Making games is hard. Most indie studios only manage to release one game, and when they do, odds are it’s not going to be a runaway success. As an indie studio founder, then, you’d be forgiven for putting everything you have into your game, in an effort to increase your odds of success.
But what many indies forget is that at the same time that you’re building your game, you should also be building the studio itself. You should be building the structures and processes that help your studio perform in the long run. This brings a whole new set of questions to the endeavour of making games, like “where should we start?”, “how do we balance this with making the game itself?”, and “won’t this turn us into a soulless corporation?”
At the same time that you’re building your game, you should also be building the studio
These questions are all perfectly valid, because the main thing I’ve found in 15 years working in games is that running a studio isn’t intuitive. Luckily, the core principles are quite easy. I have been coaching videogame leadership teams for five years, across indie, AAA, and everything in-between, and the challenges are mostly the same. In this time, I have distilled the most important tools of my trade into a framework for indie studio management called FIRM. FIRM is an acronym that stands for Future, Issues, Rocks, and Meetings, the four pillars of studio management that drive focus, alignment, and accountability. Over the course of five articles, I’ll walk you through the whole framework, how each tool works, why it works, and how they connect into a mini operating system that you can run your indie studio on.
But first, we have to look at something even more basic. Namely, the question of what a studio is, and what that tells you about YOUR studio.
What a studio consists of
If I were to ask you right now, “what is a studio?”, what would you say? If you ask this question of a dozen studios, you will probably get a dozen different answers. But how you answer this question actually matters a lot, because it determines the lens through which you look at your own studio, and by extension, the elements you include or exclude when thinking about your studio and making decisions.
Your goal as a studio is to create more value through selling your game than it costs you to make it
Zooming all the way out, the most basic understanding of a studio matches that of any company operating for profit, and is simply that it is an entity that offers some kind of product or service – a game in our case – to some kind of customer or player in exchange for money. And like any other company, your goal as a studio in this exchange is to create more value through selling your game than it costs you to make it, so that you can use the profits to continue operating your studio and make more games. The idea of value is crucial here, because value only ever exists in the eyes of the beholder, who in this case is the player. This means that if you plan on running a studio for any length of time, you should be thinking about your players and how to add value to their lives from the very outset.
Next, let’s zoom in on the studio itself.
Any studio consists of people (a team) that create something (games, or IP) that they are trying to get into the hands of an audience or community (distribution and marketing). As a studio lead, these three elements form the core of your domain, and figuring out how to do each well – building a great team, making great games, and getting them seen and played by your target audience – are non-negotiable. In fact, according to industry pundits like Execution Labs co-founder Jason Della Rocca, these three elements fully determine how an investor values your studio right now. The stronger your team, the stronger your IP, and the larger your community, the more likely you are to land an investment.
To summarize the above, then, as a studio founder your job is to think about not just the game, but also how to build the team that makes it, the audience that will play it, and how you plan to get the game in front of them, AT ALL TIMES. Remove any of these elements from play, and the whole thing stops working.
Turning “a” studio’s purpose into YOUR studio’s purpose
Now, there’s one more thing we can do with these ingredients. Taken in abstraction, these elements describe how any studio goes about creating and capturing value. But the team, game, and distribution components directly inform your own studio’s purpose.
All the way back in 2001, Jim Collins published his book Good to Great, in which he analysed the difference between companies that find sustainable success and companies that don’t. One of the main differences he found is that sustainably successful companies are often crystal clear on their purpose in the world. Getting clear on your purpose, according to Collins, helps you make better, more consistent decisions about the company, as well as attracting the right people to help push the company to even greater heights. Put simply, it helps you to be more intentional about what you do and how you do it.
Getting clear on your purpose helps you make better, more consistent decisions
Collins argues that any company’s purpose can be found by identifying the overlapping point between what a company is most passionate about, what they can be the best in the world at, and what drives their economic engine. He calls this the Hedgehog Concept, named after the hedgehog in a Greek maxim by the philosopher Archilochus, and popularised in an essay by Isaiah Berlin, which states that “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”.
Your job as a studio head is to find your studio’s “one big thing” by answering these questions. Questions that line up perfectly with the three studio pillars we have already defined.
- “What are you most passionate about?” is the emotional drive of the team you build.
- “What can you be the best in the world at?” is your craft of making games taken to its logical end point.
- And “What drives your economic engine?” is the way you make money, which is largely dependent on the community you will manage to build, and how you get them to pay for your games.
As an example, here is how Kim Nordstrom answers these questions for his former employer Paradox, in the excellent book Up Down Up:
We are the best in the world at creating deep endless complex sandbox games for our audiences who love us for it.
We create quality games for PC and console, that we maintain for years and years, with constant updates and DLC. This generates revenues that allows us to create more games and content
We are passionate about creating Grand Strategy Games and interacting with the audience who loves playing them.
This results in the following purpose:
We create endless complex replayable games for our loyal fans and ourselves.
Answering these questions for yourself, and answering them honestly, will help you to find your studio’s purpose; and sticking to your purpose will help you attract the right people and make more intentional decisions about your studio’s future.
This week’s homework
Together with your team, answer in as much detail as possible the three questions in Collins’ Hedgehog Concept:
- What are you most passionate about?
- What can you be the best in the world at?
- What drives your economic engine?
Discuss your answers. Where do you agree? Where do you disagree? Why? When you have a satisfying answer to each question, try to find the overlap between the questions. You can follow the Paradox example and transplant your answers to your purpose quite literally, but you can also get creative with it and pick something more poetic that covers the same elements.
Next week, we’ll continue with the FIRM framework itself and examine how you can think about your studio’s future.
Want the full FIRM framework with step-by-step implementation instructions? Visit martijnvanzwieten.com/firm to download the free Notion template.
Martijn van Zwieten is a business and leadership coach, and the creator of the FIRM and LoGOS studio management methods. He has coached over 150 CEOs, founders, and leaders to build better studios, ranging from indie darlings like Rusty Lake and Twirlbound to AAA powerhouses like Bethesda Game Studios and MachineGames.