I will survive: Resilience strategies for game studios

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When we think about starting and running a game studio, we know it's tough. We know that games are a creative audience-driven process which means there are no guarantees of success. Experience, skills, iteration and determination go a long way, but no matter how well things go, or how good your team or game is, you will have highs and lows. Building a business – or a game – is not a straight line from A to B.

What can you do to soften some of those bumps in the road? What can you do to increase your chances of surviving the tough times, so that you can stay around long enough to make the most of the good times?

In this article I'm going to explore some of the key aspects of business resilience that I've learned through doing, across three businesses and 15 years in the games industry.

This is an inevitable challenge for anyone running a business. The impact of decisions that you make may not manifest for some time, and may in some cases be difficult to reverse. Yet the impact can be significant, and you may have had to make that decision without all the information, or there may simply not be an easy or obvious answer to your dilemma.

In these instances, there are several approaches you can take to help your business be more resilient, to help reduce the risk of mistakes, and reduce the impact if you got the decision wrong.

I follow the 'opinions firmly felt but loosely held' approach, which in practice means that you take responsibility for making the decision and you are decisive, drawing the best conclusion possible from the information available to you, while being willing to listen and change your view from information you gather and other