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Game studios reduce the risk of a new intellectual property (IP) in stages rather than building a complete game and hoping players like it. They define the audience and opportunity, write a specific thesis about what must be proved, build the smallest prototype that represents the risky idea, test it with players who resemble the intended audience, and then weigh the results against technical, market, and delivery realities. The evidence may justify another iteration, a pivot, cancellation, or a move into preproduction.
There is no single industry-wide greenlight formula. Riot Games, Ubisoft, one studio account documented by Game Developer, and a 2024 interview survey of indie developers describe related but different practices. Their common principle is to make a named uncertainty visible before committing the people and money required for full production.
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What studios are trying to learn before full production
A new IP can fail for different reasons: the intended audience may not value its central idea, the core loop may not be enjoyable, a technical innovation may be impractical, or the commercial opportunity may be too weak. A useful test identifies which of these uncertainties matters and gathers evidence specifically about it.
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- Audience appeal: Do the people the game is for understand the promise and want to keep playing?
- Core-loop fun: Do the repeated actions work before content, art, and narrative polish are added?
- Innovation: Does the distinctive mechanic provide enough value to justify the design and production risk?
- Technical feasibility: Can the team make the proposed experience function with available tools and expertise?
- Market opportunity: Is there a plausible audience and competitive position for the finished product?
These questions are related but not interchangeable. A positive reaction to a paper concept does not prove that the game is fun to play, and a fun prototype does not by itself establish that the project can ship profitably.
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Stage 1: Frame the audience, opportunity, and thesis
Riot’s “sensemaking” phase
Riot describes early incubation as “sensemaking”: learning about players, the genre, and the opportunity before narrowing the idea. The team should enter prototyping with a concise thesis about the problem or opportunity and the strategy it intends to test. That thesis turns a broad creative ambition into a question that can be evaluated at milestones.
John-David “historianX” Perry, Riot’s Head of Operations for R&D, says a concise thesis lets the team know “exactly what we are trying to prove / disprove” and set milestones transparently. A vision can motivate exploration, but Riot’s account cautions that vision alone does not provide enough direction for efficient prototyping. The team must identify the specific innovation or uncertainty it is investigating. See Riot’s incubation description for its account of this work.
Ubisoft’s preconception and conception stages
Ubisoft describes a similar progression. In preconception, teams test and refine the vision. In conception, they develop that vision through prototypes, proofs of concept, research, and immersion in the intended world. These stages are exploratory: they help the team discover whether the proposed world, systems, and player experience can cohere before the production plan is fixed.
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Stage 2: Build the smallest representative prototype
Test the risky innovation, not every feature
Riot says a prototype should represent the anticipated audience’s experience and demonstrate the game’s key risky innovations. The goal is to answer concrete questions, not to create a miniature finished game. A low-fidelity build can therefore be more useful than an attractive vertical slice if it exposes the uncertainty the team needs to resolve.
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Riot also describes a basic “game scaffold”: a stripped-down example of a genre’s fundamental interactions. Designers can swap proposed ideas into that scaffold and observe how the system behaves. This keeps the experiment focused on the new element instead of requiring production-ready environments, characters, menus, and content.
Different prototype fidelities answer different questions
| Prototype form | What it can reveal | Evidence described in the sources |
|---|---|---|
| Simulated core loop | Whether the repeated player actions make sense as a concept | A five-stage greenlight account begins by checking a simulated version of the core loop. |
| Basic genre scaffold | How a proposed innovation behaves inside familiar interactions | Riot describes using a stripped-down scaffold to swap in ideas. |
| Mostly white-boxed playable | Whether the idea works when players can actually control and experience it | The studio account documented by Game Developer turns its proof of concept into a functioning, mostly white-boxed prototype. |
| First playable | How a work-in-progress version of the core experience functions within a production-oriented plan | Ubisoft describes a first playable during preproduction. |
Prototype fidelity should rise only when the next decision requires it. If the question is whether a movement system feels right, polished art may obscure the answer and consume resources without reducing the relevant uncertainty.
One studio’s proof-of-concept sequence
The greenlight account published by Game Developer describes first checking a simulated core loop, then converting that proof of concept into a functioning, mostly white-boxed prototype. The team collected qualitative and quantitative playtest feedback and fed actionable findings into later builds. This is an example of one studio’s practice, not a universal production prescription; its value is the explicit link between a test, an observation, and the next build.
Stage 3: Test with players who match the intended audience
Internal tests find problems early
Internal playtests are practical for frequent iteration. Team members can expose confusing controls, weak pacing, or a broken loop before the studio recruits outside participants. They also help determine whether a build is ready for a more consequential external test.
External tests check whether the promise survives outside the team
Riot recommends frequent playtests, both internal and external, with external testing at important early milestones. The participants should include different types of players within the target audience, not only developers or friends who already understand the project. Riot’s Tom “Zileas” Cadwell says the best ideas hold up when presented to different people and in playtests containing varied players from the intended audience. Read the Riot prototype account for its criteria and testing approach.
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Testing the intended audience does not mean asking only whether participants say they like the idea. Teams can compare what players report with what they do: whether they understand the objective, reach the core action, repeat it, abandon it, or discover an unintended strategy. The sources describe qualitative and quantitative feedback, but do not establish a universal metric set or pass threshold.
