This article series contains my advice on how to think during the concept stages of a commercial lane-pushing game.

I've shared these thoughts during conversations with many early-stage teams over the years — and they're gathered here to help any new teams avoid blunders and allocate their time efficiently.

This first article will consider the market. We'll cover some introductory concepts, and relate them to the lane-pushing space.

Lets dive in with the 6 considerations...

1. Expand the Audience

As a community-centric multiplayer genre, you must find a large player-base to sustain your game and your business. Where will you find those players?

A natural choice is to look at existing games and pursue that market. I recommend against this. While the lane-pushing genre is far from saturated, it has extremely low overlap between titles.

From recent Newzoo data, only 6% of players play a second lane-pushing game — and that's probably infrequent, by invitation from friends.

While you might convince some players to try your new game, their existing game is home to an established social graph and their massive "sunk cost" of invested time and money. People don't part ways with that easily.

I believe more success can be found serving players who are not currently playing a lane-pushing game. Maybe they prefer a different device, feel more at home in a different genre, or find lane-pushing games inaccessible.

The wording to use is that you'll "expand the audience" for the genre. 

Of course, you'll first need to identify an audience and research it. Make sure the audience is large enough to sustain a game, before you commit to building one.

Examples

• Pokemon UNITE expands the audience for lane-pushing games.
  • It reaches a younger audience and draws in Pokemon fans, while still engaging older players.
  • With the introduction of new game modes layering in complexity, it has plenty of room to grow.
• SMITE has definitely expanded the audience.
  • The pantheon-based characters make the game relevant and marketable to many regions and cultures.
  • The third-person perspective appealed to players who felt more familiar with action games.
  • It was the first lane-pushing game launched on consoles, and is even available on Switch.
  • Their crossover events attract fans from diverse fandoms, including Transformers, Avatar, RWBY, and Slipknot.

2. Define Your Audience

Once you've decided who you serve, write it down. Make sure your team are aligned on this, and that everyone can describe the target audience if asked.

You should be able to identify your audience in terms of at least demographic, geographic, and psychographic (what motivates them to play a game).

This will help as you approach potential funders. They will test your understanding with difficult, nuanced questions about that audience.

A response of "the game is for people like me!" might be true — but only mention this after you give a solid answer based on data and learnings from user and market research.

Find and talk to your audience! Take time to listen and learn what they like.

Read the MOM Test to improve your question-asking. It is a helpful guide to getting more reliable data.

This should be an ongoing process which will inform many decisions about your game, including the aesthetic, session length, and so on.

There's nothing wrong with pivoting to a different audience later if that makes sense. As well as your core market, you should consider some expansion markets that you could grow into if things go well.

3. Stay Focused

Now, getting to the tricky stuff. Why devote all this attention to defining an audience?

Suppose a fictional team makes a prototype lane-pushing game, and it attracts a small audience of players who like prototypes. The developer then does all the right things by being a good listener, iterating with the feedback, and attending to the community.

Later, the game is ready to expand, and it turns out there's a problem. The game can't "expand the audience" for the genre, because the players shaping the game during its formative stages didn't represent a new audience.

In other words, the avoidable mistake was making a game for "the people who showed up" to test it. That's dangerous.

It might work out, but I encourage you to be disciplined. If you think there's a market opportunity with an underserved audience, you need to get that audience involved and iterate the game with them as early as possible.

This is why you should be selective and write down who you serve.

There's nothing wrong with having players who simply like prototypes involved, or using "alpha weekends" to take their feedback in a low-commitment way, but know who you plan to serve long-term and don't lose track.

4. Plan to Differentiate

You may know the concept of network effects — which is where each new user to a platform, adds value for everyone on the platform. In games, that's each new player reducing queue times for everyone.

Queue times matter, and they matter so much that it is difficult for two similar games to co-exist. One of them will have shorter queue times, so it becomes large, while the other(s) become niche or close their doors.

Historically, the first example for lane-pushing games was Heroes of Newerth and Dota 2.

Heroes of Newerth was a commercially successful game with a large audience, and still remains a niche title today. It funded a large development team at S2 Games for the better part of a decade. Most studios would be delighted with a game like that; its achievement is underappreciated.

