Understanding the Value of Comps

Game developers have been looking at comparable products – comps – since as long as there were other games to compare to. These days, understanding your comps is an essential part of the designer’s trade. When used properly they inform our understanding of the risks and opportunities around features and product concepts, but when we misunderstand their value they can all too easily lead us astray.

As designers, the bottom line is that we’re almost always reliant on our comps to make the case for our feature and project plans to the business side of our organizations. It’s equally true however that the business side often doesn’t really understand what we do in design, so the burden of identifying comps and using them wisely tends to fall squarely on us. This is a weighty responsibility.

Ways to Go Astray

By mistake or by malice, it’s easy to go wrong with comps. But the pitfalls here generally fall into just a few categories. Whether they’re easy or hard to avoid depends upon a bunch of factors, but as the cartoons of my youth were fond of reminding me, knowing is half the battle.

Invalidation By Ego

As creative types, it’s tempting to think that all of our ideas are new ones, and it follows of course that they’re not really comparable to anything that’s come before, except maybe in that mocking way where we look at our competitors and sneer about how “last gen” they are.

This is, obviously, nonsense.

While that may seem obvious, it’s an all too common reality, especially when you’re working with leadership that sees itself as visionary. I’ve encountered cases of this in my career that were pretty extreme. Developers forbidden to mention competitors’ products, or introduce designs even superficially similar to theirs. But often this takes a more subtle and insidious form where a valid, even standard-setting comp is dismissed because – whatever it is he’s doing – a designer just can’t bring himself to believe that any competitor can have ideas as good as his own.

While I might not go so far as to agree with Mark Twain on the subject, I think it’s generally safer to assume that your ideas are at best a remix of stuff that came before, or an enhancement upon it. Council yourself on this subject, and – with all due caution – watch for it in your creative leadership as well. In that scenario, you may find that it’s better to understand a comp, use it, but keep it to yourself.

The Brute Force Method

On the other end of the spectrum, it’s essential that you not try to shoehorn comps that just don’t work. In organizations that have embraced competitive analysis as a lifestyle, it’s common that comps are required before an idea can move forward. To satisfy this, it can be tempting to pick a comp that proves your point – usually something big and successful looking – and run with it even if it’s not right for the product you’re actually trying to make.

This can be especially problematic with the kind of whole product comparisons that help get a new project off the ground, because while there are countless lessons to be learned from your competitors, it’s also vitally important to clearly define the innovations you hope to make on them. They are, after all, the competitive advantage that is meant to let you surpass a more established product.

Make sure you clearly define your key differentiators up front, and stick to them. And while you’re at it, try to use those differentiators to allow for the inevitable places where your game concept is at odds with your closest comps. Forcing one-to-one parody with your competitors can create a game that clashes with its own concepts as easily as one that’s simply too derivative.

The Incomplete Match

And of course even if you manage to fly between those two extremes without crashing into either one, you’ll need to be vigilant about the details. Features do not function in a vacuum, they operate only in the context of their game, and will often function poorly, not at all, or even be net detractors when spliced into another product without a deeper understanding of what makes them tick.

Some apparently separate features need to go together to work. The two most common examples are content driven features without a steady stream of content (gacha without new cards, competition without rewards, and so on), and economic sinks without sources, or vice-versa (a shop players can never buy from, or gacha system without an outlet for excess common cards, for example).

When picking your comps, it’s important that you not cherry pick one component of a more complex feature – typically the exciting part or the bit that makes money directly – without considering the cost and benefits of the systems that support it. Your feature won’t perform without the rest of its system, and you’ve got to make the case for including the un-sexy parts that will actually make it work.

See Good In Bad

As a matter of philosophy, I think every game contains at least one good, and one bad design. No product is perfect, and it would be silly to assume that you can lift any given system from a successful product and have it work in your own. On the flip side, it’s all too common to dismiss any component part of an unsuccessful product because of the failure of the whole. Neither way of thinking is wise.

When you’re looking for good comps, look for the comps that most closely resemble your feature in scope, design, and context.

If your best comp comes from a successful game, make a close examination of why it works in that product, and how it contributes to the success of the whole. Be sure you can make a case for why it will drive the results you’re looking for, through some combination of reason and evidence. Mostly here though, you’re just looking to avoid copying the competition’s mistakes, which is a thing that most definitely happens.

