Chapter 34 Exercises

These exercises move you from understanding the industry intellectually to navigating it personally. You will build studio profiles, compare production timelines, write the actual pitch document your Progressive Project requires, and diagnose a real layoff. Treat the exercises as professional practice. The outputs are portfolio work.

Exercise 1: Research — Three Studio Profiles (Required)

Build a research dossier comparing three different studios, one from each of these categories:

  • AAA (choose from: Naughty Dog, Insomniac, FromSoftware, Rockstar, Capcom, Square Enix, Bethesda Game Studios, Guerrilla, Sucker Punch, Nintendo EPD, BioWare, DICE, Respawn, 343 Industries, Santa Monica Studio).
  • Indie (choose from: Supergiant, Mossmouth, Daniel Mullins Games, Maddy Makes Games, House House, Motion Twin, Finji, Ice-Pick Lodge, Local No. 12, Radical Fish, ConcernedApe).
  • Mobile / F2P (choose from: Supercell, King, miHoYo/HoYoverse, Niantic, Playrix, Scopely, Jam City, Small Giant Games).

For each studio, produce a one-page profile covering:

Studio Background

  • Founded when, by whom, where headquartered.
  • Ownership structure (independent, publisher-owned, publicly traded, worker cooperative).
  • Rough team size as of 2026 (use LinkedIn, studio website, interviews).
  • Games shipped — list the three most recent and any signature titles.

Business Model

  • How does this studio make money? (Full-price sales, F2P microtransactions, subscription, publisher advance, platform first-party funding, work-for-hire.)
  • Who publishes their games? Is the publisher owned by the same parent?
  • Do they self-fund, or is every project publisher-funded?

Production Practices

Based on public interviews, GDC talks, and postmortems, what do you know about:

  • Typical project length (concept to ship).
  • Studio size per project (do they staff up for a project and restructure after, or run continuous teams?).
  • Engine (in-house, Unreal, Unity, proprietary tools).
  • Public statements or documented patterns around crunch, work-life balance, and diversity.

Design Signature

What does this studio do especially well? What games do they reliably make? What mistakes have they made?

Public Signals

Any layoffs, acquisitions, restructurings, or union activity in the last three years.

Your Assessment

Would you want to work at this studio? Why or why not? What kind of role would be a fit? What would you want to ask in a job interview?

Deliverable: Three one-page profiles (one per studio), plus a half-page "synthesis" section where you compare the three across economics, creative freedom, stability, and career growth. About 1,000-1,500 words total.

Sources to use: studio websites, LinkedIn, Wikipedia (as a starting point, not the final source), GDC Vault talks (free archive), Kotaku and Polygon feature reporting, Jason Schreier's book Press Reset and his Bloomberg reporting, interviews on IGN, Eurogamer, Axios Gaming, Stephen Totilo's Game File, and the studio's own blog or postmortems.

Warning: do not trust a single source. A studio's own marketing will describe conditions differently than employees do. Cross-reference with Glassdoor, ex-employee tweets, and independent reporting. Your profile is only as good as your triangulation.

Exercise 2: Analysis — Compare Two Pipelines (Required)

Pick two shipped games from different segments and reconstruct their production timelines. The goal is to compare how different kinds of projects move from concept to ship.

Good pairs for this exercise:

  • The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020) vs. Hades (Supergiant, 2020).
  • Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red, 2020) vs. Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe, 2016).
  • Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD, 2017) vs. Celeste (Maddy Makes Games, 2018).
  • Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar, 2018) vs. Undertale (Toby Fox, 2015).
  • Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022) vs. Balatro (LocalThunk, 2024).

For each game, reconstruct:

Timeline Skeleton

  • When was the concept first formed? (Often revealed in interviews years after launch.)
  • When did full pre-production begin? (Often marked by a team reassignment, a hire, or a public announcement.)
  • When did production begin?
  • When was Alpha? Beta? Gold/release candidate?
  • Launch date.
  • Significant post-launch beats (major patches, DLC, re-releases, remasters).

Team Composition

  • Peak team size during production.
  • Internal team vs. outsourced contributors.
  • Key leadership roles and any changes during development.

What Changed During Development

Games change in production. What features were cut or added? What scope shifted? Was there a crunch period — voluntary or forced?

