Support or Sequel?
Four Tests for Deciding Where Your Next Dev Month Goes
Here’s a crazy stat to get us started: did you know that Devolver Digital earned 88% of its 2024 revenue from games they shipped years ago? That means that all the new releases it spent all that year marketing (and I bet the data will show this year, too) didn’t even come close to topping its revenue charts; indeed, the publisher’s back catalog is what keeps its lights on.
I wanted to touch on this topic this week because an attendee asked me the following question at my recent Game Dev Assembly Editors webinar:
How do you decide whether to launch a new game, or keep supporting the game you already have?
Now, obviously, it depends highly from game to game. However, this is also kind of useless advice, isn’t it? Namely, because it begs the question of what “it” depends on, which I very un-helpfully didn’t elaborate on. So in the spirit of giving actually useful and actionable advice (ie, the very reason you read this newsletter), I’ll give you the framework I’d actually run with a client who’s facing this decision. I built it around four simple tests, which you apply in order.
First, though, I want to address a false premise that this question sneaks in, and kill it right off the bat:
This Is Not an Either/Or Decision
The attendee’s question assumes that your existing game and your next game compete for the same resources (be it time, budget, effort, or all of the above). And sure, sometimes they do! But for the vast majority of studios, their existing game actually serves as their next game’s single cheapest available marketing channel.
After all, your shipped game has many, many things that your unannounced game does not, among them:
Steam followers
A review history
A (hopefully) active Discord
An email list
And most importantly: players who already trust you
Every single one of those is a launch asset for your next game.
After all, when Studio MDHR or Supergiant announces a new title, it’s not like they’re starting from scratch, from zero wishlists; no, they’ve already got a head start on that front, by dint of their existing communities and brand equity. So instead, all they really have to do is convert an existing audience, which they’ve already spent years earning, to their new title. That is a much easier lift, which confers them a massive advantage over studios that are launching their debut title.
So the real question to ask yourself isn’t whether to support Game A or launch Game B, as if one necessarily foregoes the other. Instead, you should be asking yourself which marginal dev-month, as well as which marginal marketing dollar, nets you the most long-term value for your studio.
Fortunately, that’s an eminently answerable question! Anyway, I’ve been dancing around this long enough, so here’s how to answer it:
Test 1: Marginal Return per Update
This test forms the framework’s quantitative trigger, and fortunately for you, it’s actually quite straightforward to run these numbers:
Take your last 2–3 content updates,
For each one, chart the resulting revenue lift from within 30 days after release, against what that update cost to ship (in terms of team months and tech costs),
Look at the trend line: does it go up, or does it go down?
When an update works, it really works… like, dramatically so. Take Cult of the Lamb’s recent Pilgrim Pack DLC, which drove a 280% revenue increase the month it dropped. That’s your ceiling, your absolute best-case scenario: your content drop basically functions as a second launch, re-triggering Steam’s visibility systems (which are primarily driven by revenue) as well as pulling any lapsed players back into the fold.
But that’s a literal jackpot, and you have comparable odds of hitting it. So don’t bet the farm on it! The truth is that for most games, this trendline will gradually trend downwards, and each successive update will produce a smaller spike that also decays faster than the previous update. I really want to emphasize that, in most cases, this is to be expected. Don’t beat yourself up over it if the line goes down at all.
Ah, but you caught those last two words, didn’t you? “At all.” This brings me to the real question… if it’s not that the line is going down, then what is it? If you guessed “by how much it’s going down,” go ahead and pat yourself on the back. You want to look at where you sit on that downward curve.
The specific number will vary with each game and with each studio, obviously. But in more practical terms, if your last update’s revenue lift didn’t cover its production costs, that means your existing game is no longer supporting your studio’s growth, and you should allocate your resources accordingly. Now, I’m not telling you to abandon it yet! You can and should keep it healthy by patching it and remaining active in your community… but from this point onward, understand that if you pour new content into it, you’ll net increasingly diminishing returns.
So this diagnostic, in a nutshell, is as follows: if your existing game’s last two updates each returned less than what they cost, your existing game’s support timeline is drawing to an end… whether you realize it or not.
Test 2: Audience Transferability
Next up! This next test will probably throw the biggest wrench in your calculations, so pay attention.
For this test, ask yourself if your existing game’s community is actively signaling intent to purchase your next game. Concretely, that means any and all of the following:
Wishlists on your new title,
Steam followers,
Email subscribers,
Discord members who will actually show up when you announce the new game.
If your next game is in the same genre and tone as your existing game, then the answer is probably “yes,” and that completely changes the calculus on how much you should support your current game. If you put out an update to the old game that re-engages 10,000 lapsed players, who then see the announcement for your next title in their activity feed, that isn’t a pure opportunity cost! It actually doubles as early launch marketing for your next game, even if it looks like mere patch notes for your existing game. Score it accordingly.
But if you’re doing a hard pivot for your next game — if you’re making the new game in a different genre, or for a different audience, or launching it on a different platform (or all of the above), then it’s more likely that your existing game’s audience will mostly not transfer over (unless you have Capcom-tier brand strength), and if that’s the case, then your support for your existing game really does compete head-to-head with your new project. That doesn’t mean you should stop supporting it, but you should absolutely stop pretending said support is actually building toward anything (beyond the current game’s gradually declining revenue, that is).
