Game studios rarely commit a complete production team and budget to an untested idea. They reduce uncertainty in stages: define the audience and opportunity, state the specific claim the team must prove, build the smallest playable version of the riskiest idea, test it with likely players, and use the evidence to continue, change direction, cancel, or enter preproduction. Riot, Ubisoft, and other documented examples use different gates, so there is no single industry-wide formula.
What studios are trying to learn before production
A new intellectual property (IP) is more than a setting or a logo. It combines a proposed audience, a player problem or opportunity, a core loop, distinctive innovations, production requirements, and a plan for reaching the market. Full production makes every mistake more expensive: content pipelines are staffed, technology choices harden, and schedules begin to depend on systems that may not be fun.
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Early testing therefore targets uncertainty rather than completeness. A team might need to learn whether a particular audience understands the fantasy, whether the core loop remains engaging after several minutes, whether a new interaction is meaningfully different from familiar genre conventions, or whether the team can build the required technology. The evidence is useful only when it is tied to a decision. A prototype that produces enthusiastic comments but does not answer a named question is difficult to greenlight responsibly.
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1. Frame the audience, opportunity, and thesis
Start with a player and market question
Riot calls its early incubation period “sensemaking”: learning about players, the genre, and the opportunity before narrowing the idea. The practical output is a concise thesis about the problem or opportunity and the strategy the team wants to test. Instead of saying “we want to make an exciting action game,” a useful thesis identifies who the game is for, what experience is missing or underserved, and which proposed innovation could address it.
A thesis makes milestones testable. The team can ask what would count as supporting evidence, what observation would disprove the claim, and what the next decision will be. John-David “historianX” Perry of Riot explains that a concise thesis lets a team move through prototyping because it knows what it is trying to prove or disprove and can evaluate progress transparently. The account is available in Riot’s incubation description.
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Separate vision from the uncertainty that needs testing
A creative vision can motivate a team, but a vision alone does not tell it what to prototype first. The team must identify the innovation or uncertainty that could invalidate the concept. Examples include a novel combat decision, an unusual social structure, a new way of navigating space, or a technical interaction that the intended audience may not value.
Ubisoft describes a comparable progression. In preconception, teams test and refine the vision; in conception, they develop it through prototypes, proofs of concept, research, and immersion in the intended world. The distinction matters: world-building and narrative exploration can support the concept, but they do not substitute for testing the risky player-facing system.
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2. Build the smallest representative prototype
Prototype the risk, not the whole game
Riot says a prototype should represent the anticipated audience’s experience and demonstrate the game’s key risky innovations. That usually means a narrow slice of interaction rather than a complete campaign, art set, progression system, or content library. The goal is to create enough context for a player to encounter the uncertainty under test.
One useful technique is a basic “game scaffold”: a stripped-down example of the genre’s familiar interactions. Designers can then replace one part with the proposed innovation and observe how the system behaves. A scaffold prevents the team from spending weeks rebuilding routine features while it still does not know whether the new idea works.
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Documented greenlight practice often moves through several fidelity levels:
| Prototype level | What it can answer | What it cannot establish by itself |
|---|---|---|
| Simulated core loop | Whether the sequence of decisions is coherent enough to model and discuss | Whether real-time controls, pacing, and moment-to-moment play feel good |
| Basic genre scaffold | How the proposed innovation behaves when placed in familiar interactions | Whether the final presentation, content volume, or retention will work |
| White-box playable | Whether players can perform the loop and reveal usability or pacing problems | Whether production-quality art, audio, narrative, and scale are affordable |
| First playable | How a work-in-progress version of the core experience functions while tools and processes are evaluated | A reliable commercial forecast without later market testing |
A separate studio account describes first checking a simulated version of the core loop, then turning the proof of concept into a functioning, mostly white-boxed prototype. It combined qualitative and quantitative playtest feedback and fed actionable findings into later builds. That account, published by Game Developer, is an example of one studio’s greenlight practice rather than a prescription.
Low fidelity is not a sign that the idea is unimportant. It is a way to isolate the question. A rough arena with placeholder geometry can reveal that a movement mechanic creates no meaningful choices; expensive character models cannot fix that discovery. Conversely, a promising loop may justify a more representative build when the remaining uncertainty concerns readability, social context, technical performance, or emotional tone.
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3. Playtest with people who resemble the intended audience
Use internal tests early and external tests at important milestones
Internal playtests are fast and inexpensive. Team members can identify broken controls, confusing rules, and obvious pacing problems while the build is changing daily. They also share vocabulary with the developers, so their feedback needs careful interpretation.
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Observe behavior, then ask why
A test should collect what players do as well as what they say. Observers can record whether participants discover the intended objective, choose the proposed innovation, abandon the loop, ask for missing information, or return to a familiar strategy. Conversations and questionnaires add explanations, but stated enthusiasm is not a substitute for observed comprehension and engagement.
Evidence can be qualitative, such as recurring confusion or descriptions of a compelling decision, and quantitative, such as completion, choice, error, or repeat-play measures. The available sources do not establish a universal set of metrics or thresholds. A number becomes useful only when it is tied to the thesis and the conditions of the test.
Tom “Zileas” Cadwell of Riot says the best ideas hold up to scrutiny from many angles: they make sense to different types of people and survive a playtest with different players within the target audience. This principle argues against recruiting only colleagues or fans who already understand the concept.
