Discovering Durability: The Book I Didn’t Know I Was Writing

This week, after more than a few decades in the game industry, I published my first book, Durable Advantage: Five Pillars of the Modern Game Business. But, as often happens with any creative endeavor, it is not the book I originally set out to write.

About three years ago, I started with a fairly practical ambition. I wanted to bring together, in one place, the many things game companies need to do well to build and run a successful business. There is plenty of good thinking about technology, marketing, distribution, commerce, community, data, monetization, and operations, but most of it exists in fragments. One lesson comes from a conference presentation. Another lives inside a platform guide, specialist article, podcast, or conversation with someone who learned it through experience. Leaders tend to assemble that knowledge over the course of their careers, often discovering what they do not know at precisely the moment when not knowing becomes expensive.

I thought I was writing a book that would connect those pieces. It would be a practical guide to the decisions surrounding a game and the systems required to turn great creative work into a successful business. But somewhere in the research, I realized I was asking the wrong question. I had been studying what successful game companies do, when the more interesting question was what those activities allow successful companies to build.

Once I started looking at the problem that way, a pattern emerged.

The Pattern Beneath the Tactics

The tactics kept changing, but the things that made companies durable did not. A studio might build its community through Discord today and through an entirely different channel tomorrow. It might distribute through a major platform, sell directly to players, or increasingly do both. The technologies used to operate a game, acquire players, process payments, understand behavior, and communicate with an audience will continue to evolve. That is simply the nature of our industry. I have spent much of my career working through those kinds of transitions, from console to mobile, from packaged goods to digital distribution, and from traditional publishing models toward more direct relationships with players. Change is not an occasional disruption in games. Change is the environment we operate in.

This creates a problem with tactics because even very good tactics have a shelf life. A user acquisition strategy that works today can become uneconomical tomorrow. A platform can provide access to millions of players and then change its algorithms, policies, economics, or commercial terms. A technology that gives one company a meaningful competitive advantage can rapidly become available to everyone. The more examples I studied, the less interested I became in cataloguing what companies were doing and the more interested I became in understanding what those activities were actually building.

Beneath all of those tactical choices, I kept seeing the same capabilities. The strongest companies built deeper relationships. They developed greater control over commerce. They became better at turning information into intelligence. They earned trust. And they developed the organizational ability to recognize change and respond while there was still time to do something about it. Those recurring capabilities eventually became the Five Pillars of Durable Advantage: Relationships, Commerce, Intelligence, Trust, and Time.

Importantly, I did not start with the Five Pillars and then go searching for examples that supported them. Quite the opposite. The framework emerged from the examples I had gathered for the book I originally intended to write. Once I saw it, I found the framework far more interesting than the tactical guide I had planned.

From Activity to Advantage

Tactics answer the question, “What should we do?” A framework asks a different and, I believe, more enduring question: “What are we trying to build?” That distinction matters because a company can execute sophisticated tactics without actually strengthening the underlying business.

A company can acquire millions of players without owning a meaningful relationship with them. It can generate substantial revenue while remaining dangerously dependent on a single distribution partner. It can collect enormous quantities of data without improving a single consequential decision. It can have a huge community without having the ability to reliably reach it. A company can look incredibly successful from the outside while gradually losing control of the systems supporting that success. Its audience may be rented. Its commerce may be intermediated. Its knowledge may be scattered across dashboards, departments, and partners. Its ability to respond may be constrained by processes and organizational structures created for an earlier version of the business.

This led me to one of the questions that appears throughout Durable Advantage: If your largest platform partner changed its terms tomorrow, what would break? That is not an argument against platforms. Quite the opposite. Platforms create enormous value. They provide infrastructure, distribution, discovery, credibility, technology, and access to players at a scale that would be extraordinarily difficult for most companies to create themselves. The danger is not partnership. The danger is dependence without alternatives, leverage, or visibility.

That distinction became increasingly important to me as I wrote the book. The Five Pillars provided a way to separate activity from advantage and, more importantly, to evaluate whether the tactical decisions we make today are actually making the company stronger tomorrow.

What the Five Pillars Represent

Relationships are the direct and lasting connections a company builds with players, partners, creators, and communities. They determine whether you understand the people who make your success possible and, critically, whether you can reach them. Relationships turn an audience from something you temporarily access into something you can understand, serve, and grow alongside.

Commerce is about much more than processing a transaction. It is about how you reach the market, how value moves through the ecosystem, how much economic agency you retain, and what you can do with the margin you create. Margin is not simply profit. Used intelligently, it becomes strategic fuel that can be reinvested into products, players, teams, and future growth.

Intelligence is the ability to turn information into better decisions. We are certainly not suffering from a shortage of data. Most companies have more of it than they know what to do with. What remains scarce is the combination of systems, judgment, context, and organizational alignment required to turn that information into action.

Trust is what allows players and partners to participate, spend, share information, recommend your products, and remain with you. It is built slowly through every promise kept, every transaction protected, every interaction handled well, and every moment when a company demonstrates that it deserves continued confidence. It can also be lost remarkably quickly.

Finally, Time is the ability to recognize change and respond before the opportunity disappears. I deliberately do not define Time simply as speed because moving quickly in the wrong direction is not an advantage. Time is organizational capacity. It is the ability to learn, decide, align, and act while a decision can still affect the outcome.

These Pillars do not replace tactics. They give tactics purpose. Instead of asking only whether an initiative worked, leaders can ask what lasting capability it helped the company build. That is a much more interesting question because it changes how we define the value of the work itself.

Why I Chose This Book

Once I recognized the pattern, the manuscript changed. I stopped trying to catalogue everything a modern game company might do and began examining the capabilities all of those activities should create. Tactical knowledge is valuable, but much of it can already be found elsewhere. It may take considerable effort to assemble, but it exists. The underlying framework felt different.

I could not find something that connected the full business of games in this way, from player relationships and commerce to intelligence, trust, and the organizational value of time. That made it feel worth pursuing because I do not think the industry needs another person telling everyone exactly which technology, business model, platform, or channel is going to win. We are wrong about those things too often. What we need are better ways to evaluate opportunities when they appear.

A useful framework should survive changes in tactics. It should help a leader evaluate a distribution channel that does not exist yet. It should remain useful when a new commerce model appears, when player behavior changes, or when a technology creates possibilities we cannot currently anticipate. It should help us ask better questions even when the answers are different for every company. That became the book I wanted to write.

A Beginning, Not a Conclusion

I wrote Durable Advantage for the people building the businesses around games: founders, studio leaders, publishers, platform teams, investors, and the next generation of executives who will determine where this industry goes next. I have spent my career moving between the creative and business sides of games, building teams, making products, operating businesses, and navigating more than a few industry transitions along the way. One lesson that experience has reinforced repeatedly is that success rarely comes from one brilliant decision. It comes from connecting a lot of decisions into a system that can continue to perform as the environment changes.

I do not view the Five Pillars as the final word on how to build a game company. I see them as the beginning of a more useful conversation about what separates temporary performance from lasting strength. My hope is that Durable Advantage encourages leaders to look beyond the next launch, the next quarter, the next platform opportunity, or the next technology cycle and ask a more consequential question: Are the choices we are making today building a company that will be stronger tomorrow?

The tactics will change. They always do. But the need to build Relationships, Commerce, Intelligence, Trust, and Time will remain. Durable Advantage: Five Pillars of the Modern Game Business is available now on Amazon.

Great games matter. Great systems matter more.