Bitter experience of creating a gaming company

It may sound strange, but to create a business it is not enough just investment and enthusiasm. In this article I will provide some useful tips for the development of the project, which were given to me through bitter experience.

This story is about a passionate dream with a sad ending.

In the summer of 2012, I decided to surrender to my most important passion - the creation of computer games. I had the funds, and I thought that I had everything I needed to create a game development campaign.
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We decided to call it “Supersonic Parachute”.

I will not go into details, but I will indicate the most important reasons that led us to failure.







It all started pretty well. With a budget of 100,000 euros (140,000 dollars at the time), we started creating the first game.

I decided to focus on the new gaming platform - the iPad. When we worked on the first game, we wanted to create something that our children would like to play. And after about 6 months, the game “Starkey and Peggy” appeared.

Everything was as I wanted. The gameplay was great, we also paid a lot of attention to playable characters and beautiful landscapes.

She became my kids' favorite game.

Starkey and peggy

So what went wrong? No one knew. We absolutely did not have sales in Appstore, only three copies of the game were sold per month. From the start of its launch in 2013, we managed to raise only $ 100, while its creation took $ 30,000.

Lesson # 1: Do not create games for markets you know little about.

Although I am a gamer, it does not mean that I am familiar with the market. We did not have a market strategy.

But at the time, we thought that the reason for the failure was not a well-made game. Since then, our ambitions have only increased. We started creating two games in parallel. I had to transfer more responsibility to my colleagues, since I needed to manage our main (network) business, which financed our activities.

Lesson # 2: Never let a team without experience work on two ambitious projects at once. They will not cope with this.

Dungeon attack

It was supposed to be a mixture of RPG and strategy with real-time combat elements. And this task was assigned to a team that has never created a successful game in any of these genres.















Lesson number 3: When you start work, start small, with what you can handle. Or you will fail.

Max bug buster

3D shooter in which the player plays the mouse, living in the house of a mad scientist. She has to shoot from the hordes of oncoming creatures, armed with deadly weapons. At the same time, at first it was assumed that this would be a paper airplane simulator, do I still need to continue?

























Lesson # 4: Abrupt shifts are permissible, but remember that, at least, the game genre should remain the same. If you decide to change it in the course of work, then, most likely, you will face a fiasco.

We failed to bring a single game to the end before we ran out of money. The work was still in bulk, and we did not create a market entry strategy. I decided to name the amount spent. We spent about 120,000 euros (170,000 dollars at the time) on one game released, a bunch of code that we will never use again and a beautiful graphic design.

Looking back, I understand that most of the mistakes could have been avoided if I had created a clear work plan and had been a strong leader for my colleagues. But this was not, and therefore, only money and my passion for games could not help in achieving the goal.

Lesson # 5: Creating games and companies that develop them requires outstanding leadership. If you hope to succeed without devoting all your time to the project, then you will find a fiasco.

For some reason, I believed that my team would cope with the work without me, so at that time I was engaged in what seemed to me the most important issue - money.

Lesson # 6: You can’t trust a project to a team that has no experience. Most likely, it will not cope with the work, and you will lose a lot of money, while not realizing at what point everything went awry.

However, when I recall all this, the only thing I regret is that everything could be different if I knew how to do it right. Until now, that period of my life is associated with pleasant moments that could happen only among enthusiasts working on a new project. We solved a lot of difficult problems, created amazing technologies and graphic images, and thanks to teamwork we found new solutions. It is a pity that we did not achieve success, although there were a lot of talented people among us who could succeed in this matter. Perhaps I will come back to this some time in the future, if the flame of my dream burns as well.

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