Luck, Risk, & Coinflip of Success

Rules for Success

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” - Anton Chigurh

At game developer meetups, I often hear variants of “We’re working on a Turn-Based Rhythm Farming Sim”, or a “Couch Co-op Souls-like Cooking RTS”, with a well-rehearsed speech for why they will be successful. They believe themselves to have discovered a rule to success, and are acting upon it. Months later we cross paths again, often they have moved on to some new idea. Their speech takes a different form, starting with how they have learned a great deal from their failure, and have discovered a new rule to lead them to success.

I understand all too well where this misguided optimism comes from, having told others how my “AA quality educational games” might have a decent sized market. My first game taught low-level programming, pulling in about $100k in sales. So clearly, I was going to take my learnings, and apply them to a new game to teach English, which was going to be a bigger success. Instead, this new game failed miserably. The rule for success I thought I had stumbled onto proved to be entirely wrong.

If my own rules proved hollow, perhaps I could find better ones by looking outward at games that were major successes. Take for example the game Megabonk, which is a “Rogue-like Horde-survival Auto-shooter”. What rule did Megabonk follow to allow this game take off so spectacularly when our games failed? Was it the complementary gameplay loops? The synergistic mashup of genres? The ‘vibes’? Many games excel at these and still fail.

If every rule collapses under scrutiny, then maybe it’s all just luck. Take for example the game Among Us. It was an absolute flop on release, and only became successful a few years after launch when governments forced citizens into home isolation in response to Covid-19. The game became one of the few ways to connect with friends due to the easy learning curve and fun team gameplay. What lesson can a developer possibly draw from this, other than success is random?

Like the coin flips of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old men, we tell ourselves stories to make these outcomes seem predestined. Analyses of game successes often ascribe design genius or market foresight where there was mostly circumstance. The timing, platform visibility, and streamer virility are but Chigurh’s coins flipping in the air. Developers, critics, and players alike pretend to understand why a game ‘worked’, but more often they’re just narrating coincidence as destiny. Clinging to rules gives developers the illusion that they are in control of their destiny.

Borrowing from the opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. There is often only one way to succeed, to make something people want. However, there are infinite ways to fail. Did my language learning game fail because of the art style? Maybe we needed to start with a cool language, like Japanese? Should we have used a different game engine. Did we market hard enough? Maybe our team just wasn’t a good fit. If learning from success is dubious, learning from failures is substantially more dubious.

Maybe it’s Luck

If we cannot say with absolute certainty whether a game will be successful, surely we can at least predict better than chance? If randomness underlies success, perhaps the key is not to surrender to luck, but to understand its varieties. | Type of Luck | Description | Example Games | |——————|—————–|——————-| | Blind Luck | Success that happens by pure chance - external timing, viral spread, or unexpected cultural relevance | Among Us becomes a global hit during lockdowns; Flappy Bird goes viral through memes; Fall Guys releases at the perfect moment. | | Luck from Motion (Active Effort & Hustle) | Luck generated through sheer activity - constant experimentation, shipping, iterating, and adapting. The more actions you take, the more chances luck has to find you. | Fortnite pivots from a failing co-op shooter to battle royale overnight; No Man’s Sky rebuilds its reputation through years of updates; Supercell’s iterative “cell” model produces hits like Clash of Clans. | | Luck from Awareness (Recognizing Opportunities) | Luck that comes from sharp perception - spotting shifts, unmet needs, or emerging patterns before others do. | Grow a Garden was a Roblox hit that identified that Gen Z never had a Farmville experience; Valve notices the mod community’s potential, turning Counter-Strike into a full franchise. | | Luck from Uniqueness (Attracting Luck) | Luck that comes to you because your work or identity is distinctive - others seek you out to collaborate, adapt your IP, or leverage your creative voice. | FromSoftware’s style attracts Elden Ring with George R. R. Martin; Kojima Productions gets offers from major studios post-Death Stranding. |

These categories illustrate how luck can be influenced, but never truly controlled. Many studios, operate somewhere between the Blind Luck and Luck From Motion categories. These are often mistaken for opposites: one passive, one active. In reality, they only differ in the number of attempts, and the intellectual rigor of each attempt. Fortnite’s victory over PUBG is told as a story of perfect execution, overtaking a good game with a better one. However, this erases the randomness beneath. Fortnite was Epic’s third swing after Unreal Tournament and Paragon failed. Motion didn’t remove luck; it only gave ‘fate’ more chances to show itself. Chigurh’s coin does not reveal destiny, it only reveals chance.

The Luck from Uniqueness category is Chigurhian in a different sense. A precondition of this type of luck is that you are already somewhat successful in a domain. Take for example Lena Raine, who composed with a unique emotional synth style in the game Celeste. This caught Mojang’s attention, leading to a contract for Minecraft: Caves & Cliffs. On a larger scale, there are examples like Avalanche Software, a 150 person development team acquired by Warner Brothers from Disney. This team already had experience with family-friendly licensed worlds, making them absolutely perfect to develop Hogwarts Legacy. In both cases, past successes compounded into future ones - luck found them.

