Getting Started with Concept Compass

Concept Compass is designed to alleviate anxiety around which game concept you should commit to by providing comprehensive insights into your game idea before you invest significant time and resources. By describing your game concept and choosing the core features that define it, you’ll receive a detailed report that analyses competitors, projects sales and revenue, and provides technical and marketing considerations to help you make informed decisions.

What is Concept Compass?

Concept Compass transforms your game concept into actionable insights across six key areas:

• Competitors - Discover the most similar games to your concept, read a summary of the competitive landscape and player sentiment, and see examples of successful indie games in your space
• Art - Get inspired by the capsule artwork and gameplay screenshots of your competitors
• Projections - Get realistic forecasts for wishlists, sales, revenue, and pricing, blending your competitors’ performance with a Steam-wide baseline of genuine commercial releases
• Resources - Revisit your core features, receive technical suggestions, identify potential challenges, find research and asset resources, and discover publishers who might be worth approaching
• Marketing - Generate an SEO optimised short description for a Steam store page, discover relevant tags, analyse competitor marketing channels, and gather creative marketing ideas
• Add to Project - Turn a finished concept into a ready-made Workspace project with an editable GDD, vision board, Competitor Radar and research board (subscription required)

This comprehensive approach helps you validate your game concept, set realistic expectations, and identify opportunities before committing to full development.

Buying reports without a subscription

On a free account, you can buy Concept Compass Reports one at a time instead of subscribing. Click Buy Reports above your concepts list to open the purchase window.

Want to see what you’d get first? Click See Example Report next to Buy Reports. It opens a complete report for an example concept, Tidepost, a cozy seafaring postal adventure. You can explore every tab, from competitors and projections to marketing ideas and research resources, and download the report. Your draft game design document is created in Workspace when you add your own concept to a project. The example is read-only, so nothing in it can be changed, and it never appears in your own projects.

• One report, one concept. Each report is one complete Concept Compass concept. Completing a concept uses a report, and you keep editing it afterwards. It also unlocks the game and feature pages that concept references.
• 3 edits per report. An edit re-runs the analysis after the report is complete: applying changed concept details, refreshing after competitor or feature changes, or regenerating a report section. Completing the report the first time is free. The counter above your report shows how many edits you have left.
• Buy up to 5 at once. Use the − and + buttons to choose how many reports you want, check the order summary, then click Purchase to go to the secure Stripe checkout. Tax is calculated at checkout where it applies.
• Launch offer. While the introductory offer runs, the full price is shown crossed out with the offer price beneath it, along with the date it ends.
• Verify your email first. You need a verified email address to buy reports. If yours isn’t verified yet, the purchase window shows a button to resend the verification email.

The same window also shows the Individual plan, which gives you unlimited reports and edits. If you’ve bought reports in the last 90 days, what you paid for them comes off your first month (in pounds or euros that includes VAT; in dollars it’s the price before sales tax). Anything beyond the first month’s price is added to your account as credit toward later months. This credit can be used once.

You’ll get an email confirming each purchase.

Creating a New Concept

When you first open Concept Compass, you’ll see a list of your saved concepts. To create a new concept, click the ”+ New Concept” button. This will open a step-by-step wizard that guides you through describing your game concept.

New Concept Wizard

The wizard walks you through six steps:

1. Concept Basics - Concept name (required), game engine, team size, and scope
2. Short Description - Your elevator pitch (required, minimum 100 characters)
3. Inspirations - Games that inspire this idea: choose up to five, with an optional note explaining what you want to borrow (optional)
4. Tags & Style - Visual style, art styles, player perspectives, themes and genres, a Visual & Audio Aesthetics description, and reference images (optional)
5. Gameplay - Core mechanics, Player Experience (pacing, co-op, UI/UX and progression), and your Core Features: pick 1 to 5 features that define your game (optional, see below)
6. Narrative - Story, setting, and characters (optional)

Optional steps are marked (Optional) under their title. Visual step indicators show your progress. Once the required fields are complete you can click “Skip remaining steps and create concept”, or work through to the end and click “Create Concept”.

