Market Forces: Playing with Risk in Business Planning for Games

Abstract

Business planning within undergraduate games programmes is frequently taught through lectures, worksheets and written submissions. Strategic decision-making in indie games studios, however, is inherently systemic, shaped by studio identity, founder capability, market conditions and constrained resources. While students can often articulate concepts such as market positioning, resource allocation and marketing strategy in isolation, they may struggle to understand how these elements interact under uncertainty. This paper presents Market Forces, a tabletop serious game designed to make these interdependencies visible and negotiable within a Business Planning for Games module in a BA Games Design course. The game places students in studio leadership teams and asks them to respond to industry risks such as funding delays, market saturation and operational strain. Decisions are evaluated through a mitigation test requiring alignment between studio identity, available strengths and chosen strategy, with viability gained or lost according to the coherence of the group’s reasoning. Drawing on experiential and social-constructivist principles, this intervention allows students to experiment with real-world trade-offs in a psychologically safe environment while embedding evaluative criteria directly within gameplay. Implemented within undergraduate classroom delivery, practice-based observations suggest that students engage more readily and collaboratively in negotiated strategic reasoning and demonstrate clearer alignment between studio identity, capability and decision-making than in previous seminar-style iterations. This paper contributes practice-informed insight into serious games for professional skill development and demonstrates how purpose-built interventions can embed the practical demands of early-stage studio planning within games design curricula.