Author: Elias Sandler,
CEO at Kinoa
Very often, young entrepreneurs on their way to build their dream studio set themselves ambitious goals: Build a great game and take all of their learnings from their previous jobs at these gaming conglomerates to help them grow the same way that their previous employers did.
Usually, these gaming entrepreneurs were part of Product, Engineering or Monetization teams, and they see all the tools that they had at their disposal to grow. So when they go to build their own gaming startup, these founders raise a bit of money to get off the ground and start building the game.
At some point during the launch phase, usually during or right after the soft launch of the game, these entrepreneurs are faced with the decision of what needs to happen in order to be able to operate their games the way they experienced in their previous jobs. And this is where so many gaming companies are failing.
There is this very old school misconception that building all these tools internally will somehow create this layer of value to the company that exponentially grows with time. And the main difference with the ecosystem today, is that the great gaming companies are focusing precisely on that, building great games.
If you look at all the public gaming companies in the market today, there is no share price markup for having built or bought the technology they use to manage and operate their games. So the same faith goes to all the startups climbing up the charts’ ladders. Gaming companies need to be focusing on building great games and great experiences for their users. They need to take the scarce development resources that they have, and they should be investing them all in building the core game loop, meta features, and core features of the game. And as the company grows, keep focusing on continuously delivering high quality content for their users.
There are good companies out there (like Kinoa) helping gaming studios avoid spending millions of dollars into building dedicated engines that will, at the end of the day, represent what Jeff Bezos coined as “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. Learn the balance between what you absolutely need as a dedicated service for your game VS one that you can take off the shelf and use its capabilities to catapult you to where you want to be to grow your game.
As you are building your game, don’t become another statistic on your way to the gaming companies’ graveyard. The world has moved to a place where tools in the market that are built to help you fulfill your goals could be the difference between your ultimate success and the quickest way to resource depletion and the subsequent closure of the studio.
