Frequently Asked Questions
These common questions and their short answers are taken from Cheryl Platz’s book The Game Development Strategy Guide: Crafting Modern Video Games That Thrive (2025). You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.
- Does “game development” in the title mean this is a programming book?
No. This book is intended for anyone who works on video games, and starts in Chapter 1, “What Makes Us Play,” by exploring universal player motivations. The word developer in video gaming, like the broader software industry, is used in many different ways. As discussed in Chapter 3, “Putting the Dev in Game Development,”while some folks believe “game development” refers only to programming, it is usually a more general term applied to the collective act of making a game across all disciplines (as demonstrated by the existence of the broader Game Developers Conference). - Is this a design book?
Yes, in the sense that video games are inherently a design problem. In particular, see Chapter 4, “Game Designer’s Toolkit,” to explore game design fundamentals and Chapter 5, “Game Experience Design in Practice,” to explore user experience design in games. But this is not a book just for designers. Good design requires full context, and this book provides context that will prove useful to any game development or support discipline, like the creative ideation and prioritization techniques in Chapter 14, “Let the Right Ideas Win.” - Is this book only useful for new game developers?
This book is useful for game developers at any stage of their career. While it’s a fantastic overview for early career game developers, many veterans who reviewed this book mentioned that they pulled away new insights, especially from chapters like Chapter 9, “From Emergence to Prosocial Gaming.” and Chapter 11, “Efficient and Ethi-cal Economies.” Readers will walk away with a common language for game development techniques from chapters like Chapter 3 and Chapter 13, “The Good and Bad of Game Dev Processes,” that you can use with developers at any career stage. - Is this book only for indie gamers? Or is it only for huge AAA games?
There are insights in this book that will apply to teams and games of any size, like the insights about player motivation in Chapter 1 and Chapter 6, “The Why of Multiplayer,” and the insights about industry roles and practices in Chapter 3 and Chapter 14. If you’re on a big team, Chapter 13 will help you understand how you fit into the bigger process. If you’re a team of one or a few,Chapter 15, “Failure to Thrive,” will help you make sure you don’t overlook critical considerations until too late in your process. - Can I use this book to help my nonindustry partners understand game development?
Absolutely! As I wrote this book, I wrote it with a secondary audience of partners like business development, legal, and other groups who don’t experience the industry in the same way. There are tons of folks who would benefit from an overview of the industry and our considerations all in one place. They’ll get the most out of chapters like Chapter 2, “The Living Business of Games,” and Chapter 10, “The Money Game,” which lay out the basic business models at play today, as well as Chapter 3, which will help folks understand why game development teams are so big and complex, and Chapter 7, “Engaging Players over Time,” and Chapter 8,“Creating Immersive Worlds,” which really help explain how games are different from other forms of entertainment.
