Key to successful game studio: the four games they didn't release

From The Wall Street Journal, a profile of a successful Finnish mobile game company named Supercell, maker of Hay Day and Clash of Clans:

Supercell executives say the company has so far avoided flops because it kills projects with bad prospects early on.

"It's not like Supercell made two strikes and that both of them were home runs," said Ilkka Paananen, Supercell's 34-year old co-founder and CEO. "The truth is that we are very good at failing.

"Last year we released our two first games on the App Store, and they were both big hits," Mr. Paananen said. "But what really made us successful were the four games we killed before release."

Hat tip Tuuti Piippo.

From FailCon: Designing for Failure - Lessons from Jetpack Joyride

This post was contributed by FailCon, an international conference on common business
failures and how to recover from them. http://thefailcon.com. FailCon has a blog that discusses subjects near to our heart.

I recently sat in on a post-mortem presentation at GDC by Luke Muscat of Halfbrick games, the creator of Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride.  While he discussed dozens of ingenious tidbits on how to keep people feeling challenged, spending money, and generally having a good time, one thing stood out as especially relevant to us: Jetpack Joyride is designed to make the player fail. Over. And Over. And Over.  In fact, it relies on the user not only failing but enjoying it so much that they stick around and share it with friends.  With millions of downloads, clearly it’s working.

So just how have they made inevitable failure so fun, and what can the rest of us learn from this?

Reward Failure:  In Jetpack Joyride, with your ultimate death comes an immediate reward screen recognizing your progress, any mission goals you accomplished, and offering you a slot machine chance for any coin you picked up.  This can be pretty easily practiced with yourself and employees, too.  When encountering a failure (either personal or amongst employees), focus less on the problem that happened and more on what risks were taken, what was learned, and how this is going to improve the process down the road.  Keep yourself and the team feeling engaged with the organization, and show that each failure does contribute to the final product.  Make it very clear that taking well-informed, relevant risks is a good thing.

Always Have A Next Step: Immediately after exploding, Joyride shows you what your current missions are, to remind you that there is still more to get done.  This is by far the most important take-away for business leaders.  The quickest way to recover from a personal failure is to know what the next step is.  Before taking a big risk, set up a contingency plan: know exactly what things might help in a recovery, and have a short and easy to-do list on the side.  That way, when failure rears it’s ugly head, you can smile and nod and turn your attentions immediately to the next step, without having to worry about getting stuck in a rut.

Reduce the Barrier To Retry:  Joyride is a quick game with a one-tap ability to replay after failing.  Make failing that easy in your organization.  Use the Next Steps tips to always have a way for people to start again.  More important, make sure no one is dwelling on the failure.  The worst thing you can do is hold it against someone, having a three-strikes rule or anything like that.  This will make each re-entry more frightening.  Discuss what happened promptly, incorporate the lessons, and then move on to something new.

Most people design a business for success; it keeps everyone positive and envisioning a clear final goal.  But businesses rarely reach the first goal they sit; dozens of road blocks come up along the way, and you need to be able to recover and pivot quickly.  While you should keep strong goals in your mind, designing for failures - making them manageable and recoverable - is safer and more realistic for yourself and your company.

Game Designer Colin Northway: "I was looking under smaller and smaller rocks for game ideas"

Another mistake story from the GDC 2012 "Failure Workshop." This was excerpted from Kris Graft's excellent writeup in Gamasutra, a gaming industry site:

Fantastic Contraption developer Colin Northway talked about the importance of identifying failure in its early stages. He spent several months trying to find the gameplay breakthrough in projects such as the bird-inspired Flocking, but they just didn't materialize.

Flocking was a project "that I thought was fantastic and a good idea, but one ... that I couldn't get to function as a video game," said Northway. He stressed to developers that just because you're really in love with an idea, "you won't always be able to make a game about that."

"I was looking under smaller and smaller rocks for game ideas," he said. That search is often futile. "That's the downfall of a lot of game designers," he said.

"When you're doing game design you should be picking among the ripest fruit... your job is to find the sweetest fruit. ... your job is not to eke something out of the cracks that will be playable."

Now, Northway feels that he has found his way out of the game design wilderness. He's currently working on a beautiful game called Incredipede, which appeared at Tokyo Game Show's Sense of Wonder Night. "I hope none of you get lost, and I hope all of you make your way out," he said.