Playtests are diagnostic, not a one-time exam
Riot explicitly treats a test as a way to diagnose the source of a problem. The innovation may be less valuable than expected, the execution may need improvement, or the underlying approach may be flawed. Cadwell notes that a team may try again with better execution or choose another innovation approach. A successful test can also uncover new issues, so a positive result is permission to learn more, not proof that production risk has disappeared.
The possible responses are therefore:
- Iterate on the same idea when the hypothesis is promising but execution is weak.
- Change the design or prototype a different approach when the innovation does not deliver enough value.
- Pivot the project when evidence points toward a different audience, loop, or premise.
- Cancel when the remaining risk is not worth further investment.
- Advance toward preproduction when the audience, innovation, and team understanding are sufficiently clear.
Stage 4: Add market, production, and delivery checks
Ubisoft’s kickoff as a gateway to preproduction
For Ubisoft, a kickoff meeting concludes conception and acts as the gateway to preproduction. The pitch addresses how the world, systems, gameplay, characters, and story support one another. Ubisoft also says teams consider market potential and plans for shipping the game. In preproduction, they develop and evaluate the tools and processes needed for production, then create a first playable that lets them examine a work-in-progress version of the core experience. The company’s stages are detailed at Ubisoft’s official process page.
This gate prevents a common mistake: treating a compelling mechanic as sufficient evidence for a full production commitment. A studio must also understand how the parts fit together, what it will need to build, and how the game could reach players.
A five-stage greenlight example
The Game Developer account describes another staged approach that includes competitive-landscape research, target-customer definition, a core-loop proof of concept, playtesting, and eventually a soft launch with predefined commercial measures. Soft-launch metrics belong to a later commercial validation step; they should not be confused with an early concept test that asks whether the core idea works.
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Because this account describes one company, it demonstrates sequencing rather than an industry standard. Studios may place market research, technical checks, audience tests, and commercial experiments at different points or omit some entirely depending on genre, platform, funding, and business model.
Stage 5: Turn evidence into a production decision
A meaningful gate has three parts: the question the team set out to answer, the evidence it observed, and the decision that follows. “The prototype felt good” is too vague to guide investment. A stronger record might state that target players understood the proposed loop, repeated the defining action, and identified a specific execution problem that the next build will address.
Riot reports that approximately 10% of its pitches make it into prototype. That figure is Riot’s own reported experience; it is not an industry-wide success rate, a current benchmark, or a prediction for another studio.
| Evidence pattern | Reasonable gate response |
|---|---|
| The target audience understands and values the innovation, but the build is difficult to use. | Iterate on execution and test again. |
| Players complete the loop but do not find the proposed innovation valuable. | Rework the innovation or test a different approach. |
| The audience, loop, or opportunity appears materially different from the original thesis. | Pivot the concept and rewrite the thesis before further prototyping. |
| The central uncertainty remains unresolved and the expected value does not justify more work. | Cancel rather than commit to full production. |
| The audience response, risky innovation, production approach, and delivery case are sufficiently understood. | Advance into preproduction or broader investment. |
A practical evidence chain studios can use
The sources do not prescribe one universal workflow, but together they support a repeatable way to make a new-IP decision auditable:
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- Write a testable thesis. State the specific innovation or uncertainty, what would count as evidence, and which milestone will be reviewed.
- Choose the least elaborate prototype that can answer the question. Use a simulation, scaffold, white-box playable, or first playable according to the uncertainty being tested.
- Run internal tests early and external tests at important milestones. Recruit varied participants from the intended audience rather than relying only on developers.
- Capture behavior and explanation. Combine observed play, qualitative comments, and quantitative measures when appropriate; the cited sources do not define a universal dashboard.
- Convert findings into an action. Record whether to improve execution, change the innovation, pivot, cancel, or proceed.
- Before preproduction, check delivery reality. Review the relationship among world, systems, gameplay, characters, story, tools, production process, market potential, and shipping plan.
This chain keeps the prototype tied to a decision. It also prevents a team from interpreting enthusiasm for a polished demonstration as proof that every production risk has been solved.
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What the available evidence does—and does not—show
Studio accounts are informative but not universal
Riot and Ubisoft are describing their own organizations, goals, and gates. Their terminology and order of operations may not fit a small independent team, a licensed project, a live-service game, or a different platform. The five-stage account likewise represents one studio. These examples establish useful patterns, not a mandatory industry pipeline.
The indie study is exploratory
A 2024 interview survey by Linåker, Bjarnason, and Fagerholm covered 10 indie game developers. It discusses pre-release experimentation and reports constraints involving participant access, bias, and whether participants represent target audiences. The sample describes those interviewees; it cannot produce an industry-wide pass rate or prove that every indie studio tests ideas the same way. The paper is available at arXiv.
No reliable universal budget, duration, or pass rate is established
The cited material does not provide a standard prototype duration, budget, team size, or cross-industry percentage of concepts that reach production. Riot’s approximately 10% figure must remain attributed to Riot, and the 10-person academic sample must remain attributed to that study. Any broader number would overstate what the evidence supports.
The central principle
Studios test new IP ideas before full production by spending just enough effort to expose the project’s most consequential uncertainty. They begin with a specific audience and thesis, build a representative but appropriately rough prototype, test it with the people they hope to serve, and use the findings to make an explicit investment decision. The strongest result is not always a greenlight: a well-supported pivot or cancellation can prevent years of work on an idea whose central promise has not survived contact with players.
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