How Not to Run a Game Studio

"Anime Roblox…but for adults!"

Emmett furrowed his brows and squinted at us. "Yeah, I could buy that working." That was it. The founder and CEO of Twitch just told us our anime take on a UGC gaming platform was a brilliant idea. Or at least that's how I interpreted it during our YC batch.

I've always loved games since I was a kid. I think most Gen Z boys will admit to being addicted to at least one video game as a child (if not still being addicted now). But running a game studio/company does not equate to playing games. Someone should have told me that earlier…

So here's my postmortem on Advent, the game studio that could have been.

The Importance of Distribution

Coming out of YC, my co-founder, Jarrett and I set out to create the biggest gaming company of our generation. And it would live on Fortnite. For those wondering why, the answer is distribution.

Distribution matters in every industry, but distribution matters in gaming. It's what allowed Zynga to become a multi-billion dollar company. It's why 1 in every 5 iPhones had Angry Birds downloaded in 2012 (someone fact check me please). And it's why Roblox, which every other kid plays (this I'm sure about), will never ever go away.

So when Fortnite opened a UGC ecosystem similar to Roblox called UEFN, dozens of companies hopped on the platform to access this free distribution. These "free" 200M monthly active users is what we leveraged to close our entire seed round of fundraising.

So, what went wrong then?

Game Design is Hard

On a scale of 100% Epic's fault to 100% our own fault, this was clearly ours.

Being software devs, we thought it would translate pretty darn well to game development. Obviously (or not), we were wrong. In traditional B2B software, getting the software to work is maybe ~70% of the battle. In consumer software, it's maybe ~50% of the battle. But in game dev, it's table stakes*.

If your game just works without being fun, it's effectively won less than 1% of the battle. Now, one could argue that making a fun game is similar to making a good consumer app. I've definitely taken lessons from game design and migrated them over to other projects. But after a year of working on games, I was far from being a "great" game designer.

*Note, I understand that many games these days release as buggy messes. Fun and bug-free is not mutually exclusive. A game can have lots of bugs, but still be fun. Still, crafting fun is a different skillset than just crafting code. We deserve more fun software though. This take by Siqi Chen is certainly how more founders should be thinking about the software they build.

Platform Lock, like real platform lock

I'll give you a scenario. We're about to launch our second game. One week before release, everything is ready to go. I wake up one morning to publish the final test version onto UEFN and I get this error:

"Something went wrong? What the fuck does that mean Epic?"

I'll tell you what it means. It means Epic updated Fortnite, breaking our game, then gave us the most generic error log possible to figure it out by the end of the week. We scrambled to figure it out.

We surfaced every log possible out of UEFN: nothing. We combed the forums for other people with this issue: nothing…except a bunch of unanswered threads. We even tried making our own threads about the issue and only heard crickets from Epic support for over a week!

Now, this isn't all on Epic. They have so many UEFN devs to deal with on a daily, maybe even hour-to-hour basis. But we had poured time and money into our launch and marketing only to be met with zero context or support on a game-breaking bug.

There's a lesson here though: on these platforms, you give up your freedom in exchange for distribution. The markets have decided that this tradeoff is usually worth it. That's why every indie game developer sells on Steam and why mobile companies still sell their games on Apple's app store.

While companies have been started on the backs of others' distribution (Zynga on Facebook), it's far from the ideal setup for a company. Even Zynga had to capitulate to Facebook when Zuck decided that Zynga accounting for 12% of all ad revenues on the platform was bad for business.

The meta isn't meta-ing

Both us and our investors thought UEFN had wide open space for RPGs, puzzle games, casual games, and many other genres. This prediction still has potential given the popularity of Blox Fruits (1M CCU) or Pet Sim (10B lifetime plays) on Roblox. Our game release strategy centered largely around copying existing play patterns that worked on other platforms and bringing them into the Fortnite meta.

Unfortunately, in its current state, Fortnite players still boot up Fortnite to well…play Fortnite - Battle Royale.

Obvious right?

But that's the thing, we were sure the platform would eventually outgrow its Battle Royale roots and branch out into a much larger, genderless swathe of games (just like Roblox). Almost two years later, and nothing's changed. The top 20 games in Fortnite Creative are still mostly practice maps for Battle Royale players to warm up or train for the main Fortnite mode that started it all - and I see that changing very, very slowly if at all.

The top 20-30 games as of Nov 2024 are all practice/Battle Royale maps except for Lego, Creative, and Havoc Hotel 2 (which I'm sure will drop out of the top 30 in no less than a month).

The future of platforms for game devs

Discord Activities. Telegram Games. Snap Games (now defunct). Netflix Games. Youtube Playables. Facebook Instant Games.

LinkedIn Games…(cringe)

It seems like every social network decided after COVID that games should play a major role in the future of their platform. Most of them wave their many millions of DAUs in front of developers as a golden ticket to success. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work out.

Much like how players come to Fortnite for Battle Royale, users come to Telegram to chat, viewers come to YouTube to view, and I guess professionals come to LinkedIn to stalk other professionals? I don't know. But I sure as hell don't log into LinkedIn to play chess.* This is why telling game developers that "we have all of these gamers" ready to play your indie game isn't exactly true. Snap Games literally closed down because engagement on games was cannibalizing their actual money-maker: people viewing Snaps and stories.

*It's okay if you log into LinkedIn to play chess.**

**Just kidding, it's not.

Anyways, rant over. This is a living doc, and I hope to update it with more thoughts in the future. Maybe, in part 2 I'll write about how I'd actually start a games company now knowing what I learned the first time around. Until then, you can challenge me to chess on my LinkedIn here.