Part one of How to Find Market Signal was about the history of games marketing and the need for a new approach. Today we get into the nitty gritty of how to find your vision and relevant signals in the early stages of game dev.
Here’s an argument. Maybe you’ll buy it, maybe you won’t: Finding market signal for a game is mostly about weeding out ideas and approaches that aren’t working.
I’ve been mulling this over since last week, when the former Game Director for Apex Legends, Chad Grenier, told me how he thinks about using metrics to guide game development.
He said: “Never design a game based on metrics. Design a game based on a vision the team is passionate about. Use metrics to learn where not to go, not where to go.”
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There’s so much wisdom in that, and it’s clarifying for the project of this essay series.
You can’t rely on market signals to determine your vision. You’ve gotta hold to a vision you believe in, pursuing it doggedly. But you must also be willing to adjust course along the way—in response to negative signals—to avoid big mistakes.
Market Signals as Traffic Lights
I’ve started to think of market signals as almost like a series of traffic lights that you pass through on the road to releasing a game. 🟢 Green lights (which are very rare) mean you’re crushing it—exceeding expectations. 🔴 Red lights (which are more common) mean there’s something that needs correcting.
Too often, you get 🟡 flashing yellows. What do these mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe that you need to proceed with caution.
Here’s an example. You’re a game developer running an early prototype playtest for a game with 40 random kids, and it goes something like this:
Signals when playtesting early prototypes
🔴 Nobody loves it
Usually this manifests as some people saying polite things but leaving the playtest as soon as they can. If you run a net promoter score survey and nobody gives you a 9 or a 10, you’ve basically scored a zero. This means you likely need to go back to the drawing board.
🟡 Some players stick around and give genuine feedback
What’s this? Players were engaged enough to give detailed notes? It’s possible you could polish this turd into something worth pursuing. Or maybe not! Hard to say.
🟢 Some players fall in love
This looks like people staying online and playing for hours past the official end of the playtest. People shouting with joy when they win. People asking if they can bring their friends to play with them right now.
Yellow and green lights both basically mean you’re clear to keep pursuing your vision and making improvements, though you need to have a clear idea of what you’re going to improve to turn the “meh” people into “hell yeah” people.
Let’s imagine you’ve gotten one of those rare green lights in your early prototype playtest, so you spend the next two months building out the game, adding content, improving the visuals, fixing bugs, tuning the controls. And then you host another playtest.
What would it mean, in this scenario, if you’re only able to get the same 40 kids to show up and playtest? And then this time, they still mostly say positive things, but they dislike some of the changes and don’t stick around to play as long. That’s a yellow at best—maybe even a red, if you aren’t able to figure out next steps in accordance with your vision.
At this stage, what you really need to be measuring is your ability to iterate successfully. That is, how quickly are you able to make positive changes to your game and ship a meaningfully better version to playtesters? Do you have a clear roadmap of changes ahead, or are you mostly reacting to feedback and trying to mitigate negative sentiment?
Signals when iterating between playtests
🔴 You fail to meaningfully improve the game every time
If players aren’t thrilled with what you’re doing—if their reaction to the latest build is the same (or worse) as their reaction to the previous one—you’ve likely got either a vision problem or an audience problem.
🟡 Players are happy with some changes, but dislike others
This can be a good sign, depending on your approach to testing. You might ship a half-baked system to playtesters just to validate a hypothesis, then actually make it good on the second pass. The key here is clarity of vision—you need to have a very clear idea of where you’re going next after each of these playtests. If not, you’re not at a yellow. You’re running a red.
🟢 Players love it and demand more
One of the best positive signals is when you have very engaged players that are imagining whole roadmaps of changes that are actually in line with your vision. That gives you a gameplan for the next playtest. Show up with those changes players want and more, then measure the difference.
I keep talking about vision. I probably need to step back for a second and explain what I mean.
