As well as a form of art and entertainment, games are about business. Whether you want to work at a game studio, start your own business or make games as a hobby, recognizing the dynamic landscape of the videogame industry is critical to finding your place. This course will introduce you to game production, project management, teamwork skills, and how to position your game ideas and yourself in the broader marketplace. By the end of the course, you will be able to develop an impactful portfolio of game work to get noticed and/or develop an effective business plan to bring your game to market.
Business Planning
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From the course by Michigan State University
Business of Games and Entrepreneurship
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From the lesson
Entrepreneurship and Starting a Company
Starting a company isn't for everyone. But it is also good to know what goes into starting a company even if you're not the one doing it. Often times, as an employee, it can feel pretty arbitrary why a company makes the decisions it does (and sometimes it is, but for the sake of argument, we'll assume that the person at the helm of the company isn't just making random decisions). But, often there is a logic there and understanding why a company does what it does is often rooted in the logics that we will be discussing here.
Meet the Instructors
Casey O'DonnellAssociate Professor
Media and Information
[MUSIC]
Welcome back.
So now you decided on the kind of company you're gonna start and
the thing that you're gonna make and you have a vision and you're ready to go,
you've got to write some more.
Yep, we're gonna ask you to do that here too.
I know you're all excited about making games.
If you wanna start a business, this is important too.
So let's talk about business planning.
A business plan is a thing that helps a business allocate their resources,
outline the areas of key importance, prepare for problems,
see opportunities and plan for the future and it's important to think about.
Because if you're starting a company, you don't want it to just produce one thing.
You would like to be able to have an income for more than one project,
that's always been one of the complexities in other forms of mass media production.
If you think about film right, that workers move from project to project and
there are lots of structures that make that work.
But it's more difficult, because there moving from project to project and
sometimes there's lag between those projects and you have to plan for that and
when you have a company the idea is that you can have income over time that is
steady and secure.
Let's talk about a business plan and kind of the basic outline and the things
that your gonna put in there, not unlike a game design document where you have a high
concept is you start very high and you drill down into the details as you move
through the document and executive summary is kind of like a high concept statement.
But at this time, you're talking about your company.
It's a highlight reel, what makes the company unique?
What are the products that they're working on that are interesting and
compelling and why is it need to exist?
Why does your company need to be there?
The next thing that you're talking about is a description of the company.
It's history where it came from, the plans for a start up,
like was it funded by this other thing that sort of led to it?
Or was it a spin-off organization?
Those details help people understand where it's coming from.
You need to decide if you're a product or a service.
Are you creating a thing or are you establishing a service?
Now increasingly, that line can be blurry when you deliver a game
that provides in-app purchases perhaps or additional content.
Maybe in some ways, you're acting like a service, because you're continuing to
provide service over time even though you do have an initial product.
A game that's out there, but you revise it.
So you need to think about the difference between those things and
how you're going to strategize that.
The next important part is the market analysis and this is actually,
probably the most important thing that you will do in you business plan is to figure
out what is your market?
Who are you trying to sell to?
Who's going to buy your product or who's going to spend money on it or
maybe it's only supported by in advertising and so who's your audience?
Who are you trying to speak to?
Who's gonna pay attention?
Who's eyeballs are you trying to grab?
The next part is strategy and implementation, it's taking that market
that you would like to reach and how are you going to do that?
Be specific.
What are some of the management responsibilities dates, budgets?
How are you gonna track your results?
How are you going to establish that your doing what you set out to do?
A technology plan.
So how are you going to strategize your website?
How are you gonna think about the kind of software that your company manages?
What is that technology plan for
how are you gonna manage all of what you're going to deal with?
If you're making a game that requires all sorts of external services.
How are you gonna deal with it when you have a 100 people playing your game or
a 1,000 or 10,000?
How are you gonna scale?
How is your tech knowledge you are gonna scale?
Are you gonna use unity?
What?
These are all technological questions that your company has to ask,
you need to talk about your management team.
Who's gonna be responsible for making these things happen?
You're literally assigning tasks to people that are going to run the company.
What are they responsible for?
What are they not responsible for?
And then ultimately, you're gonna have to do a financial analysis.
You're gonna have to figure out if there's money to be made.
How you're gonna do that?
Is it gonna work?
And it's easy to really perform that analysis with rose colored glasses, but
you don't want to do that,
because you don't wanna fool yourself with that company.
So what can help with a successful business plan?
What are some things?
Well, just like game design documents, just like everything that we've been
talking about clarity, spelling, grammar, financial data mistakes, math errors.
Don't do that.
This is supposed to be a clear and concise document, you're supposed to be able
to convince people that your company will be successful with this document.
Needs to be well thought out, needs to be structured.
You don't wanna be meandering all over the place,
you wanna have a higher logical structure that speaks to what your company does.
Your company needs to be able to illustrate profitability,
you need to be able to pay your employees.
The company needs to be able to expand and grow and try new things,
that's what profitability is about.
The reason that company wants to make profit is to distribute it
to its employees and its shareholders, but also ultimately have the ability to grow.
Let's talk about some of the barriers, because there's lot of barriers to
starting a company and doing it effectively.
And the reality is that time, effort and resources to get a product or
service done on time is a massive barrier.
It's difficult.
The right people can be difficult to find.
Acquiring talent and the right talent and
the talent that can actually implement a thing.
It's really complicated.
You have resources and that's not just monetary resources, but
software licenses, hardware, those are important pieces of this.
But going back, it's also about basic logistical stuff,
like the office location.
How are you gonna pay rent?
Furniture, electricity.
How big of an internet pipe are you gonna have into your company?
All of those are really active,
important things that you're gonna have to think about.
I guess lastly, I just wanna give you a little bit of advice.
And that's if you're starting a company, start simple and inexpensive at first.
I've already said it's easier when you're younger and
you don't have the same financial obligations that you do when you're older.
That's great.
Avoid money complications as long as possible.
I mean, eventually you're gonna have to have really candid conversations with
people about well.
Who owns what percentage?
And how much risk have you taken?
And whose going to pay the rent this month?
And so by the same token, be prepared for issues.
At some point, somebody's gonna say,
I don't wanna be involved in this anymore and you can't just let that go.
You're gonna have to have a conversation about well,
how much ownership of what's already been done do you expect to have?
And then you're gonna have to ask them to put it in writing and
you might have had a heated falling out with that person.
And yet, you're gonna have to say, no, I need in writing that you only
own 5% of the company now or that you have no financial interest anymore.
Those are things that you're gonna have to have a conversation about and
get in writing.
You really need to work on your business as much as you do your product,
because the business becomes the life blood that provides future products exist.
And so if you're only taking care of your product and
neglecting the company, the product may succeed, but the company will fail and
that's really a hard thing to hear sometimes.
That all of these things that aren't actively making
games are just as important as making the products that a company producers.
With that, I'll see you on the next video.
[MUSIC]
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