Public Challenges

  • Delays announced or rumored.
  • Leadership departures during development.
  • Engine or tech challenges (Frostbite, RAGE, RE Engine, proprietary issues).
  • Reception on launch — was it technically clean? Did it ship with major bugs?

What You Can't Know

Be honest about the limits. Reconstruction from public sources is guesswork. Note where your timeline is speculation vs. documented.

Deliverable: A side-by-side comparison document. Include a rough timeline chart (text-based is fine) for each game. Compare timeline, team size, stage durations, and post-launch support. Identify three or four differences that reflect the segments (AAA vs. indie, Western vs. Japanese, console-first vs. PC-first, single-player vs. service).

Sources: Jason Schreier's reporting, particularly Blood, Sweat, and Pixels (which covers multiple 2015-era postmortems) and Press Reset. GDC Vault talks (many postmortems are posted). Gamasutra/GDMag postmortem archive. Noclip documentary series. Official studio retrospectives (Supergiant's Hades postmortems, FromSoftware's Miyazaki interviews in Japanese outlets like 4gamer, Edge magazine's long-form features).

Word count: 1,200-1,800 words.

Exercise 3: Practical — Write Your 1-Page Studio Pitch (Required — Progressive Project)

This is your Ch 34 Progressive Project deliverable. You are writing the studio pitch document for your action-adventure game.

Constraints

  • Single page. One side of a sheet. 11pt font, normal margins. If it does not fit, compress.
  • Headings where useful. Bullets over paragraphs where possible.
  • No jargon a publisher would not know. No engine-specific language unless engine is the selling point.

Required Content

  • Studio name. Make one up if needed. Commit to it; it is the brand now.
  • Team. Names (you can use first-names or pseudonyms), roles, and what each person has shipped before. If you are solo, state that and explain what contractors you plan to use.
  • Project title and tagline. Tagline is one sentence, 15 words max.
  • Hook. "It's X meets Y with Z twist." Make it specific.
  • Core gameplay loop. Three sentences on what the player does. If your loop cannot be described in three sentences, the loop is not focused enough.
  • Target platform(s). Where does this launch?
  • Target audience. Who plays this? Name three comparable games and what is different about yours.
  • Scope. Hours of content, number of levels/zones, estimated playtime, unique features.
  • Timeline. Vertical slice by month X, Alpha by month Y, Beta by month Z, ship by month W. Use months-from-now, not dates.
  • Budget. Rough total. Break down into salary (if any), audio, art outsourcing, marketing, tools, contingency. Even if the budget is "my savings plus $0," say so.
  • Ask. Are you self-funded? Looking for a publisher? Applying for a grant? Platform first-party support?
  • Why us / why now. Two to four sentences of credibility and market timing.

Tips

  • The hook is the hardest part. Practice it on friends. If they cannot repeat the hook back to you after one explanation, it is too long.
  • Budget conservatively. Publishers can smell budget inflation. They can also smell budget denial — do not pretend a 2-year AAA can be made for $200K.
  • The team section matters more than you think. Publishers bet on people; the IP is secondary.
  • Avoid comparing yourself to games you are not in the same weight class as. "It's Elden Ring but smaller" is not credible from a solo dev. "It's Hollow Knight with a weapon-crafting twist" is.

Deliverable

A PDF of your one-page pitch. Save it. You will revisit and revise it in Chapter 38.

Exercise 4: Critical — Diagnose a 2023-2024 Layoff

Pick one studio closure, mass layoff, or major restructuring from the 2023-2024 wave and diagnose what happened.

Candidates:

  • Mimimi Games shutdown (September 2023, after Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew).
  • Volition closure (Embracer, August 2023, after Saints Row 2022).
  • Smilegate Barcelona closure (2023).
  • Arkane Austin closure (Microsoft, May 2024, after Redfall).
  • Tango Gameworks closure (Microsoft, May 2024, after Hi-Fi Rush) — note: later partially revived under Krafton.
  • Roll7 closure (Private Division, 2024, after OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome).
  • Massive layoffs at Unity (multiple rounds 2023-2024).
  • Sony Bend / London Studio closures (2024).
  • Embracer Group breakup and multiple studio closures across 2023-2024.
  • Riot Games layoffs (January 2024, 530 roles).
  • Bungie layoffs (October 2023, July 2024, across multiple rounds).