Oh, while we’re at it, I need to drop one really quick but really important operational note: your audience is not going to transfer by accident. If you want your old game’s community to fund and seed your new game’s launch, then you have to deliberately build that bridge for them. To start:
Cross-promote your new game when announcing updates for your existing game,
Open a “what we’re working on next” channel in Discord,
Write email sequences designed to migrate players from lists specific for your game to studio-level lists,
Do whatever you can to shout your new game from the rooftops and actually ask players to wishlist and buy.
And that’s just for starters! There are many, many ways to go about this, and what’s optimal will vary by studio. But regardless of tactics, my point is this: don’t assume your audience will show up for your new game by default; if you haven’t built the marketing infrastructure to transfer them over, then the audience you so diligently earned through your existing game will simply evaporate the day you stop updating it.
Test 3: Platform Visibility
Sorry, I’m about to throw you another wrench. For this next test, you’ll need to recalibrate your instincts based on the most recent industry data, specifically the kind that shows how over the past few years, platforms have steadily shifted value toward the back catalog instead of new releases.
Newzoo’s 2026 PC and Console report (which I’ve already cited quite a bit in these pages) found that playtime for games ranked outside the Top 20 grew 44% on PC from 2022 to 2025; furthermore, long-term survivability for these long tail studios depends on the depth of their catalog and how it interplays with platforms’ discovery mechanics more than it does on launch window momentum for any new title.
Among those long tail titles on PC, roughly 80% of revenue comes from back catalog games, not new releases! And to corroborate this insight, GameDiscoverCo’s own analysis has shown that only around 15% of Steam playtime goes to any new games at all.
Meanwhile, a new launch starts from zero in a market that sees 20,000 new Steam releases each year. Your existing game, if it’s selling steadily, already has algorithmic standing with Valve, which is insanely valuable in and of itself. Steam’s post-launch visibility is based on revenue, and a game clearing meaningful weekly revenue will continue surfacing in recommendations, tag pages, and discovery queues… without you spending a single dollar.
The implication and lesson here is that your bar for walking away from earned visibility should be very high indeed. Visibility is the most expensive thing in this industry to acquire, as well as the easiest to squander. If your existing game still has algorithmic standing, your default move should be to harvest it, not abandon it.
Test 4: Concentration Risk and Runway
Now we arrive at the framework’s counterweight, and it’s important because the previous three tests, on their own, can sneakily seduce you into milking a single game until your studio dies of old age. So stay with me for a bit longer.
The reality of the current market is that a studio with only one game is only one decay curve away from closure. Every game’s revenue eventually declines, and if your existing title generates more than 80% of your studio’s revenue and is trending down, then your studio’s survival literally depends on you launching a new game. It’s a mathematical necessity!
Sorry, but that’s just the reality.
But also, look at how the publishers who live or die by this reality play it: Team17’s new releases generated just 8% of its total revenue in the first half of 2024, while Devolver (as I opened with) runs at 88% back catalog. These companies survive because they treat their catalog as their main business and their new launches as bets… but also notice that they never stop placing bets. Their catalog funds their pipeline, while their pipeline refreshes their catalog. If they were to stop either side, the machine would simply seize up.
And yes, I know you’re not Devolver, but this same logic applies just as much for a single-title indie studio. It’s just at a smaller scale. The point is, if your back catalog consists of just one game, then your existing game’s revenue is your runway. So with that in mind, let’s conduct Test 4 by asking the following questions, in order:
How many months of runway does your current game’s decay curve give you?
Is that longer than your next game’s development timeline + a proper pre-launch marketing window?
If the answer to that second question is “no,” then forget about deciding whether to support or launch… you now have an existential scheduling emergency on your hands.
Putting It All Together with a Tapering Support Schedule
After running these four tests, most indie studios will land in the same place… and it will rarely be a binary either/or decision. In most cases, the solution is a tapering support schedule, explicitly designed to start migrating the current game’s community to the upcoming game, with Test 1 determining whether to kill support for the existing game altogether.
In practice, that looks something like this:
Continue supporting your current game, at full intensity, while its content updates still return more than they cost.
As returns decline, shift from shipping content updates to maintaining the community (a comparably lower-cost endeavor), and rebuild every remaining touchpoint to point forward at the next game:
Cross-promote announcements
Open a Discord channel for the new game
Migrate your email list to studio-level
When an update fails Test 1 (the marginal return test) twice in a row, completely cease new content production for your existing game, and shift your team’s full weight towards the new title… which by then should already have a wishlist base that you seeded with the old game’s audience.
Also, notice that this framework scaffolds what is ultimately a leadership decision. This is not a question of tactics; there is no TikTok strategy or polished trailer that can tell you where to allocate your next dev month. That question belongs to whoever owns marketing as a leadership function inside the studio; and if nobody owns it, then the decision gets made by default… which usually means that you support the old game out of habit until you discover that you’ve run out of runway and can’t fund the next game’s development or launch.
So if you’re staring at this decision right now, start with how ready you are to launch your next game. Fortunately, the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard I built takes about four minutes to complete and will tell you whether your next title has enough of a foundation to justify pulling resources off your current title:
And, of course, if you’re facing this decision and need a marketing leader to evaluate it, make it, and be accountable to its results, you can always book a free consultation with me to see if we’re a fit:
GG,
~Jay
Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com