusions

The commonly-understood definition of a delusion is something like “a false belief that you hold because you’re out of touch with reality.” But there’s a lot of psychological literature about delusions that argues they serve a purpose. In part, they’re your brain’s way of helping you deal with situations that otherwise might be unbearable.⁷

For indies and solo devs — Don’t you kind of have to believe that your first game is going to have a chance at success? Otherwise it’s too hard to stay motivated enough to spend months and months working on it. Believing your first game might be the next Stardew Valley gives you the strength to make it to the next stage of your journey.

For startups and small studios — The unpredictability of the game’s market is felt as an enormous burden. You and all your teammates pour your hearts into something for years, and you have no idea whether it will reach players. In that situation, you’re naturally going to entertain fantasies of amazing breakout success and overnight virality. You cling to the examples of games that seemed to prove it’s possible, because they give you hope.

For larger games studios — There’s something a little soul-crushing about working at a place with hundreds or thousands of people. You think How can what I’m doing really matter? How can I make a real difference? And so you’re drawn to the group identity. It’s powerful, and popular. You adopt it and incorporate it into your own identity, which creates a sense of belonging.

And sometimes, let’s be honest, being a little delusional works.

This is something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about ever since I did a deep dive into No Man’s Sky and the way they recovered from their botched launch. That game went from being DOA to grossing hundreds of millions of dollars.

To some extent, what Hello Games did with that game was delusional. There was really no reason to think that shipping free updates to a widely panned game would work out. But they just did it anyway. They squashed their egos, ignored the haters, and started figuring out how to deliver real value for players.

And it paid off. Hello Games is respected. Beloved, even. That came entirely from the work they did on the game and the humble way they communicated about it.

That’s the real trouble with delusions. They’re often wrong. But sometimes pursuing them is a necessary act of faith.

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That’s it for this week. I’m gonna get started writing apology emails to all the brand managers in my life.

I’ll see you next Friday.

1. Scroll to the end of this essay for a weird part where I argue that maybe delusions are sometimes good and necessary.

2. I gave my dentist his money back and we’re still tight. He’s a cool guy.

3. The most ridiculous part of this story came when we submitted our business plan for our game studio to the University of Mississippi’s Gillespie Business Plan Competition and inexplicably won 1st place, which earned us free office space at an on-campus startup accelerator and a $4,000 cash prize. Sometimes I wonder whether my whole games marketing career since then has been subconsciously driven by a feeling that I’ve gotta launch some successful games to “earn” that vote of confidence we got from the Ole Miss biz school staff. Either way, Hotty Toddy.

4. BTW don’t pay that much attention to these headcount estimates in the section headers. Obviously a six-person indie studio and a 60-person VC-backed startup are two different beasts. But we’ve gotta draw the line somewhere and I’m trying not to say “AA” to describe these teams.

5. Content creators are like three or four different marketing channels rolled into one, which is partly why they seem so disproportionately important. Unlike press, they tend to promiscuously blend paid media and “earned” media activations. And buying an ad slot on a Mr. Beast video has more in common with traditional TV or radio ad spend than with paying a streamer to play your game for six hours. And they overlap in very confusing ways with “community” when you start cooking up things like partner programs. Look at what the apparel company Gymshark does with their “athletes” program for a good example. So it’s just an absolute mess of a “channel.”

6. There have been very few successful games by Western game devs that launched as free-to-play in the past five years. The big exceptions include VALORANT, Call of Duty: Warzone, Monopoly GO, Marvel Snap, Gorilla Tag, Super Auto Pets, and Wordle—the last of which counts because it made $1 mil by selling to the NYTimes (lol). Credit to Polygon’s Samit Sarkar for pointing that one out. There’s probably a dozen mobile games I’m missing (Stumble Guys, Match Factory, Squad Busters, etc.), and you could split hairs over paid games that later went F2P, but the numbers look terrible when you consider how many Western F2P games failed during that same window.

7. If you want to learn more about the psychology of delusions, you can fall down a real rabbit hole by reading the absolutely deranged book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber and some of the psychiatric commentary on it.