Analysis Questions

  1. What publicly happened? Dates, numbers, official statement (if any), unofficial reporting (from Schreier, Stephen Totilo, Jacob Geller's Game File, or trade press).
  2. What was the studio working on? Shipped games, in-progress projects, leaked or rumored projects.
  3. Who owned the studio? What was the parent's financial situation? Many 2023-2024 closures were cost-cutting at struggling publishers (Embracer's debt crisis, Sony's PlayStation Studios "portfolio optimization," Microsoft's post-Activision integration, Unity's financial pressures).
  4. Was the product commercially successful? Critically? Both, neither?
  5. Was there a pattern at the parent company? (e.g., Embracer closed several studios in the same period; Microsoft restructured multiple times.)
  6. What can you infer about the decision? Was this a creative failure, a commercial failure, a financial engineering decision by the parent, a restructuring to unlock debt, or a mix?
  7. What happened to the people? Did the studio reunite elsewhere? Did veterans form a new studio? Did some find work at other studios, some leave the industry? Public LinkedIn signals help here.
  8. What does this case tell us about the industry's structural pressures?

Deliverable

A 1,000-1,500 word analysis. Structure: what happened, why it happened, what it signals, what a designer can learn from it (about where to work, how to build a career, when to take equity over salary, when to unionize, etc.).

Warning

Be careful with causal claims. You are reasoning from limited public information. Layoff decisions are made in private and often poorly communicated publicly. Use hedged language ("the public reporting suggests," "it appears that") and cite sources. Do not speculate about individuals' performance. The best versions of this exercise focus on structural and financial pressures, not on blaming specific people.

Sources

  • Jason Schreier's Bloomberg articles and Kotaku back-catalog.
  • Stephen Totilo's Game File newsletter.
  • Axios Gaming (Stephen Totilo).
  • Games Industry Biz (for European and UK coverage).
  • Famitsu and 4Gamer (Japanese industry coverage).
  • Studio heads' public statements (often on Twitter/X, Bluesky, or LinkedIn).
  • Ex-employees' public posts (LinkedIn "Open to Work," public tweets about the closure).

Optional Extension Exercises

A. Build a revenue projection spreadsheet. For your project from Exercise 3, build a Google Sheets or Excel model projecting Steam revenue at 5k, 25k, 100k, and 500k lifetime units. Include: Valve's 30% / 25% / 20% tiered cut, your cost of goods (near zero for digital), refund rate assumption (~10%), regional pricing adjustment, taxes (VAT, sales tax), and net to developer. Compare to your stated budget. At what unit sales do you break even? This exercise is eye-opening.

B. Map the outsourcing graph. Pick one AAA game (e.g., Horizon Forbidden West, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Spider-Man 2) and identify every outsourcing studio credited in the end credits. Note what they contributed (usually found in the "Special Thanks" or "External Development" sections of credits). Locate each studio geographically. What does the global distribution of game labor look like for a single AAA product?

C. Compare pitch documents to published designs. Some studios have published their original pitch decks. Bungie's Destiny pitch deck leaked; Rare's Sea of Thieves pitch is discussed in their internal retrospective; Psyonix's Rocket League pitch decks have been shared in GDC talks. Compare the pitched game to the shipped game. What changed? Why?

D. Shadow a producer's week. If you have a mentor or know a working producer, ask to see one week of their task list (redacted). What percentage of the work is scheduling? Coordination? Firefighting? Design decisions? The gap between what producers are assumed to do and what they actually do is one of the least-discussed realities of the industry.

Exercise 5: Structural — Trace the Ownership Graph

The ownership structure of the game industry has consolidated dramatically over the past decade. The question of "who owns this studio and who owns that owner" is no longer trivia; it shapes what games get greenlit, what gets cancelled, and whose worker protections apply.

Pick three studios you respect or have interviewed with and trace their full ownership graph up to the ultimate parent.