I salute the GDC for holding this session, and especially to the game designers for sharing their stories. There is loads of research referred to on this site to show that destigmatizing and sharing mistakes is immensely helpful for learning and for ongoing improvement. Finding one's way out of the wilderness is a very valuable experience, and telling others about it is a great act of generosity.

Game designer Scott Anderson: game failed because "we were driven by external rewards"

Another mistake story from the GDC 2012 "Failure Workshop." This was excerpted from Kris Graft's excellent writeup in Gamasutra, a gaming industry site:

Scott Anderson and his team were working on a puzzle/platformer game called Shadow Physics, a project that appeared at first to be set up for success, but eventually was abandoned.

"About eight months ago we lost our funding, and the game was cancelled," Anderson said. Shadow Physics was previously funded by Indie Fund.

The failure has since sunk in, and Anderson admitted, "The game was a great concept but it wasn't really a lot of fun...ever."

There were other various reasons why Shadow Physics failed. "We were driven by external rewards," such as fortune and fame, Anderson said, instead of a true passion for the project.

There were also problems with the game's tech, and the gameplay relied too much on the physics engine. He said the game was just not "tight," and there were unpredictable game systems.

"The game just didn't work," Anderson said. "We chased certain Braid mechanics a little too much," he added. He said at times there was too much "Braid envy" going on in the game design.

There were also issues with the development process, iteration was becoming expensive, and the hiring process was based on if they liked the person, rather than if he or she was a good fit.

Additionally, communication issues "were a big problem with the team in general." People wanted to avoid conflict, but then it became a "passive aggressive war zone," said Anderson.

Amir Rao of Supergiant Games: Users had "no idea what was happening" when using gardening feature

This mistake story from the GDC 2012 "Failure Workshop" was captured by Kris Graft of Gamasutra, a gaming industry site:

Next up for the [failure] workshop was Amir Rao of Supergiant Games. The studio did ship its first title, Bastion, to much success. But what's not known by most people is that it shipped without one big feature that failed.

Basiton had a rich art style, a unique reactive narrator, and, Rao said, "It was going to have a rich and exciting gardening feature."

The reasons for including this feature were clear for Rao. "Gardening is an aesthetic that everybody understands. ... We wanted to try and take that aesthetic ... and apply that to an action RPG, because that is something that we haven't seen before."

The studio spent a year working on the gardening feature, influenced by games like Viva Pinata, Harvest Moon, and even certain systems from Civilization Revolution.

Player would find seeds out in the world, bring them back to the hub called Bastion, put them in planters, water them, and wait to see what they would become. The problem was that players had "no idea what was happening," said Rao. "It's really hard to communicate the intermediate part of planting" that happens between burying the seed, and having the final plant.

"You know people understand a lot better than planting? A menu," Rao determined.

I empathize with Rao's disconnect with his users, and respect his recognition that the gardening feature wasn't working. It's easy for a product developer to fall in love with certain features, and hard to finally decide to take them out.

Jamie Cheng, game designer, on a failed effort: "We didn't have a conviction of what we wanted to do"

This mistake story from the GDC 2012 "Failure Workshop" was captured by Kris Graft of Gamasutra, a gaming industry site:

Jamie Cheng of Eets and Shank developer Klei Entertainment talked about his studio's failure -- an online game called Sugar Rush. The studio worked on it for three years, did the art style for the game five different times, held three closed betas, and was only two weeks away from a full ship. But it never shipped.

Cheng said the game was originally called Eets: Sugar Rush, and had marshmallows fighting one another. It was greenlit by Nexon in Vancouver.

The game gradually became a mish-mash of ideas from the game developers and ideas from the publisher. It became diluted, and the game didn't really know what it was supposed to be.

Impending failure became clearer when Nexon Vancouver totally shut down, and with that, the backend for the game was gone.

But the studio still didn't want to give up, so it tried to convert Sugar Rush to a game called Scrappers for consoles. But it still didn't ship.

"We didn't have a conviction of what we really wanted to do," said Cheng "...We didn't know [how to work with a publisher] as an independent [studio]."

Klei eventually created and successfully shipped Shank, a game made with a much clearer creative vision.

Game Developers Conference hosts a "Failure Workshop"

This news piece by Gamasutra, a gaming industry site, got my attention:

For the second year at GDC [the Game Developers Conference], game developers got together not to talk about their best practices or their successes, but instead about their failures....

