From a publisher’s point of view, one of the most common patterns we see—especially in game projects—is teams spending valuable time on good ideas, when that same effort could have gone into great, player-impacting decisions.
This usually doesn’t come from lack of talent. It comes from a few familiar gaps:
- Teams are deeply invested in the craft, but less exposed to player and market signals
- The target player experience isn’t fully aligned across design, tech, and production
- Communication between developers, publishers, and stakeholders becomes fragmented
- Development energy shifts toward what’s interesting to build rather than what’s valuable to ship
- The project slowly turns into a passion-driven exercise instead of a commercially viable game
To help structure these conversations, we often encourage teams to use a guiding checklist during planning and review sessions—before committing to new features, systems, live-ops ideas, or major technical work.
This checklist isn’t about control. It’s about clarity.
Typical questions we expect teams to be able to answer include:
- Is this feature essential for the player, or just a nice-to-have?
- How does it impact retention, engagement, or monetization?
- Does it meaningfully improve game feel or core loop?
- What are the design and technical risks?
- Is the scope appropriate for the current stage of the project?
- Should this be built in-house, or sourced via assets, plugins, or middleware?
- Could this become a distinctive strength of the game or studio?
- Is the expected ROI proportional to the effort?
- Is there a simpler workaround that achieves the same outcome?
- And given everything else, where does this sit in the priority list?
The purpose of this checklist is not to decide for the team what to build.
The purpose is to make sure:
- The reasoning is solid
- Assumptions are explicit
- Trade-offs are understood
- And the right conversations happen before time and budget are spent
Thanks for building with intent.