Business Model Before Creative Vision
The business model decides where creativity can flow, not the other way around
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 82%
The common narrative holds that a creative genius makes something and business models rearrange around the vision. Lasky inverts it. Business models define the channels where creativity can flow, and have done so across the last fifty years of the games industry. The mechanism is concrete. In the packaged-goods era the goal was to sell a disc and get the buyer back a year later for another one, so a degree of planned obsolescence had to be designed into the disc itself - which is how you get annual FIFA and Call of Duty releases. Free-to-play demands a fundamentally different kind of game because the product must remain susceptible to the monetisation mechanic. The console itself was a business-model revolution against arcade quarter-drop economics. The insight generalises to any creative industry where a commercial layer and a creative layer must collaborate.
Origin
The organising thesis of Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins's Gamecraft series, itself inspired by Thomas Schatz's book The Genius of the System, which elevated the business side of the Hollywood studio era.
Core principles
- 01Creative geniuses are real, and they operate inside constraints set by the business model.
- 02Every monetisation choice writes design requirements into the product.
- 03Revolutionary changes in an industry are usually model changes, not craft changes.
- 04The creative and commercial sides collaborate; they do not take turns.
- 05The same dynamic runs across every creative industry, not just games.
How to run it
- 1
State the revenue mechanic first
Write, in one sentence, exactly how and when money changes hands. Disc purchase, subscription, in-game currency, advertising, quarter drop.
Watch out Skipping this step means the model will get chosen implicitly by whichever channel you happen to launch in.
- 2
Derive the design requirements it forces
Enumerate what the mechanic demands of the product. An annual repurchase model requires planned obsolescence; a free-to-play model requires a loop that keeps giving reasons to spend.
Pro tip If a requirement feels cynical, that is usually a sign you have identified a real one.
- 3
Name what the model forbids
Identify the creative ambitions the model makes impossible. A one-purchase, play-forever product ends the packaged-goods business, which is why nobody built it.
Watch out Fighting the constraint with craft rarely works; change the model instead.
- 4
Study the last model revolution in your category
Look at the previous shift - free-to-play, digital distribution, streaming, the console replacing the arcade - and catalogue what it made newly buildable.
Pro tip Free-to-play was to games what television was to film, or what broadcast was to professional sport.
- 5
Align creative and commercial deliberately
Put the model constraints in front of the creative team as inputs rather than as late-stage vetoes, and treat the collaboration as the design process itself.
Pro tip The same collaboration explains outcomes in luxury goods and film as much as in games.
In the wild
In the packaged-goods era, the entire business depended on someone buying a disc and returning a year later for another one. That single fact dictated what went onto the disc: it had to contain a degree of planned obsolescence, because a game bought once and played forever would end the industry. Annual franchise releases follow directly.
→ Decades of annual FIFA and Call of Duty releases, still firing on all cylinders even as models rotated beneath them.
Robbins convinced Lasky that the console was itself a revolutionary business model. The arcade ran on quarter drop - six dollars for six minutes - so putting the box in the living room removed per-play payment and functioned almost like an early form of free-to-play from the player's point of view.
→ The living-room console displaced arcade economics and reshaped what kinds of games were worth making.
Common mistakes
Believing the creative genius narrative
Designers lead the industry but operate inside constraints set by the model they work in. Treating vision as unconstrained produces plans that cannot be financed.
Choosing the model after the product
By the time a product is built, its monetisation options have already been narrowed by design decisions nobody framed as commercial ones.
Assuming the constraint is permanent
Revolutionary model shifts happen roughly once a decade and open a set of products that were previously unbuildable; missing one is how incumbents lose.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders, product leaders and analysts in games, media and any creative industry trying to explain why products in a category look the way they do.
Not ideal for
Pure patronage or grant-funded work where no revenue mechanic constrains the creative brief.
From the transcript
“there are very clear business models that guide where the water of creativity can flow and that has been for the last 50 years what…”
“in the package Goods era your your goal was to sell a disc and then get somebody to come back a year later and buy…”
“what you're going to put on that disc is going to be informed by that business model it's got to have a degree of planned…”
From the episode
Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming
Mitch Lasky