SWOT Analysis

In the merciless battleground which is the world of business competition, there are few weapons as well wielded as the SWOT Analysis (also known as a SWOT Matrix). This simple grid allows you to observe both your project and your competition, measuring each one’s advantages and disadvantages and allowing you to have a better idea where your product is positioned.

In the world of game design, a SWOT matrix allows us to know which features we need to include in our game (super useful during a GD-2), and to set our expectations as to where we can actually lie in the overall gaming ecosystem. It also informs what you need to emphasize and what you need to watch out for when starting the planning of a project.

The SWOT is a grid that lists out factors that affect your game’s positioning, positive & negative and external & internal. It divides these factors into 4 categories:

• Strengths — internal, positive. These are the characteristics of the product that give it an advantage over your competition. In the case of games, this can be a novel game mechanic, a hook, a new shader technique your team developed, etc…
• Weaknesses — internal, negative. These are the elements of the project that affect it negatively. For example a new team that hasn’t worked together before, your first attempt at a genre, a really limited budget, etc…
• Opportunities — external, positive. These are advantages for your game that come from outside your direct control. Classical examples include IP partnerships, a new platform you are developing on, ties to a cultural touch point that is trending, etc…
• Threats — external, negative. These are risks that are outside of your control and can affect the project. For example other teams working on similar games, working with technology which is unstable, working with a third party which is unreliable, etc..

Notice the first letter of each category, that’s an easy way to remember 🙂

SWOT analysis has been used in business circles since the 1960’s. The first book to describe its categories (even though it doesn’t give the matrix a name yet) is Business Policy: Text and Cases written by Harvard graduates Edmund P. Learned, C. Roland Christensen, Kenneth R. Andrews, and William D. Guth.

1. Find 5-7 games that are your competitors. They can have similar characteristics, genre or appeal to the same demographic.
   • Be careful to choose games that are at your level of scope and marketing budget; you may be inspired by large AAA games, but they are not your competition (unless you are also making a large AAA game).
   • Also be careful of just selecting successful games. A lot can be learned from analyzing failures
2. For each of these create a SWOT matrix and fill it up
   • Doing research on their production history (news articles, dev interviews) can help find external characteristics (opportunities & threats).
   • Reading reviews, postmortems and player comments can help find internal characteristics (strengths & weaknesses).
   • There’s no real maximum for each category.
3. Make a SWOT matrix for your proposed project.
   • Reach out to disciplines like Marketing and Production to learn more about the external & internal elements of the project.
4. Compare them all; are there commonalities between the competition? Is there a difference between the successful and failed projects? How do all of these compare to your game?

Let’s imagine you are planning to work on a bartending narrative game in the same vein of VA-11 Hall-A.

Before we start production proper, we want to make sure that we understand what our competition looks like. Doing some research (Steam’s “More like This” section and searching by tags are a great source) we find there a few similar games out there: The Red Strings Club, Coffee Talk, etc… Each one deserves their own SWOT, but for this example we’ll stick to VA-11 Hall-A. After some research (I relied on Wikipedia’s “Critical reception” section and the Dev’s site), the SWOT grid looks like this:

It is good to review these with your team, or make individual SWOTS and compare notes. There can be a lot of discussion about each point. For example, notice that “Cyberpunk theme is niche” is considered both a strength and a threat. A niche game appeals to a small market section, but these can be extraordinarily passionate about that. Discussion will help properly place the different elements.

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