Agenda

This session gives game developers a practical framework for diagnosing the problems most likely to sink a studio, before an investor, publisher, or the market finds them first.

Drawing on 22 years of experience as a fractional COO, angel investor, and advisor to indie game studios, the speaker walks through seven categories of studio health that experienced investors and publishers use to evaluate teams, often without founders realizing it. The talk uses a simple information-quality lens, Signal, Proxy, and Placeholder, to help attendees assess whether their answers to hard questions are actually holding up, or just filling space.

Tailored for teams of 1 to 100, the session covers founder fit and role clarity, product and market alignment, production and operational readiness, go-to-market traction, business model realism, narrative consistency, and legal and platform risk. Each category includes a concrete red flag and a before-and-after example showing the difference between a weak answer and a strong one.

This is not a theory talk. It is a practical guide to what goes wrong, why it was usually visible in advance, and what you can do about it now.

Takeaway

Attendees leave with two concrete tools: a Signal-Proxy-Placeholder framework for evaluating the quality of their own answers to investor and publisher questions, and a seven-category self-assessment checklist covering the areas where early-stage studios most reliably get into trouble.

Intended Audience

Founders, leads, and producers at early-stage indie studios who are building toward a funding round, a publishing deal, or simply want to make their studio harder to break. No finance background is required. Attendees will get the most out of this session if they have a working understanding of their game's goals, their team's structure, and where they are in development.