3 min read

EGD News #20

Hi there,

It’s Joakim here. Greetings from Helsinki!

Here’s our weekly Elite Game Developers newsletter.

Blog

Why I wrote the Long Term Game — When I left Next Games, I took a month off. During that time, I started to put together my life long dream of writing and publishing a book. In this article, I describe where the inspiration came from and what I wanted to share in my book that’s coming out on March 18th.

I wrote the first manuscript in two months. What I did was I planned to write 1,000 words a day. To help me achieve this, I started every morning by writing at least ten Post-it notes with topics that I wanted to write about. Each Post-it represented at least a hundred words. By doing this for two months, I finally achieved to get 45,000 words down and have my first manuscript in place.

You can read the article here.

View all the previous articles on the blog by going here.

Podcast

Learning to build a games company — Callum Brighting is the Co-Founder and CEO of Netspeak Games, based out of London, UK. When you hear Callum speak, you’ll notice that he’s a phenomenal learner. He’s been practicing the first-time founder role for a year now. His efforts in building a games company have happened with tremendous confidence.

In this episode, we talk about several topics. I was most intrigued by hearing about Callum’s management style and how he’s developing those skills.

All past episodes can be found here.

Articles Worth Reading

+ Amazing advise article for entrepreneurs — FirstRound Review has put together their best insights from founders sharing advice on the Review blog. Hear from entrepreneurs who’ve seen trouble and gained first-hand knowledge. Topics that get covered include, “Decide not to decide and don’t raise too early,” “Make sure your emotions aren’t in the driver’s seat by giving change two weeks to settle,” and “Challenge yourself to become a better mentor.”

+ How to make remote working work — Last week, I share Super Evil Megacorp’s guide for remote working. This week, there’s another insightful guide available from Will Luton, who talks about why the Department of Play chose not to have an office, and the great things it did for the company and the great things it can do for you too.

+ Five Mistakes to Avoid When Making A F2P Game — Priyank Badkul from Huuuge Games talks about the critical free-to-play development mistakes that he’s bumped into during his career in gaming. Priyank talks about audience definition, innovation, testing UA early, and not playing the long term game. He talks about retention ratios, which is one of my favorite engagement metrics.

+ ROAS tool from Ironsource — Previously, I shared the tool that Pollen VC had put together, a simple template for tracking UA campaigns daily. If you’re starting to acquire users for your game, Ironsource’s tool seems like a perfect place to start. Their article talks about how game devs can set the right ROAS goals to achieve profitable results from UA. Even if you don’t want their tool, the advice in this article for ROAS goal setting will be super helpful!

Quote from this week

“Before growth hacking, you need to value hack. Value hacking is about seeking the truth rather than selling. If the truth of your value proposition is super compelling, then growth becomes the exercise of syndicating the truth. If the truth of your value proposition isn’t present, you have to grow by throwing money at the problem.” – Mike Maples, Jr. on The Knowledge Project podcast