How to Validate Your Game Idea Before You Build It

In 2014, Steam released around 7000 games. In 2024? Over 18,000. That’s an 11x increase in a decade. The top 100 games capture 90% of the revenue which leaves thousands of game studios splitting scraps while their games drown in obscurity.

So how do you avoid spending years on a game that never finds its audience?

Is there a way to figure out if a game idea has the potential to become successful?

How can you avoid spending months or even years building a game without knowing if it will lead anywhere?

I sat down with Riad who has 20 years experience building games, to break down the validation strategies most indie developers ignore until it’s too late. What follows isn’t just theory, it’s a playbook for testing your ideas before you bet years of your life on them.

Why Is Predicting Game Success so Hard?

The hard truth is that it’s almost impossible to predict what will be fun.

Look at Hollywood. Billion-dollar studios with decades of experience still can’t string together consistent hits. Games move even faster, influenced by pop culture, new tech, and shifts in player behavior that happen overnight. 

Riad’s take is blunt: predicting success is “kind of a fallacy or like a dead end.”

The better approach? Stop trying to predict. Start validating.

Don’t assume anything. Test your assumptions as quickly as possible. We’ve figured out engines, distribution, and marketing. Now it’s time to get good at ideation and validation. That’s how you lower risk.

What Actually Needs Validating?

Not all validation is created equal. There are two distinct aspects to game success:

1. Marketability – The outside appeal. Genre, theme, target audience, visual style. This is the “city building game with zombies on mobile” elevator pitch. You can validate this immediately, even before a single line of code exists.
2. Quality – The actual gameplay. Fun factor, addictiveness, polish. This only reveals itself through prototypes and playtesting. Late-stage validation.

You need both to create a virtuous cycle: marketability gets players to check out your game, quality makes them recommend it forward. Without one or the other, the chain breaks.

How Do You Validate at Each Stage of Production?

Different phases demand different methods:

Concepting Phase: Test Marketability Early

You don’t need a game yet. Fake screenshots. Mock up a trailer. Post concept art on social media and gauge reactions. This is your cheapest validation, zero code, pure audience signal.

Put up a Steam page as early as possible. You need minimum assets (a few screenshots), but even a year or two before release, start collecting wishlists. Wishlists are weak signals individually, but in aggregate, they confirm whether your concept resonates.

Preproduction: Test Quality Through Prototypes

Game jams are perfect here. Ludum Dare gets massive visibility because creators rate each other’s games. If you can rank top 3 among thousands of games with just a two-day prototype, you’ve got a strong core loop.

Then watch what happens after: if your game jam entry pulls 10K, 100K, or 500K downloads on Itch, you’re onto something.

Production: Demos Are the New Meta

Steam’s demo ecosystem has become critical. Your demo can go viral on its own, collecting reviews and playtime data. Nothing validates quality better than raw playtime. If people can’t stop playing for 100 hours, that’s your signal, even stronger than revenue.

What About Social Media Validation?

Here’s where it gets tricky.

Social media is useful for early feedback and learning how to talk about your game. 

Listen to how fans mirror your concept back: “Oh, this is like Stranger Things in space.” 

That’s your tagline.

But views don’t always convert. You might go viral and it goes nowhere. TikTok users are mostly on mobile, not logged into Steam. 

Platforms penalize external links. One viral video with low follower growth is noise, not signal.

Social media can definitely be a way to seek validation but trade with caution. 

The real mistake? Developers don’t post enough. If you have followers and post something, maybe 5% see it. You could post 20 times in a row before it starts gaining any traction. Stop worrying about perfect branding. Just show your work.

What About Kickstarter, Publishers, and Other Channels?

Kickstarter has evolved. It started as pure validation → put up an idea → see if people commit money. Now, campaigns require months of prep, and developers game the system with ultra-low goals and stretch goals. It’s still validation, just not binary. It tells you how much to scope, not whether to build at all.

Publisher pitching is a data point, not a verdict. Scouts are experienced but biased. They might not understand niche genres or grassroots movements. Famous games got rejected by 50+ publishers before becoming hits. Use publisher feedback as one input, not gospel.

Riad’s trick: pitch the same game 10 times in a row at a conference, but change your tagline each time. See which framing resonates most.

How Do You Know When an Idea Is Actually Validated?

Stop looking for marginal improvements. You’re not hunting for “this performs 3% better.” You’re hunting for outliers, 100%, 1000% better performance.

If you’re wondering whether your idea is validated, you probably haven’t found it yet. 

When you hit “product-market fit”, you’ll know. There’s no question about it.

Could it be that your marketing just sucks? Maybe. But here’s the pendulum swing: it’s both. You need the right concept AND the right quality. Every bit of marketing gets multiplied by your game’s potential.

What Mistakes Kill Validation Before It Starts?

Confirmation bias. You want your game to succeed, so you cherry-pick positive feedback and ignore red flags. The antidote: compare multiple ideas. Test three concepts simultaneously. When one gets 500 likes and another gets 100, you have a reference point.

Sunk cost fallacy. Walking away feels like failure. But if you have 30 game ideas and validation could tell you which one’s a mega-hit versus which one tanks, wouldn’t you want to know before you build?

Building in stealth. Unless you’re a proven hit-maker with fans waiting for your next move, announce as early as possible. For 99% of developers, nobody’s waiting for your game. Nobody even knows you exist. Put up that Steam page. Start collecting data now.

Disregarding validation as “too capitalistic.” Validation doesn’t destroy art. It helps you choose which of your ideas to pursue. It’s not about chasing trends—it’s about unlocking your potential with the limited time you have.

Ideation Is the New Competitive Advantage

We’ve figured out distribution, marketing, and production. The biggest growth area now is ideation and concepting. That’s where most developers spend the least time thinking.

If you could only implement one validation practice? Do a game jam. It hits multiple validation aspects in just two or three days. Even if you walk away from the idea, you’ve only invested a weekend.

The market is saturated. The algorithms favor hits. The old playbook of “build it and they will come” is dead.

What works now? Test fast. Test cheap. Test often. Find the outlier before you commit the years.

Because in an industry where 18,000 games fight for attention annually, the ones that win aren’t just well-made, they’re well-validated.

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Woww you read all the way through! 😻👏

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