The Focus of Teaching?

There are different approaches as to how much time you spend on teaching game development. Do you have (or want to have) the staff capabilities to dive deeper into game production? Or will you just be touching on more generic product questions and business development issues?

Fundamentally, the question is: Do you want to teach incubatees mainly how to build a business, or how to build game products too? This depends on your goals as an incubator as well as your funding and institutional set-up. 

Usually, when it comes to building game products, game incubators are focused more on teaching product enhancement than core skills. These core skills are most frequently seen as a precondition to joining the incubator in the first place.

Building and Analysing a Product

Game developers often need to learn how to build a product. Crucially, they need to figure out if their product, i.e. their game, is actually good. They need to learn and be able to analyse if their product has market potential. Do people want to buy it? Comprehensive product analysis is absolutely key to game development.

There are different attitudes to the importance of a product. For a new company, the product will most likely be more important than the company itself. For the most part it is the product that matters in the beginning and without it, the company would not be able to stand on its own.

But game developers need to avoid focusing on a singular product. Such a focus can make it very difficult to drop that product if that product is actually bad. Again, this all depends on the type of incubator and if you e.g. take on early-stage incubatees. These teams might need more basic help in contrast to later-stage teams, so-called “splinters”. They usually do not need technical help but more product analysis assistance.

The basic question for incubators is: Who are your customers (incubatees)?