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Deciding What to Make: A Greenlight Process for Commercial Indies
Making an original video game is hard. Making an original game and selling it is harder. If there was some kind of guaranteed way of achieving financial success there would be a lot fewer studios closing! GDC has a lot of talks with good advice about how to finish your game, and how to market your game, and how to playtest, etc, but there are not nearly as many about how to start making a game - or rather, what game you should even start making in the first place.
Are there certain styles of game that are "safer" to even try to build commercially? Are there game ideas that survive the surprises of development better than others? Do some games have a more flexible budget than others? These are rhetorical but useful questions that can help you hedge your bets when you are making experimental or original games commercially.
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