Example (for illustration, do not use)

  • Naughty Dog — owned by Sony Interactive Entertainment — owned by Sony Group Corporation (Japanese publicly traded, 6758.T).
  • FromSoftware — majority owned by Kadokawa Corporation (Japanese publicly traded, 9468.T) — Kadokawa has Sony Group as a significant minority shareholder (roughly 10% as of writing).
  • Supergiant Games — independent, privately held, no parent company.

Your Task

For each of your three studios, document:

  1. The immediate parent (if any).
  2. The ultimate public-market or ultimate-private owner.
  3. The year of any acquisition and the approximate deal value if public.
  4. Other studios owned by the same parent. Is there overlap in platforms, genres, or IP strategies?
  5. The parent's public financial health (market cap, recent layoffs, debt levels). Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, or the parent's investor-relations site.
  6. Any known restructurings or strategy shifts at the parent in the past two years that might affect the studio.

Why This Matters

A studio's freedom to make the games it wants to make is constrained by its parent's strategic priorities. Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard and ZeniMax has concentrated decision-making about dozens of studios under one roof. Embracer Group's 2022-2023 debt crisis caused a cascade of studio closures across previously independent brands (Saber, Crystal Dynamics-Eidos, Gearbox, many more). Sony's 2024 "portfolio optimization" closed London Studio and restructured several PlayStation Studios.

Before joining or contracting with a studio, knowing the ownership graph tells you something about how stable the gig is and whose quarterly earnings call you are, indirectly, working on.

Deliverable

A 600-900 word document mapping the three ownership graphs, with a reflection on what the structural picture tells you about each studio's likely freedom of maneuver. Include a simple diagram (ASCII-art or a sketched image) for at least one of them.

Exercise 6: Practical — The Credit Audit

Pick a major AAA game you love. Watch the entire end credits — yes, the full runtime, often 25-45 minutes. Note:

  1. How many discrete names appear.
  2. How many external studios are credited (under headers like "External Development," "Additional Development," "Special Thanks").
  3. How many geographic regions are represented, based on the external studio names and what you can find out about their headquarters.
  4. Which roles are most represented (artists? engineers? QA?).
  5. Whether outsourcing studios' employees are individually credited or the studio is simply named.

This exercise takes 45 minutes of your life and will permanently change how you think about AAA production. The game you love is the work of thousands of people, many of them in contexts very different from the ones you imagine.

Deliverable

A 500-700 word reflection on what you saw and what it changed about your view of the game and the industry.

Reflection Questions

  • Where do you want to work in five years? Which segment? Why?
  • What kind of stability do you need financially, and what segment matches that need?
  • What is your personal risk tolerance for a publisher deal vs. self-funding?
  • Would you rather ship one game every five years or one update every two weeks? (The answer tells you AAA-vs.-live-service.)
  • Are you willing to move for a job? Which cities are you unwilling to move to?
  • What are your lines on crunch, unpaid overtime, NDAs on working conditions?
  • If you had a credible offer at a first-party studio, a mid-tier publisher-owned studio, and an indie collective, which would you take and why? What additional information would change your answer?
  • Would you accept equity in an early-stage studio in lieu of 30% of a market-rate salary? At what stage of your own life and finances does that trade become reasonable?
  • How do you think about the ethics of working at a studio that ships games with the dark patterns Chapter 33 covered? Is the ethics of your work your responsibility, the studio's, or both?

Record your answers. They will change over time. Re-read them in five years.

A Note on Doing These Exercises Well

The exercises in this chapter are different from the design exercises in most of this book. They are research exercises. The quality of your work depends on the quality of your sources and the honesty of your triangulation, not on the cleverness of your design instincts.

The discipline to practice: every claim you make about a studio, a project, or an industry trend should trace back to a citable source. "I heard that" and "it's well-known that" are not sources. When the source is an employee's personal tweet or a Glassdoor review, note that explicitly — these are meaningful but partial data points, not definitive accounts.

The industry rewards people who do the homework. If you can walk into an interview knowing the studio's ownership structure, their last three games' reception, their public stance on unionization, and the name of the creative director you would report to, you are already in the top 10% of candidates. If you can walk in having read the Jason Schreier postmortem of their most troubled recent project and knowing which lessons they publicly claim to have learned from it, you are in the top 1%. Most people show up having played the games. Play the games and do the homework.