The Importance of Testing Your Vision Early
Here’s the thing about your vision for your game: It might actually suck. It might be wrong, doomed, hopeless. To paraphrase that Chad Grenier quote from earlier, you can’t use market signals to determine your vision, but you have to be willing to kill or alter a vision if the market signals are telling you it has problems. You need to find these problems as early on in your development process as possible.
We’ve all seen game developers launching games that ran nothing but red lights throughout their whole development. They make it all the way to launch day just to get t-boned in the middle of an intersection when…
…the players don’t show up
…or if they do, they leave a bunch of negative reviews
…or some true believers turn out to support, but it turns out that they represented a tiny market niche, one too small to pay back the dev costs
This is the downside of having a vision you really believe in: the risk is that you tune out the world and miss a bunch of signals that you need to be making smarter decisions.
And this is happening at every level of the games industry: games from major publishers, games funded by platform holders, games with tens of millions of dollars in funding.
You’re already thinking about Concord, right? I’ve written about the troubled lead-up to Concord’s launch already but the thing that sticks out to me the most is the Open Beta playtest that Sony ran on Steam in July, barely a month before the game’s launch. Given the size of the marketing budget, the results were way under target:
Daily peak concurrent players during Concord’s Open Beta in July. The Source: SteamDB
A lot of devs I know were looking at this chart and debating whether Sony would even go forward with launching the game after this playtest. It was a powerful red light: unmistakably negative market signal. But it came too late in the development process. The physical game disks were almost certainly already printed and shipping to retailers. All they could do was hope the numbers were a fluke and pray like Carrie Underwood.
Putting the game’s vision to the test earlier could have made all the difference.
All Gas and No Brakes on Tiny Glade
Now, just for the sake of argument, let’s talk about the opposite end of the spectrum—a game with a vision so ridiculously strong that it earned green lights basically from conception to launch.
The first game that comes to mind for me is Tiny Glade. This was a game, made by only two people, with insanely positive market signal throughout its development. And it sold over 600,000 copies in its first month.
This is the type of early reaction on social media that the Tiny Glade devs were getting:
This level of obviously positive market signal is self-reinforcing.
It meant that they got invited to be a part of showcases like the Future Games Show, where their trailer was viewed by many more people.
It led to major websites and content creators picking up Tiny Glade, including the team at Digital Foundry, who posted a glowing review of the game’s visual tech:
Ultimately, due to the strong performance of their social media posts and their Steam demo, they got heavy featuring support on Steam. Tiny Glade is now basically guaranteed to sell at least a million lifetime units of this thing, and I honestly believe that most of that was baked in due to the strength of their vision for the game.
In interviews, creators Anastasia Opara and Tomasz Stachowiak talk repeatedly about how hard they worked to make every interaction feel intuitive and satisfying. They did lots of playtesting and sometimes went through six or more iterations on a feature before they felt it was right.
This is what a strong vision gives you. With a clear sense of direction in mind, you can figure out which signals you ought to be testing for.
In the case of Tiny Glade, they were going for something like:
Signals for Tiny Glade’s building tools
🔴 Players don’t love or immediately understand how to build
🟡 Players are happy with the building tools, but struggle with some nuances
🟢 Players feel that building is entirely intuitive
Think about the clarity this gave Opara and Stachowiak when playtesting. They weren’t just aimlessly hoping that players liked the game. They were testing for very specific aspects of a clear vision.
And then on top of that, they had the game’s broader positioning figured out very early. They knew they were making a cozy city builder.
Listen to how Opara talks about this:
“It was decided quite early during the prototyping phase to make Tiny Glade a cozy game. The inspiration came from me personally enjoying a lot of cozy games at the time and liking the direction where they were going. I played games like Townscaper, Unpacking, and A Little to the Left, and all of those games felt so different from regular games. They were very uplifting and kind experiences, and maybe at that time of my life, it was important to have something like that. The feeling that they gave you was very warm and sweet, almost reminding me a bit of the fuzzy warmth after watching a Ghibli movie.”
