Ambition is abundant in Pakistan's game development scene and costs nothing to express. Every studio intends to build something significant; every developer intends to work on something that matters. What is scarce is the translation of that intent into goals specific enough that someone could be shown to have missed them.
This distinction sounds pedantic and is the difference between a scene and an industry. A scene is a group of people who want the same thing. An industry is a group of people who have agreed on how to tell whether they are getting it.
A goal you cannot fail is not a goal. It is a mood.
Goals specific enough to be wrong about
"Make great games" is a value. It cannot be measured, cannot be missed, and therefore cannot guide a decision. "Reach 40% day-one retention on our next title" is a goal — it is measurable, it can be missed, and missing it produces information about what to change.
The teams making real progress in Pakistan have almost all made this shift, usually after a painful project. The transition is uncomfortable because numeric targets remove the ability to describe a struggling project optimistically. A game with 12% day-one retention is failing regardless of how good the art looks.
That discomfort is the entire value. A team that has agreed on a number in advance finds out it has a problem in week six rather than week thirty, which is the difference between a correction and a write-off.
Goals that actually change behaviour
- Retention and engagement targets set before production starts
- A fixed date for the first externally playable build
- Explicit, agreed criteria for cancelling a project
- Revenue targets attached to specific titles, not to the year
Which numbers are worth agreeing on
Not every metric deserves to be a goal. Downloads are the most commonly cited and among the least useful, because they measure marketing rather than the product. A game with a million downloads and 4% day-one retention has a distribution success and a product failure, and treating the first number as the goal conceals the second.
The metrics that actually predict outcomes are behavioural: does someone come back the next day, do they reach the point where the game becomes interesting, and does the session length hold or decay. These reveal whether the thing is good before any money is spent finding an audience for it.
Monetisation metrics matter but come later. A game that does not retain cannot be fixed by monetisation, and teams that optimise revenue per user before retention are usually polishing a product nobody stays long enough to pay for.
Metrics in the order they matter
- Day-one and day-seven retention first
- Progression: do players reach the interesting part
- Session length trend over a player's first week
- Monetisation last, once retention is established
The goals nobody is rewarded for
A studio can achieve every internal target while the surrounding industry stagnates, because the things that build an industry do not appear on any single company's scorecard. Training juniors properly, publishing honest post-mortems, keeping senior people in the country, sharing benchmark data — each of these costs the individual company and benefits everyone.
This is a straightforward collective-action problem, and the usual outcome is that nobody does them. The scenes that matured successfully typically had a handful of studios that took these on before it was in their narrow interest, and were later understood to have built the ecosystem the others operate in.
It is worth being clear-eyed that this is genuinely a cost. Publishing a post-mortem on a failed title helps competitors and exposes your mistakes. Doing it anyway is what separates a market that compounds from one where each generation learns the same lessons from scratch.
Collective goals worth adopting
- Train and retain juniors rather than only hiring experienced staff
- Publish honest post-mortems, especially on failures
- Create progression that keeps senior people in the country
- Share retention and monetisation benchmarks across studios
Goals need a review cadence to survive
A goal set once and never revisited becomes decoration within a month. The mechanism that keeps goals alive is a fixed review rhythm — a short, regular meeting where the number is looked at, compared against the target, and either confirmed or explicitly changed.
The important part is that changing a goal is allowed, as long as it is done deliberately and recorded. Targets set before a project starts are estimates made with the least information anyone will ever have; refusing to revise them is not discipline, it is pretending the estimate was better than it was.
What is not allowed is quietly forgetting. A goal that is never mentioned again has not been revised; it has been abandoned, and the team has lost the information that missing it would have produced.
What keeps goals from decaying
- A short, fixed-interval review of the actual numbers
- Permission to revise targets deliberately and on the record
- A written record of what changed and why
- Treating silent abandonment as a failure of process
What this looks like in our studio
We set numeric targets before each title now, and we miss a good number of them. That was uncomfortable at first and turned out to be the point — missing a defined target teaches considerably more than hitting an undefined one, because you can identify what the gap consisted of.
The practice that has helped most is agreeing on cancellation criteria before production rather than during it. Deciding in advance what result would mean stopping removes the emotional argument later, when a team has months invested and every instinct says to keep going.
None of this is sophisticated management theory. It is writing down what you expect, checking whether it happened, and being honest when it did not.
Practices that have worked for us
- Numeric targets agreed before production begins
- Cancellation criteria decided in advance
- Regular review of actuals against targets
- Treating missed targets as information rather than failure
Matching goals to the right timeframe
A goal set for the wrong horizon fails predictably. Retention targets belong to a single title and resolve in weeks. Capability targets — learning live operations, hiring a producer — belong to a year. Ecosystem goals like training successors resolve over several years and cannot be judged quarterly.
Most frustration in small studios comes from measuring a slow goal on a fast clock, then concluding it failed. Assigning each objective an honest horizon before starting removes most of that noise.
Horizons that fit the goal
- Weeks — retention and engagement on a live title
- Months — shipping, publishing and live-ops capability
- A year — team composition and seniority
- Years — successors trained and knowledge retained
Dreaming big, measuring precisely
The gap between a promising scene and a functioning industry is usually a measurement problem rather than a talent one. Ambition supplies direction; specific, falsifiable goals supply progress, and the collective goals nobody is rewarded for supply the ecosystem everyone else operates in.
None of that requires more ambition than Pakistan already has. It requires converting the ambition already present into numbers people have agreed to be judged against.
Frequently asked questions
What goals should a new game studio set?
Measurable ones agreed before production: retention and engagement targets, a fixed date for the first externally playable build, and explicit criteria for cancelling the project.
Which metrics matter most for a mobile game?
Behavioural ones first — day-one and day-seven retention, whether players reach the interesting part, and session length trend. Monetisation comes last, because a game that does not retain cannot be fixed by monetisation.
Why are downloads a poor goal?
They measure marketing rather than product quality. A million downloads with 4% day-one retention is a distribution success masking a product failure.
What are collective goals in a games industry?
Objectives no single company is rewarded for — training juniors, publishing honest post-mortems, retaining senior talent locally, and sharing benchmark data. They cost the individual studio and benefit everyone.
