Whats the equivalent of testing your business idea before building a business in the gaming world ?
Well, that seems to be how many multiplayer games are released nowadays anyway. Look at ARMS or Mario Tennis Aces on the Nintendo Switch, or Pokemon GO, or Sea of Thieves* on Xbox. Released in very basic states, then slowly expanded upon via regular updates. You could even possibly say Minecraft went the same way.
That said, this sort of 'Minimum Viable Game' idea may not work as well here as it does for business products or web services. People are practically spoilt for choice when it comes to what games to buy, and a game that leaves an initial 'meh' impression (due to a lack of content/replay value) can often die out before the updates ever come. And the critics will certainly not be kind to it either...
* Admittedly, that one took four years to develop, which may not have been the best setup given the lack of content.
Other ways this is sometimes done are:
1. By releasing demos on a regular basis to test the waters 2. Splitting the game up into episodes and selling them one at a time. Valve did this with Half Life, but it was arguably TellTale Games who ran with it. 3. Or by running a beta test for the game and gauging reactions from that.
Of course, all the above assumes you can build at least a somewhat sizable portion of the game in a reasonable timeframe. If you want to know whether a completely untested idea will be viable... well good luck with that in this industry. You'll always need at least a core gameplay loop setup to know whether the idea is fun, and you'll need much more if you want to know whether anyone will buy it.
For example, let's say you want to make a retro platformer. The assumption is that many people would be interested in a new retro platformer. That's easy to check: browse through Steam's new releases, find the 10 newest retro platformers, and see how much interest they get. Heck, even imagining that exercise could be enough to make you change course.
I don't think you can gauge success by looking at existing titles. It's like asking if there's a market for scifi novels. What do you find? People like scifi novels, and there are lots of scifi novels that suck and nobody reads them. Do people like metal music? There's tons of successful metal bands, and there's an ocean of trash.
Every work is unique.
I guess if you go deeper you can get a qualitative idea by judging how good a game is before including it as a data point
These outliers don't refute the rule that different markets have different odds of success.
Stardew Valley primarily gathered early adopters through regular blog updates about dev progress.
- Finish the first 20% and presell the unstarted 80% as a Season Pass
- Launch a basic version with DLC
This probably depends on your ratio of story/art to engine/game mechanics[0] your game would have.
It seems games that do not require continuous player progress (ruling out RPGs entirely) can be a good fit.
e.g. Episodic story-telling games and then something like Hitman, so action games can be done that way too.
But you could easily release TBS games this way too, many "mission"-based games would lend themselves to this format.
[0] In a broad sense.