Is it any surprise, then, that the game looks as good as it does? Opara had a clear vision for the game’s overall aesthetic vibe, so she could measure her progress toward achieving it.
How to Find Your Vision
It is not possible to get clear market signal for a game if you don’t know what you are making, who you are making it for, and how it compares against other options on the market. If you’re missing any one of these three parts of the equation, you will launch blind.
And I’ve talked about playtesting a lot so far in this article, but that’s obviously not the only way to get signal.
You can do:
Market Research - Build up a detailed spreadsheet of similar games and gather data. How well does the median game in your genre sell? What are the outliers, and what do you think made them stand out? How will your thing stand out?
Competitive Analysis and Scope Planning - Self-assess how you’re likely to compete against the leading comps. What things will you do better than other games? Where will you merely meet the standard? Where are you okay falling short? How many “hours of interesting fun” are you planning to give players? And maybe most importantly, how many months are you going to give yourself to make this thing?
Positioning Exercises - Try testing your own ability to articulate what your game is and who it’s for. You should be able to discuss your target audience and how you’ll reach your first 1,000 players from the target audience (I wrote more about positioning here.)
The point of this is not to get caught in the weeds or chasing a genre that’s likely to make more money. It’s to clarify in your own mind what it is you’re trying to make and how it’s different from what’s already out there.
Publisher Pitch Deck Exercise
If you’re trying to figure out your positioning, one helpful exercise is to put together a publisher pitch deck, whether or not you actually intend to take your game to a publisher.
You need to be able to make a convincing case for why players will buy your game. Otherwise, how are you ever going to convince players to buy it?
You’re probably thinking, “but I don’t know how to make a publisher pitch deck!”
Good news: I reached out to friend of the newsletter Ian MacLarty, who successfully pitched one of the first games to ever get funded by Outersloth, the indie game fund from the creators of Among Us.
He has kindly agreed to share the entire pitch deck for Mars First Logistics, with budget numbers redacted. Click this link to view the full thing in Google Slides. It’s only 9 slides and it has fantastic GIFs and imagery. You can also see what his demo looked like here.
View the pitch deck that landed Mars First Logistics funding from Outersloth.
Forest Willard, who co-leads Outersloth with Victoria Tran, has published an excellent blog about what he looks for in game pitches, and I highly recommend reading it. But you don’t need to understand Willard’s particular tastes to see why this pitch for Mars First Logistics is so good:
In two sentences (slide 2) MacLarty gives you a very specific sense of what the game is (“an open world physics simulation game”) and even what the addictive core game loop will look like.
Then on a single slide (slide 3) he lays out the entire vision. He goes deep on the game loop, the creative inspirations behind the game’s vehicle editor, how progression works, and how many hours of fun he thinks he can deliver. After reading these two slides we understand this game’s scope completely.
Then (slide 4) we get to competitive analysis. There’s nothing exactly like this game out there, so he highlights different games to show which pieces he’s cobbling from others: deliveries from Death Stranding, an art style similar to Sable, offroad vehicle gameplay like MudRunner. This is a guy who knows games, and that informs MFL’s positioning.
On the same slide he offers up examples of positive signal he’s getting. None of these posts are viral, but they show players immediately getting what he’s trying to do with the game. That’s huge: it means players understand his positioning.
Slides 5 and 6 demonstrate that MacLarty is a serious developer who understands scope. He has a realistic timeline. He is asking for money because he knows how much money he needs to make this.
Slides 7 and 8 are when we finally learn more about who Ian MacLarty is, and the (small) team he’s working with on this game. Turns out, he has shipped literally dozens of small games, including several actual hits! By this point in the deck, any sensible publisher/game fund manager is pulling out their checkbook.
And, would you look at that. It’s already over. Slide 9 has a fun GIF and a thank you. How long did it take to read this? Five minutes?
That’s good, because anyone actually reviewing your pitch deck doesn’t want to spend more than a few minutes on it if possible.