But it did hit a limit on growth — in part because Dota 2 was a close alternative with superior network effects.

A more recent example is when Fault, Overprime, and Predecessor competed to capitalise on the innovations of Paragon. As the games were similar, network effects kicked in — and only one still operates.

To avoid or at least lessen this pressure, you need a dissimilar product — which specifically means substantial gameplay innovation.

It is not enough to diverge on aesthetic and tweak a few mechanics. A lot of teams learned this the hard way. Note that being "too different" is a risk as well, and your players will probably tell you if that's the case.

5. Plan your Route-to-Market

While not news to anyone in the industry, one of the challenges of free-to-play is its high user acquisition costs, particularly since 2020.

Newzoo claims 80% of PC game revenues in 2022 were from free-to-play games. A significant chunk of this is reinvested into user acquisition (UA) and retention, making for a very competitive market.

The response from many studios has been to scramble for ways to find organic installs (such as a friend referral, where the studio does not pay directly for the install). But with lots of smart, motivated people chasing the same users, player time and attention has become an increasingly scare resource.

Every month, multiplayer games with high potential close down. They can't afford to acquire enough testers to improve their game to the point where it would have a chance on its own.

Prospective funders for your game know there is a risk — that the cost of user acquisition will be too high for the game to secure a sizeable player-base. Without a large player-base to unlock network effects, high queue times will likely be fatal.

Even if you have a publisher with deep pockets, you'll still need to work with them and show that you can help them mitigate that risk.

I find a good way to think about this is to have a convincing answer to the following question:

"How do we create a window (of time) where the cost of user acquisition is low?"

It could be a short window where the cost is greatly reduced, or a longer window with lots of steady organic installs. But you need a window! And practically speaking, your game needs to embed a special something to help create that window.

If your plan is to make a great game, then "address its marketability later", you simply aren't competing with games that build their marketability in. Thus you've likely lost the race before it even starts. So design and plan for it.

Otherwise, you may end up in a rough situation. I've spoken with several founders who ran the numbers, saw the $40M price tag for user acquisition, and had to shut down their game (and often their studio) because it wasn't financially viable to do a launch.

Examples

• As a simple example of this principle, TMNT Splintered Fate has the 'special something' of an IP partnership. They timed the game's launch on Switch with another big event in the calendar of the fanbase. That creates a window which drives tons of organic installs, lowering the average cost of UA.

6. Market the Right Things

Developers sometimes get excited about features which mean nothing to players. A great example is "equipment" systems (items, talents, etc.) — they excite designers, but a twist on 'items' won't be anything special once players get used to it.

In contrast, almost all players care about the question:

"Can I bring friends to this game?"

They will mean different things by it, but whether it's the learning curve, aesthetics, community standards, or something completely different — you should make sure your marketing answers this question for your chosen audience, and that your audience likes your answer!

Additionally, many expert players in this genre are conscious of a game's future potential. They're discerning, educated consumers, and are thinking ahead. A typical thought might be:

"In 5 years time, is this game going to be suffering from the same issues that infuriate me in my current game? Or has a smart choice or decision been made to design that frustration out?"

I don't think teams are expected to have all the answers, but highlighting that you know the issues and that measures are being taken, can go a long way.

Of course, players also want to know the game is fun. Ideally, you'll have a verb that creates spectacle, making the game very streamer-friendly and giving the game an exciting hook.

We'll talk about what that looks like in a later article.

Conclusion

These 6 considerations are about "who you serve". I really encourage teams to invest time to understand this properly. It helps with surfacing bad assumptions, and will play a major role in the game's design.

Done right, in 2-3 sentences just about anyone should be able to understand who your lane-pushing game is for, and the ways your audience is distinct from that of existing games. I always ask this of new teams. A good answer shows maturity in the proposal.

Upcoming articles in this series will cover how to iterate game design for a lane-pushing game, and technical considerations for the genre.

Note: Yes — I'm happy to have a casual chat with teams creating in this space. Please feel free to get in touch if you're a creator and feel that this might be useful :)