Global game industry revenues are more than three times higher than those of the movie industry. Billions of people around the world play video games, and hundreds, even thousands of games are published every single day. Needless to say, the industry is extremely competitive, and success doesn’t come easy – but potential rewards are sky-high.

The game industry is relatively young, and constantly changing. Platforms, player trends, monetisation models and regulations change rapidly, and are quite different from general start-up trends. This is why a generic tech incubator can rarely offer much help to game start-ups. The complex web of strategic decisions between game design, monetisation, target audience, player motivations, live ops content, art, user acquisition and more is unique to games.

This roadmap is based on a constantly growing collection of practical learnings, methods and approaches from different sources of game incubation and game business development expertise. It can be used as a handbook when you go through the planning process of a game incubator, or as a foundation for a deeper understanding of the needs of game start-ups.

Specific experiences and solutions are grouped in four high-level categories but as a roadmap you can follow the path that best fits to your goals, environment and circumstances.