An inward look at the optimism bias I experienced when developing a game, the effect it can have when the game doesn't do so well and some potential strategies for dealing with it.
So, I released a game. I worked hard on it and it didn’t sell. Sound familiar?
This type of story has been getting more and more frequent as the number of ratio of games to player base is only going up. You know this, everyone knows this, I knew this but even as I was knee deep in code, pixelling my not so little ass off I had this feeling that ‘It won’t happen to me’ there are enough players out there on Steam that aren’t sick to death of pixel platformers. This has a name, it’s called Optimism Bias. Optimism Bias manifests in a number of forms, from the smoker who believes that he won’t get lung cancer or the person who doesn’t take out insurance because they think they are a good driver and everyone else is rubbish.
Looking back there was a number if signs, people rarely come out and give you brutally honest feedback but I doubt I would have done anything about it and just kept on my merry way.
Is this a bad thing when it comes to making a game? I’m still not sure about this, without it I doubt I would have made the game in the first place but on the other hand, the come down after finally releasing would have been a lot easier.
I’ve since learnt some simple strategies to try and combat optimism bias and be realistic about what the potential that another game would do well. These came about when reading ‘Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive’ By Charles Duhigg. Charles talks about some of the strategies he employed when evaluating whether or not to take on a TV show. He tries to quantify each of the possible futures and the odds of achieving any one of the outcomes.
How can this help with game development? I don’t have all the answers here, but I’ve been trawling through any postmortems, any sales figures for similar games that are equivalent to what I’m able to produce.
Now using this information write down some possible futures, their probabilities and try to gauge the effort involved in the each of the entries on your list.
For example some possible futures that I came up with:
Just watch Netflix – no effort, no rewards (well entertainment I guess), probability of achieving this outcome 100%
Release a non steam game done in spare time – low risk, medium effort, low financial investment, good learning, 0-100 sales, probability of achieving this outcome 95%
Release a game on steam done in spare time – low risk, high effort, low-medium financial investment, good learning, 1000-10000 sales, probability of achieving this outcome 20%
Release a game on steam quit job and go full time – high risk, high effort, high financial investment, good learning, 50000+ sales, probability of achieving this outcome 5%
These numbers may all just be bullshit, but the act of researching and thinking about the outcomes is the key thing here.
So if you take anything out of this article, seek out failed postmortems along with the good ones. Try gauge the possible outcomes and think about what you might get out of each of them.
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