Airline Pilots follow safety checklists to reduce crashes. Even for decade-long veterans can forget to do the obvious. Same thing for F2P game studios. This is my F2P Checklist I bring to every game studio when I’m analyzing their projects.

It’s surprising how few studios have strong answers for each of these key boxes prepared over time. Often there’s a mismatch between spend motivation and the archetypes they’re focusing on. Sometimes their content plan is all about getting the game out the door, but means they’ll never be able to support it long-term unless they’re a mega-hit.

Sometimes they have no inspiring mid-term goals. Sometimes they have strong month-to-month progression but haven’t thought about the day-to-day satisfaction. Sometimes they build a great lifecycle for the day 1 players but the player starting 2 years down the road is in for a terrible time.

Make sure your studio has good answers for each of these boxes before launch. If you don’t, you’ll have to try and fix it mid-air.