Ahead of his session The Game Discovery Lab: A Small Studio's Approach for Killing Bad Ideas Fast at Gamesforum London, we spoke to Fabio Dellerba, COO & Founder at Digitalmoka to answer one simple question: 

What if the smartest thing a game studio can do is kill an idea before it becomes a game?

For the nine-person Rome-based studio, finding the next successful title means getting better at testing ideas before committing significant time and money to development.

Don't fall in love with your ideas

In 2013, Digitalmoka was founded by Fabio and his lifelong friend and business partner, Massimo Dolce. Fabio stated that now after developing a suite of mobile card games, the studio is now ‘’in search of a new title and hopefully a new success.’’

That search has changed how the team thinks about validation.

“I think the most difficult part is the mental switch,” Fabio says. “When you market test your game ideas, you're basically paying to know that most of your ideas are weak.”

It's a difficult reality for developers to accept, particularly when they believe strongly in a concept and this is something that Fabio knows first-hand.

“At the beginning of our experiment, I literally fell in love with one prototype, but I think I'm the only person who liked it because the market would not agree with me.”

His advice is simple: “Try to not fall in love with your ideas until the market proves they are worth it.”

For smaller teams, discovering that early can be far cheaper than discovering it after months of development.

“It's way cheaper than ending up investing time and lots of money producing a game that never finds a market success.”

AI could level the playing field

AI could make this approach even more powerful. Discovery has the potential to be transformed through AI generated prototypes, so what will this look like over the next few years? 

“If I had to bet, I'd say AI tools will empower small teams even more,” Fabio says.

His prediction is that small teams will soon be able to produce “high level game prototypes in no time”, giving developers more opportunity to focus on what ultimately matters: “the gameplay itself, the fun part of a mobile game.”

But faster prototyping doesn't remove the need for good ideas. It makes effective validation even more important.

Think big, stay small

Digitalmoka's approach is also shaped by its position as a small studio in Italy.

“The Italian mobile game scene is not so mature, so we rely a lot on the help of friends abroad,” Fabio explains, particularly around user acquisition and AI business intelligence tools.

“We are a global team in that sense.”

His advice for other smaller studios is to learn from the industry's biggest players but adapt those practices to their own scale.

“A good strategy for smaller teams in particular should be trying to adapt big companies' best practices to a smaller scale.”

And with new technology making that increasingly possible, Fabio's conclusion is blunt:

“So we have no excuses.”

Perhaps that's the real lesson from Gamesforum's conversation with Digitalmoka. The future of game development may not belong to the studios that build the most ideas.

It may belong to those that get best at deciding which ideas are worth building.