Practical Game Design - Second Edition

1

Introducing the Game Production Process

Welcome to the games industry! It’s an ever-changing world where competition is fierce, publishing platforms and business models come and go (in just a few years, crowdfunding has appeared, peaked, and seemingly vanished), whole genres of products disappear (only to be revived or reinvented 15 years later), and big publishers, small independent studios, and even streaming services such as Netflix all fight for an ever-limited resource – player attention. As game makers, we often give away more and more (if not all) of our content for free, hoping to monetize users later down the line.

At the time of writing, Valve’s Steam still dominates publishing on PC, while Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo keep fighting ...