In the opposite case of course, you’ll want to do much the same, but you’ll face more pressure to justify your choice because the default assumption is that an unsuccessful game is the sum of unsuccessful parts. The first step is a logical case for why the feature should work, but you’ve got to follow this up with some evidence that it actually will, if you can. Look for other, similar features – even if they’re less perfectly comparable – to make the case for its potential.

Blood From A Stone

Avoiding the pitfalls is only the beginning of what it takes to get the value out of comps though, of course. To really make them work for you you need to pick the best comps at your disposal, and then make sure that you’re doing all the required legwork.

How Stuff Works

As I’ve aluded to a couple of times above, it’s not at all sufficient that a comp simply resemble the feature you’re using it to justify. You need to be able to make a case for why that feature will work in your product, and that means understanding not just the mechanics of the feature, but why its analogues succeed in the products they’re part of, and how they actually got designed.

First, think about attachments. Your comp is part of a larger game, and interacts with at least one of the systems in that product. Some of those connections are vital to its function while some aren’t, and it’s key that you know which are which, and whether they have their own analogues in your game.

Then consider the audience, and the way they’ll perceive and interact with the feature. Games with similar mechanics can attract players with radically different preferences, and you need to understand if your feature appeals to the audience you have, not your competitor’s. The way they’ll perceive a feature depends on their interests, level of engagement, and existing commitment to the product, so make sure you’re taking all of that into account.

And finally, think about functionality. When you look at your competitor’s design, you should always be taking a critical eye, thinking about how it works and how you can do them one better. How you can simplify its presentation, reinforce the loops around it, or make it more engaging. A missed opportunity to improve is money left on the table, and you never want that.

What’s The Difference

From improvement comes differentiation, and differentiation is key, both at the whole product and individual feature levels. If you go head to head with an established opponent, you will lose, unless you can bring to bear some really meaningful leverage. This is where key differentiators come in.

Usually the easiest way to sell these is to make them “plus ones” on top of your existing comp’s proven design. Easily explained, easily understood improvements where you can point out some inadequacy in the comp and present it as an opportunity to improve in a way that – for whatever reason – they haven’t.

But even if you’ve got something more radical in mind, your comps are your friends. A well understood and successful system makes a great foundation for even aggressive innovation, because in that scenario all you’ve really got to prove is that you’re not ruining what makes the existing thing work.

Due Diligence

In the olden days of game development, understanding and iteration were all you needed. We made design decisions based on little more than what we thought would be good for the product. Those days are gone now, at least in most of the industry, and today we need to know our business in a more literal sense than we ever did back when.

Once you’ve got a good comp, and you know what you’re going to do with it in your own product, it’s time to set some real, justifiable expectations about what it’s going to do for your business. Whether it’s a whole product, or an individual feature, comps are invaluable in making informed decisions about what will move the needle for your product, and by how much. In short, they help us figure out how much money a given design is likely to make for us, directly or indirectly.

Depending on your organization, this may not be your job as a designer. It’s pretty common to have product managers, analysts, or even dedicated researchers to dig deep for this kind of insight. But if you want to see your designs succeed, you’ll do well to select comps that you believe will (honestly) support your ideas, and do so as clearly as possible in the eyes of whoever is handling the book keeping.

If you can, set out goals for the project, and pick your features, based on their comps, in a way that works out to meet those goals. Short of simply building it and seeing what happens, the best case you can make for your design is one where the figures all add up.

No Comp, No Problem

At the end of the day, sometimes there really is no valid comp to work from. Famous sayings notwithstanding, all the good ideas haven’t been thought of already, and this is especially true when framed in the context of a particular product. When you find yourself with something you can’t compare directly against another product, it’s time to take a leap of faith, and the question becomes how to make sure that leap is a wise one.

Good Faith Comparisons

Whether you have a comp for your design or not, the most important thing is that you can make a case for why it’s right for your game, your audience, and the team who will produce it. More than simply believing in your design, it has to make sense as something that will improve your product.

Comps are great. They’re a powerful tool which help us realistically evaluate both risk and reward. But at the end of the day you’ll have to go beyond your comps, at least a little into unknown territory, because in the fast paced world of game development it pays to be a leader not a follower. Your good faith in your design is what will justify the risks you choose to take.

The value of comps lies in knowing and thus minimizing those risks, while maximizing your opportunities.