20 biggest gamedev lies 👇
1. “We’re about to disrupt an entire genre!”
→ We’re making loud promises to create FOMO and raise our next round.
2. “Our game is a hit with millions of downloads.”
→ We lose money on every install and ROAS is deep in the red.
3. “Our team includes people behind the world’s most successful games.”
→ One guy once tested Candy Crush at King in 2013.
4. “We’re like one big family.”
→ Get ready for guilt-tripped crunch with no overtime pay.
5. “We use a data-driven approach to development.”
→ We added basic analytics and can now see Day 1 retention.
6. “Our prototyping speed is off the charts.”
→ We bought half the Unity Asset Store.
7. “Our strategy is based on deep market research.”
→ Our founder really likes Royal Match.
8. “We’ve optimized development using AI!”
→ We fired the people we over-hired during the last funding wave.
9. “Our team has full decision-making freedom.”
→ If the producer is busy, you get to choose button colors.
10. “We have a clear vision and believe in our success.”
→ We’re making it up as we go and hoping for a miracle.
11. “We’re scaling fast.”
→ We hired 12 juniors last month and forgot to onboard them.
12. “Our metrics are trending up!”
→ We had one lucky TikTok go viral.
13. “We’re community-first.”
→ We turned comments back on yesterday.
14. “We’re working with top-tier publishers.”
→ We cold-emailed someone on LinkedIn and they replied “cool”.
15. “Our pipeline is fully optimized.”
→ We renamed projects in Asana and called it a process overhaul.
16. “Our gameplay is super innovative.”
→ It’s Flappy Bird but with NFTs.
17. “We’re building around player feedback.”
→ We ignored most of it and picked the one comment that matched our gut feeling.
18. “We’ve nailed our core loop.”
→ Players open the game once, close it, and never return.
19. “We care deeply about game balance.”
→ Our spreadsheet has 42 tabs. None of them are synced to the build.
20. “We focus on long-term player engagement.”
→ We added a daily login reward and hope it works.