Build VS Buy - The Quickest Way To The Gaming Studio Graveyard

The Dream Every Founder Chases

Very often, young entrepreneurs on their way to build their dream studio set themselves ambitious goals: Build a great game and take all of their learnings from their previous jobs at these gaming conglomerates to help them grow the same way that their previous employers did.

Usually, these gaming entrepreneurs were part of Product, Engineering or Monetization teams, and they see all the tools that they had at their disposal to grow. So when they go to build their own gaming startup, these founders raise a bit of money to get off the ground and start building the game.

The Moment of Truth

At some point during the launch phase, usually during or right after the soft launch of the game, these entrepreneurs are faced with the decision of what needs to happen in order to be able to operate their games the way they experienced in their previous jobs. And this is where so many gaming companies are failing.

The Build-It-Yourself Myth

There is this very old school misconception that building all these tools internally will somehow create this layer of value to the company that exponentially grows with time. And the main difference with the ecosystem today, is that the great gaming companies are focusing precisely on that, building great games.

What the Market Actually Rewards

If you look at all the public gaming companies in the market today, there is no share price markup for having built or bought the technology they use to manage and operate their games. So the same faith goes to all the startups climbing up the charts’ ladders. Gaming companies need to be focusing on building great games and great experiences for their users. They need to take the scarce development resources that they have, and they should be investing them all in building the core game loop, meta features, and core features of the game. And as the company grows, keep focusing on continuously delivering high quality content for their users.

Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting

There are good companies out there (like Kinoa) helping gaming studios avoid spending millions of dollars into building dedicated engines that will, at the end of the day, represent what Jeff Bezos coined as “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. Learn the balance between what you absolutely need as a dedicated service for your game VS one that you can take off the shelf and use its capabilities to catapult you to where you want to be to grow your game.

Don't Become a Statistic

As you are building your game, don’t become another statistic on your way to the gaming companies’ graveyard. The world has moved to a place where tools in the market that are built to help you fulfill your goals could be the difference between your ultimate success and the quickest way to resource depletion and the subsequent closure of the studio.

Conclusion: Build the Game, Not the Engine

The studios that survive are not the ones with the most impressive internal infrastructure. They are the ones that pour every scarce engineering hour into the thing players actually pay for: the game itself. Build vs. buy is not a technical decision. It is a survival decision. Every month spent reinventing operational infrastructure is a month not spent on the core loop, the meta, and the content that keeps players coming back. Know what is truly differentiating for your studio, buy the rest off the shelf, and keep your team focused on the only work that moves your valuation and your players. That focus is what separates the studios that make the charts from the ones that end up in the graveyard.