Forest Willard—the guy who actually reviewed this deck and funded Mars First Logistics—is refreshingly honest about this:
But, look, let’s not go too far down this publisher pitch deck rabbit hole. The point of this exercise was to show what a clear vision for a game looks like. Making a pitch deck is one great way to figure out your vision.
And one of the many benefits of developing a clear vision for a game is that it becomes a lot easier to figure out what sort of market signals you should be testing for.
For instance, in the case of Mars First Logistics, MacLarty emphasized:
the game’s visual appeal,
the intuitive design and depth of the vehicle construction tools,
and fun physics-based delivery gameplay.
So what signal should he be testing for?
Signals for testing Mars First Logistic’s vision
🔴 Players say negative or neutral things about the visual style, vehicle design tools, or physics systems
This is obvious, isn’t it? If these things are the reasons players would play, they have to draw positive reactions. Just as bad are negative or neutral comments would be no commentary at all. You want people to notice the things that make your game special.
🟡 Players ignore the above features, but are delighted with aspects of the game that MacLarty didn’t expect
This is a weird situation to be in, but it happens often in game development. It could be a sign that you should pivot and make something that leans into the elements that players love. It can also mean you just need to iterate more on the features that are core to your vision. You’d have to experiment more to find out.
🟢 Players leave reviews that look like this:
I promise you I wrote the above three criteria before going and looking at these reviews. This is one of the first ones I found.
MacLarty absolutely nailed it. He knew what he wanted to make, so he went and made it. Mars First Logistics launched in Steam Early Access in June 2023, only a few months behind the schedule MacLarty proposed back in early 2021.
The result: Nearly 1,000 reviews with a 96% “overwhelmingly positive” review rating on Steam. He has already made good money, and he’s set to do extremely well when the game’s full version launches. In the meantime, he has a healthy audience of Early Access players that give him targeted, smart feedback as he iterates on the game.
There’s a word for what MacLarty’s getting right now:
Coda: A bit more on pitching to publishers/funds
If you get a chance to actually pitch a publisher or a games fund, you should do it. But don’t expect it to be a particularly useful way to get signal on your game.
Regardless of how the publisher reacts, you’re unlikely to learn much from the experience. For example:
Signals when pitching publishers:
🔴 They ignore you or decline without offering clear feedback
This is the outcome for well over 90% of pitches. It could be a sign that there’s something wrong with your pitch which the publisher feels uncomfortable pointing out. But it can also be a sign that they were just busy.
🟡 They decline, pointing to specific aspects of your pitch they see issues with OR they refer you to a different publisher they say might be a better fit
Most of the time, even if you address the feedback that a publisher is giving you, they’re still not going to buy in on the pitch, because publishing is massively vibes-driven. The criticisms that publishers offer you might actually just be rationalizations of their negative feelings about your pitch or your team. It’s hard to know.
Once again, Forest Willard is refreshingly honest about the difficulty of giving feedback in these situations:
🟢 You get offered a publishing deal with good terms
For first-time developers, this almost never happens. For experienced devs, it’s easier to get a deal, but the devil is in the details. The level of the publisher’s excitement or belief in the pitch ought to be reflected in the terms. You’ve got to try to get multiple offers from different publishers in order to really know how to evaluate this. Easier said than done.
P.S. I announced this week that I’ve changed jobs! I’m now working full-time with the A16Z GAMES team as a Marketing Partner. The gist is I’m going to try to help tons of gaming startups while helping to grow the reach of the games and SPEEDRUN initiatives at a16z. It’s a hugely exciting change—though I should admit that I’ve already been secretly publishing stuff with them for months for their Substack. They’re also extremely encouraging about me continuing to write this newsletter.
I really appreciate your focus on here on reading signal in playtests :)
(My lil project is ready for playtesting, and I'm going to have to navigate that whole *situation* for the first time.)
o i’ve been waiting for this!