Common Fallacy #1

I ride the subway to work every day, and see tons of people playing Candy Crush. A common fallacy would be to say: if King did it, that means we can too!

Does that mean we should start investing heavily in native apps? Maybe. Maybe not. Should we invest time and money to create 50 games, and hope that the 41st one strikes big, just like Rovio?

A more calculated approach is to use a Venn diagram. Consider three circles

• What we're good at
• What the market needs
• Who the competition is

If all 3 circles intersect, it's not optimal, because ideally we'd want to avoid competing with the Kings, Rovios, Zyngas and Kabams.

Optimally we'd want the first two circles to intersect, and the third circle nonexistent. Let's call this our North Star.

How do we arrive at the North Star? Two good strategies:

• don't compete head on with the big guys
• find your niche, make indie games that scale (Terraria, Stickman, etc)
• create branded games

Obviously, there is a plethora of other good strategies. I shall be analyzing each one in future blog posts.

To recap:

• avoid entering a crowded market
• before creating a game, consider using a Venn diagram for analysis