The 5 Stages of Greenlight: How to Know When It's Time to Launch Your Game

Fostering creative freedom is paramount to successful game development, but spending too much time in the blue-sky phase can create challenges. It’s a problem that we at Hothead Games fell victim to after securing the mobile licensing rights to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” 

Inspired by the film and TV series, our creative team started by developing high-polish cutscenes that explored the IP from a narrative angle. With significant resources invested into these premium assets, we tried to retrofit a paywall-based economy but quickly realized it would frustrate players and wouldn’t monetize well given how easy it is to capture and share paid content on platforms like YouTube. The project was cancelled, though we recognized that it was due to our flawed production practices that let us put the cart before the horse.

Our solution has been to outline a five-step, gated greenlight process that governs the development of every game we make. While we like to stay heads-down as we move through each phase, every gate is an opportunity to critically reflect on the creative and commercial implications of the project. If it comes time to advance to the next stage and things don’t look promising, we kill the project and start again. Here’s the process we’ve found works best for us:

Stage 1: Strategy
The first step in developing any idea is a thorough analysis of the competitive landscape to determine whether or not anything similar has already been done. If so, can we do it better? On the design side, we outline positive and negative customer personas with special attention paid to spending and engagement habits. Is our ideal customer a hardcore player, or are we appealing to a casual audience? Both come with very different KPIs that impact the game’s virtual economy, which we also address in this phase. For creative professionals, research can feel like a waste of their talents, but knowing what your finished product will be competing against pays dividends. With our homework done and a best-case scenario clearly defined, the project moves through to gate number two.

Stage 2: Pre-Production
With target personas defined, our creative team starts to explore different art styles. Generally speaking artists enjoy greater creative flexibility the further we get from the casual market, which requires greater use of primary colors and basic character designs to appeal to as many players as possible. If we’re targeting a niche audience, we’ll try styles ranging from cartoonish abstraction to photorealism. We also take this time to flesh out a high-level proof-of-concept that demonstrates the game’s core loop. If our core team finds that the simulated version is fun enough, we move on.

Stage 3: Prototyping
This is when we turn our proof-of-concept into a functioning prototype. While the majority of the game remains white boxed, we start to combine select concept art with enough basic code that we can deploy builds internally and explore primary mechanics. Our designers organize playtesting sessions and start gathering qualitative and quantitative feedback that gets analyzed for trends. We digest the findings and incorporate all actionable insights into the next build, repeating the process as many times as possible. This way, we’re able to catch low-hanging fruit early and decide whether or not the game’s worth sticking with.

Stage 4: Production
By now we’ve validated core mechanics with internal playtests and the game is starting to take shape. Our producers establish monthly milestones and regularly measure development progress against that schedule. Making it this far means that we’re confident in the game’s core design and we’re willing risk significant resources developing the bulk of its assets in order to produce a minimum viable product that can be released in select regions for a highly monitored soft launch. Even this late in development, a project can get spiked if we’re unable to hit deadlines. If all goes well, we ship the MVP and move into the final and most brutal stage of our greenlight process: soft launch.

Stage 5: Soft Launch
This is when we dive into the wonderful world of monetization acronyms. We set concrete goals in advance, and assuming we get feature support from our distribution platforms, we’ll pull in enough users to get a solid feel for the game’s performance within the first forty-eight hours. We check retention, conversion, ARPU, ARPPU, and more every day in order to make long term revenue predictions and decide whether or not the game is worth supporting. We give every title enough runway time to hone our first time user experience, A/B test new features, and address any problems our analytics reveal. If the metrics look good after an adequate time in soft launch, we’ll go global and start supporting the title with liveops and in-game marketing.

Order From Chaos
At Hothead, we’ve been successfully making games for more than six years. As we’ve evolved, we’ve come to embrace structure. Our greenlight process brings a sense of order to the fast-paced mobile market. It prevents wasted resources and helps the whole team feel more in touch with their industry. Whether you’re a small shop or a growing studio, we suggest instituting your own greenlight process. Setting up these kinds of boundaries is a great way to stimulate creativity and ensure that you and your team continue to produce the best games you’re capable of.  Our continued success is in part because of this amazing process.