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4. Treat playtests as diagnosis, not a one-time pass/fail exam
A playtest can reveal several different problems:
- Low value: the proposed innovation is understandable but does not add enough enjoyment or meaningful choice.
- Execution trouble: the idea may be worthwhile, but controls, pacing, communication, or balancing prevent players from experiencing it.
- Approach failure: the underlying design direction does not produce the intended experience, so a different implementation or innovation is needed.
- New risk: solving the original question exposes a technical, social, production, or audience problem that was not visible before.
Riot explicitly describes trying again with better execution when appropriate, changing the innovation approach when it is flawed, and accepting cancellation as a valid outcome. A successful test can therefore generate another prototype rather than an immediate greenlight. The decision should state what changed, which uncertainty remains, and what evidence is required next.
5. Combine creative evidence with production and market questions
Use a decision matrix instead of a single popularity score
Studios compare approaches along several axes. The following framework reflects the distinctions in the documented studio accounts without implying that every company uses the same names or order.
| Question under test | Representative evidence | Possible next gate |
|---|---|---|
| Does the intended audience understand and value the experience? | Observed play, interviews, and feedback from internal and external target players | Iterate, refine the audience thesis, or stop |
| Does the core loop create meaningful decisions? | Simulated loop, scaffold, or white-box playable | Rebuild the loop, test a different approach, or advance |
| Is the distinctive innovation technically feasible? | Proof of concept and implementation experiments | Change tools or scope, invest in engineering, or cancel |
| Can the team make and ship the intended experience? | Tool and process evaluation plus a first playable | Move into preproduction with a production plan |
| Is there a plausible commercial opportunity? | Competitive research, target-customer definition, and, later, controlled market measures | Adjust positioning, continue development, or do not fund broader production |
Understand what “greenlight” means at each stage
Ubisoft describes a kickoff meeting as the conclusion of conception and the gateway to preproduction. The pitch considers how the world, systems, gameplay, characters, and stories support one another, along with market potential and plans for shipping. In preproduction, teams develop and evaluate the tools and processes needed for production; a first playable lets them examine a work-in-progress version of the core experience. Details are in Ubisoft’s Creative Process.
The five-stage account at Game Developer adds competitive-landscape research, target-customer definition, a core-loop proof of concept, playtesting, and eventually a soft launch with predefined commercial measures. A soft launch is a later market experiment, not the same thing as an early concept test. It can inform commercial readiness only after the team has a functioning product and a defined audience; it cannot prove that an unbuilt idea is fun.
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Before asking for a larger team or budget, the project lead should be able to answer three questions:
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- What did we test? Name the audience, innovation, loop, technical assumption, or market hypothesis.
- What did we observe? Describe player behavior and feedback, the test conditions, and the limitations of the evidence.
- What follows? Specify the next prototype, a scope or audience change, a preproduction plan, a pause, or cancellation.
Advancement is justified when the audience, risky innovation, and team understanding are sufficiently clear for the next investment. It does not mean every uncertainty has disappeared. A prototype earns a larger commitment by reducing the uncertainties that matter most at that stage.
What the published figures do—and do not—tell you
Riot’s approximately 10 percent figure
Riot reports that approximately 10% of pitches make it into prototype. That is Riot’s own reported experience, with no year stated on the accessed page. It is not an industry-wide success rate, a probability that a prototype will ship, or a benchmark that another studio should copy. The figure appears in Riot’s incubation account.
The 2024 indie developer survey
An exploratory 2024 interview survey by Linåker, Bjarnason, and Fagerholm spoke with 10 indie game developers about pre-release experimentation. The study is useful for showing the kinds of constraints and experiments small teams discuss, but its participant access, sampling, bias, and target-audience representativeness limit generalization. It does not provide a pass rate for the game industry. Read the paper at arXiv.
What is not standardized
The sources do not establish a universal prototype duration, budget, staffing level, commercial threshold, or cross-industry percentage of ideas that advance. A mobile service game, a premium console title, a multiplayer platform, and a small experimental project may need different evidence. Funding arrangements and publisher expectations also change the gates.
That uncertainty is itself a planning fact. Studios should publish their own definitions of success for each gate rather than borrowing a number from another company. A short test with a clear thesis can be more informative than a larger build that mixes several unanswered questions.
A practical checklist for evaluating a new IP
- Write one sentence naming the intended audience, opportunity, and proposed innovation.
- List the assumptions that could kill the concept, and rank them by potential cost or impact.
- Build a scaffold or simulation that exposes the highest-risk assumption with minimal content.
- Convert it into a playable slice only when controls, context, or timing are part of the question.
- Run internal tests, then test with external players who resemble the intended audience at meaningful milestones.
- Record behavior, explanations, and measurable outcomes under the conditions of each test.
- Choose explicitly among another iteration, a pivot, scope or audience changes, preproduction, a pause, or cancellation.
- At the preproduction gate, verify tools, processes, team capability, market rationale, and a plan to ship—not just enthusiasm for the concept.
The central discipline is to spend only enough effort to answer the next important question. When evidence is clear, the studio can invest with greater confidence; when it is negative or ambiguous, an early pivot or cancellation protects the much larger cost of full production.
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