We asked strategic communications expert Charlotte Grafton-Callaghan this month to share issues on what can go wrong with communications for studios. Some great tips came back – so have a read. Charley will be joining us for a our monthly AMA game dev insights session on the Great Northern Games Discord on 6th October at 12 noon. This is a free session for anyone developing games who is based in The North of England and/or is part of the Game Republic network.
The announcement that can’t be written
by Charlotte Grafton-Callaghan
You think you have a communications problem.
This usually happens when something’s changing – a restructure or new direction for example. You need to write the announcement, but no matter what you try, the words just aren’t coming. Drafts go around the leadership team, each version gets softer, more vague. The one that goes out says very little, everyone knows it doesn’t really say anything, and the audience starts to read between the lines. The assumption internally is that the words were the problem.
They weren’t. When a business can’t say what it decided, it’s usually because it didn’t decide it.
What this looks like
Writing something down is an unforgiving, sometimes brutal, test. An ambiguous strategy can survive months of meetings because everyone is running their own interpretation of it and no one has reconciled these various versions. But the moment you try and put it to paper in a way the whole leadership team is happy to stand behind, the ambiguity has nowhere to go.
This is the moment you find the game director and the commercial lead have different ideas of what the change means for them, and it doesn’t match what the CEO believes or told the board. It was never explicitly agreed what a new direction meant and what it didn’t mean, the trade-offs were never named. The obvious follow-up questions remain unanswered.
The drafting process hits a wall because the decision was never explicitly made. The words are just where this becomes clear.
What it costs
Not being able to draft an announcement doesn’t show up on a P&L, that isn’t the expensive part.
Decisions that don’t get made don’t disappear, they just get absorbed. That can look like a project that should have been cancelled yet keeps going on a reduced budget – because stopping it requires someone to make that call. Or maybe it’s putting money and resource behind another direction masked as ‘just trying something’ because choosing one meant having the conversation nobody wanted to have. Or a team working from a strategy that changed six months ago but no one formally agreed the shift, just a new document circulated to senior leaders, no one checked if it was read.
None of these individually looks like a crisis.
But together it means a company is working in different directions and running multiple things without being fully committed. Everyone is wondering why everything seems to take longer and cost a lot more than the plan said it would.
It isn’t inefficiency, well, not obviously so. It’s the cost of keeping your options open and it is leaking budget.
It happens to everyone
This happens to even the best teams because it’s not about competence or even being brave enough to say it. Often making the choice to defer a decision feels like the most rational move at the time – we’ve all said, ‘we’ll take this offline.’
You need more information, the market is volatile, what if that hard call ends up being the wrong one? The cost of getting it wrong publicly is palpable, especially in an industry where our players and the press scrutinise and remember everything. No one wants to be the reason a sub-Reddit pops up.
So, the decision gets shelved, it becomes the ‘we’ll come back to this down the line’ moment in the leadership meeting. This feels like prudence, but when nobody is tracking the accumulation, the cost soon mounts up. One deferred decision is defensible, a portfolio of them is not.
The litmus test
There are two cheap and easy tests you can do before it gets too expensive.
Write the paragraph early. Before a decision is signed off, have someone draft two sentences you’d be happy to put in front of the team, the board or even the community. Trying to write it is what highlights every unanswered question. Think of it as a diagnostic tool, not a communications exercise, and it costs you nothing. If you are struggling to find the words or three people write varying versions, the decision isn’t closed, and you’ve found that out while it’s still easy and cost-effective to fix.
Count what you’re paying for. Do a quick internal audit of everything receiving budget lines and resource, mark the ones that represent a decision that was made. What’s left? So many teams do this and find at least one thing they are still funding which doesn’t align with the direction.
Neither of these requires a framework, or an away day in the countryside, they just need someone to be willing to say out loud that a decision people assume was made, in fact, never explicitly was.
The point
Take communications problems seriously and don’t assume they are just what they look like on the surface. A message that won’t land is sometimes a message that needs rewriting. More often, it’s a decision that needs making, and the attempt to write it is how you find out which one you’re dealing with.
This is a solvable problem and can be addressed so much faster than most teams expect. The hard part is someone naming out loud the thing that everyone in the room is already feeling inside.
Charlotte Grafton-Callaghan works with leadership teams across games and entertainment on the decisions that shape direction, and the communications that carry the case for them.
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