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Find your focus or prepare to fail, says Tag Games' Paul Farley

Indecision is a killer, and you can't do it all

Find your focus or prepare to fail, says Tag Games' Paul Farley
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Paul Farley is MD of Tag Games, a Dundee-based developer behind the likes of Doctor Who: The Mazes of Time on iOS and Funpark Friends for iOS and Android.

One of the biggest challenges in any business is focus. This can be especially true of independent mobile games developers who have a quite bewildering range of options to consider.

I'm in the fortunate position of having many industry friends who run all manner of independent games studios. These range from headcounts of just two or three people, to over a hundred.

I am in awe at the huge range of games, business models, platforms, technologies and partnerships these studios are engaged with.

Looking across the full breadth of opportunity it would be folly for even the largest of these studios to try to engage with everything our industry offers, so why do so many fall into the trap of trying to be all things to all people?

Generation mobile

The large majority of studios in the mobile games industry are under three years old. Many have been born of the smartphone generation.

When you are young and just starting out there are many options available to you. You are free of inherited thinking, process and restraints, but this freedom can become a burden when it leads to indecision.

The adoption of digital distribution and the removal of the console or carrier gate keepers enables literally anyone to create and launch a game to a global market. However the constant evolution of consumer tastes, business models and technology creates an almost overwhelming wave of complexity that must be overcome and rationalised.

It is in the shadow of this wave that many start ups can freeze.

The majority of successful start ups in the mobile games space appear to find a specific niche that works for them, whereas many aiming to make games that 'appeal to everyone' and deliver them cross platform fail.

Failing to find the best ways to use the resources at your disposal is a nail in your indie start up coffin.

Finding focus

Every studio is unique and every team has its own strengths and weaknesses, therefore what you decide to focus on will depend on the set of circumstances you find yourself with.

It's worth remembering that games studios are not rigid machines – they are organic and ever changing, and you might need to refine or rediscover the focus you once had.

As your studio grows you'll find you may have greater capacity to stretch further than before, but it's very easy to bite off more than you can chew!

At Tag Games, over a period of around a year, we started the development of our proprietary multi-platform game engine, built a cloud-based server infrastructure from the ground up, completed our own metrics system and developed our first free to play social game – all in addition to the core self-publishing and partnership work we were doing!

In hindsight we lacked focus, and while we benefit hugely from those technologies and experience today, I can't help wondering if we'd been more focused we'd have achieved more with less.

The process of finding your focus is as much a question of your identity as an organisation as it is of finding an attractive market opportunity.

Pushing a square plug into a round hole is a battle you aren't going to win, so it's baffling to see studios so often making games that follow a popular trend rather than a natural fit for their talent base.

If you know yourself and know your team, you'll have a much better idea of which opportunity is right for you.

Decide and deliver

As mentioned previously, indecision is a killer, so once you know what your team is capable of and an opportunity does arise that is suitable, make a decision to follow it quickly, or likewise dismiss it and move on.

An amazing opportunity only has worth if you have the means to respond to it and deliver. It's easy to look back at some of the huge breakout successes in our industry and claim "we could have done that."

Often this is deluded thinking though.

Not only did a team have to have the insight to find the opportunity, they then needed the focus to deliver on it within a certain window of time and to high quality level. There is a lot of skill, hard work and luck involved in being in the right place at the right time.

It is entirely possible that two studios with identical product strategies on the same platform and similar resources to draw from can result in one being successful, while the other isn't.

Success is often measured in binary hit or miss terms. In mobile particularly the winner does take it all.

There is no middle ground. It's hit or miss. It is quite brutal, but helps to bring a focus that might otherwise be lacking.

You can find out more about Tag Games on the company's website.