For those who are high agency, Luck from Awareness offers the most hope of success. From your unique understanding of the world, you can potentially see where the ball is going before it gets there. It would be foolish of me to give you ideas for what this might look like, because the entire premise is to be ahead of the curve.

An often overlooked detail is that these categories are too rigid and are often mixed. Take for example the famed game developer Jonathan Blow, who is often reduced to a caraciture story of “Once upon a time he made a game called Braid that blew up. This made him rich, allowing him to fund his future puzzle games”. On the outside, it looks like Blind Luck. In reality, he faced countless rejections from contractors and publishers. His art style was criticized as being irredeemably bad. However, his persistance eventually got him onto the Xbox Indie Arcade store, where his game was a massive hit. His users forgave the art style, appreciating the depth of the puzzles and mechanics far more. His success was born of a healthy blend of all of the types of luck.

Looking at this story, it can be difficult to draw any lesson other than to ‘try really hard’. This lesson feels even more insulting if you are already ‘trying really hard’. If luck defines how success finds you, then to see clearer, we must invert.

Choosing your Luck

The problem with luck is that we do not choose it. It is not an action. Ironically, we are actually choosing ‘possible misfortunes’, also known as risks. When scratching a lottery ticket, you are choosing the possible misfortune of spending $20 on a dud. When choosing to work on a game that leverages AI or the blockchain, you are choosing the possible misfortune that the field does not advance fast enough for costs or latency to go down. The risks we choose to take directly impact the types of luck to which we are subjected. | Type of Risk | Primary Type of Luck | Description | |——————|—————–|——————-| | Market Risk | Luck from Uniqueness | Will people even want this? Will my style resonate? | | Execution Risk | Luck from Motion | Can we even put together the right team? Can we ship the game before running out of cash? | | Technological Risk | Luck from Awareness | Will the technology advance enough to enable this? |

Whichever risk your team subjects itself to will become the greatest hurdle. For this reason, it makes sense to choose a risk that aligns with your greatest strengths.

Supergiant Games took on massive market risk by betting on a unique art and narrative style that they believed would resonate. Despite entering the seemingly crowded market of Roguelikes, their bet paid off, and their game Hades was a massive hit.

No Man’s Sky famously promised expansive procedurally generated worlds, creating immense hype around their product. They ultimately released to an audience of disappointed users when they failed to deliver on their promises. However, post-launch they were able to correct this mistake through sheer execution, making for a remarkable redemption story.

The lesson to take from these is not to avoid risk in its entirety, as eliminating risk entirely also means eliminating luck - no risk, no reward. Instead, the aim is to reduce the most existential risks, without dulling your ambitions beyond recognition. That said, one should take extreme caution in how risks are reduced. One common pitfall is to eagerly work with someone you just met, only to find that you do not respect their decisions. What seemed like ‘reducing execution risk’ actually ended up creating execution risk. This team is likely to blow up and leave the pieces of their game behind.

I reduced market risk in my first educational game Squally by running a small KickStarter before I got too far into development. Additionally, I was building the game that my 12 year old self would have wanted, which was another great way to reduce market risk.

While these are helpful tactics, there are pitfalls to avoid here too. I’ve seen many developers go crazy with KickStarter rewards, but in pursuit of reducing market risk, they instead increased their execution risk. Time that should have been spent developing their game is now being spent on shipping T-shirts and mugs across the globe. If your team excels at this type of execution, then this trade-off may be worth it.

For my second game targeting English learners, I eliminated some execution risk by teaming up with my brother. However, we took on substantially more market risk, the area where we were weakest, and it cost us dearly.

Moving forward, I am leveraging my unique experiences gained from working at companies like Roblox and Manticore Games. I have seen how large monolithic game engines operate. I have spent months debugging esoteric memory leaks. I have seen how incredibly slow the development cycles can be. I no longer believe these engines are the long-term future, so I want to take on some technology risk and solve this.

I am directing my ‘awareness’ to work on miniature, specialized game engines, using emerging technologies like Rust/WGPU/WASM to eliminate the aforementioned pains. The incumbent giants have too much inertia to pivot to these technologies. In fact, the opposite has happened. Unity has deprecated their web player, abandoning web altogether. Being able to share a link and hop into a game with near-zero latency could be a huge distribution unlock. If Among Us had been shareable by direct link, its virality curve might have been quite literally vertical.

Of course, it may be that I am entirely wrong. Even if I am not wrong, someone else could beat me to the punch, or see a glimpse of the future that I missed, allowing them to make clearer decisions. I know I cannot drive the probability to 100%, but I can do everything in my power to get as close as possible. And if I fail, I will dust myself off and try again.

Instead of asking yourself, “what makes games successful?”, the better question is, “what will make YOUR game successful?”. What do you know about the world that others do not? What rules will you choose to maximize your strengths? In the end, the rule you choose may not save you, but to have no rule at all is to leave fate to a coin toss.

If you wish to follow our progress, follow me at https://x.com/zcanann