Ron Carmel of World of Goo house 2D Boy hosted the panel, and opened by stressing the importance of sharing experiences of failure. If people don't talk about and share their failures, "We're missing out on 90 percent of our learning opportunities," Carmel said.

He talked about dispelling the "success myth," explaining that "the successes that you see usually come after a long string of failure."

Carmel is right. You don't read about the failures that predate a big hit. Instead, writers mine that success story for some formula they can sell to their readers about how to replicate this success. The game designers at this session know this isn't how it's done.

And we shouldn't be surprised that game designers are not afraid to fail and to learn from failure. Other posts on this site have reinforced that iterative learning is natural to gamers, as it should be to those who design games as well.

Gamasutra captured some great mistake stories from the session. We'll feature those in upcoming posts.

HBR article on lessons from gamers lauds failure as "an antecedent to success"

The May 2008 Harvard Business Review features an article called "Leadership's Online Labs," in which the authors discuss the results of a study of high-performing users of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), like World of Warcraft. In these games, participants worldwide take on roles and participate in quests and adventures. These games require the players to act in concert to achieve their objectives, planning together and using their varied capabilities to, for example, storm and take control of a castle against determined adversaries.

The article focuses on how the lessons learned by the MMORPG standouts could be applied to business. One passage in the article was very relevant to this site:

Trial and error play a big role in accomplishing game tasks. Failure, instead of being viewed as a career killer, is accepted as a frequent and necessary antecedent to success.

In one incident that we recorded from EverQuest, seven guild members prepared for a brand-new quest that required them to get their team across a large lake protected by a gruesome and hostile creature. Although they had formulated a strategy based on information gathered in advance, everyone seemed comfortable with the high likelihood of failure, at least initially. After a first attempt, in which the whole team nearly drowned and was forced to retreat, members quickly began plotting a new strategy in the spirit of a fundamental gamer maxim (one not heard very often in business): Let's try that again.

Frequent risk taking allows players to practice the art of weighing odds calmly in uncertain environments. Confronting risk routinely and with a level head will be an important leadership skill as the real-world business environment becomes more uncertain and as success comes to depend more on innovation than on execution. Organizations can help prepare leaders by fostering a culture in which failure is tolerated. They can expose leaders to risk by mimicking the structure of games, breaking down big challenges into small projects. Failure, after all, is clearly more palatable for the individual and more affordable for the organization when it happens at the project level rather than on a larger scale.

Lessons from Multiplayer online games- embrace of failure and iterative learning

In the May 2008 HBR article "Leadership's Online Labs," the authors discuss the results of a study of high-performing users of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), like World of Warcraft. In these games, participants worldwide take on roles and participate in quests and adventures--requiring the players to act in concert to achieve their objectives, planning together and using their varied capabilities to, for example, storm and take control of a castle against determined adversaries.

The article focuses on how the lessons learned by the MMORPG standouts could be applied to business. One passage in the article was very relevant to the Mistake Bank concept:

Trial and error play a big role in accomplishing game tasks. Failure, instead of being viewed as a career killer, is accepted as a frequent and necessary antecedent to success.


In one incident that we recorded from EverQuest, seven guild members prepared for a brand-new quest that required them to get their team across a large lake protected by a gruesome and hostile creature. Although they had formulated a strategy based on information gathered in advance, everyone seemed comfortable with the high likelihood of failure, at least initially. After a first attempt, in which the whole team nearly drowned and was forced to retreat, members quickly began plotting a new strategy in the spirit of a fundamental gamer maxim (one not heard very often in business): “Let’s try that again.”...


Frequent risk taking allows players to practice the art of weighing odds calmly in uncertain environments. Confronting risk routinely and with a level head will be an important leadership skill as the real-world business environment becomes more uncertain and as success comes to depend more on innovation than on execution. Organizations can help prepare leaders by fostering a culture in which failure is tolerated. They can expose leaders to risk by mimicking the structure of games, breaking down big challenges into small projects. Failure, after all, is clearly more palatable for the individual and more affordable for the organization when it happens at the project level rather than on a larger scale.

"Failure is a frequent and necessary antecedent to success." These few words illustrate one of the major systemic failings of companies today: instead of encouraging and learning from failures and mistakes at the project and small-group level, and adjusting course or changing behavior as necessary, they repress failure, refuse to acknowledge it, and don't learn. Resulting, of course, in a larger-scale catastrophic failure that everyone could see coming yet no one could acknowledge or do anything about.