Your work is saved automatically as a draft while you go, so you can close the wizard and pick up where you left off: drafts appear in your concepts list with a Draft badge. If you change your mind, use “Discard draft” to delete it.

Once created, your concept appears in the concepts list and you can return to update it at any time via the Concept Details tab.

Games That Inspire This Idea

Choose one to three games that help explain your idea, with up to five allowed. Search by title, select a game, and optionally add a What inspires you? note of up to 300 characters. Notes such as “the ingredient-matching loop” or “co-op teamwork” help distinguish what matters. Use “visuals only” when the inspiration is solely aesthetic: that game stays visible without guiding gameplay discovery.

Selected games are automatically included in your competitor space and gameplay references strongly steer the search. For a hybrid concept, you can select games representing different parts of the loop. Your written mechanics take precedence when a reference plays differently from your idea. Selecting inspirations in the wizard saves the draft without generating a report or spending credits.

The same picker appears in Concept Details. Changes there take effect through Apply and Save, which uses the usual report regeneration allowance. Removing an inspiration from the competitor table also removes it from the picker, so it will not return on the next search.

Choosing Your Core Features

Core features are the handful of design building blocks that define your game, such as “deckbuilding”, “base building” or “pixel art”. Choosing them tells Concept Compass what your game is really about, so it can find sharper competitors and give more relevant advice. Each one links to a full feature report.

Core Features sits on the Gameplay step, under the gameplay description. Your selected deck sits above up to four Suggested for your concept cards:

• Drag and drop a suggested card into your deck, or click it to add it to the next free slot. On a touch screen, press and hold a card to pick it up.
• Browse All opens the full feature catalogue in a scrollable grid. Search for a feature or filter by Category, then add cards with Add to Deck without closing the browser. Cards already selected show Added.
• Suggested for your concept cards match games similar to your description, with evidence such as “Found in 12 of 20 similar games”. They update a moment after you finish typing your gameplay description. If suggestions are unavailable, Browse All still works.
• Reorder your selected cards with the arrow buttons or by dragging, and remove a card with × or drag it back to the suggestions. When the deck is full, drop a new suggestion onto a filled slot to swap it.
• Done closes the browser and keeps your selections. When editing an existing concept, Back to Deck returns to the selected cards within the same window. Changes save automatically.

Three features is the sweet spot (the third slot is marked Sweet spot) and five is the maximum. A tight set of pillars gives the clearest results; a message under your deck lets you know how you’re doing.

Concept Details Tab

The Concept Details tab is where you define the core aspects of your game concept. This information is used to find similar games on Steam and generate all the insights in the other tabs.

Concept Settings

Start by filling in the basic concept information:

• Concept Name - Give your concept a memorable name (required)
• Engine - Specify which game engine you plan to use (e.g., Unity, Unreal, Godot)
• Team Size - Indicate how many people will be working on the game
• Scope - Select the game’s scope: Micro, Small, Medium, or Large

Scope definitions:

• Micro - Solo or very small team, simple mechanics, short development time (1-3 months)
• Small - Small team, moderate mechanics, shorter development time (3-12 months)
• Medium - Medium-sized team, complex mechanics, longer development time (1-2 years)
• Large - Large team, highly complex mechanics, extended development time (2+ years)

Use the Download ▾ menu to export your concept as Markdown or PDF.

Tags & Style

Define the visual and thematic characteristics of your game to help find more relevant competitors:

Visual Style Select the overall visual format: 2D, 3D, 2.5D, or Text-Based. Choose camera perspectives separately below.

Art Style Search and select art styles that match your game’s aesthetic. Options include styles like Pixel Art, Low-Poly, Realistic, Hand-Drawn, Anime, Stylized, and more. You can select multiple art styles if your game blends different approaches.

Genres Select the primary and secondary genres for your game. Common genres include Action, Adventure, RPG, Strategy, Simulation, Puzzle, and many others. Selecting accurate genres significantly improves competitor matching.

Themes Choose thematic elements that define your game’s setting and tone, such as Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, Historical, Modern, Post-Apocalyptic, and more.

Player Perspectives Choose camera perspectives such as First-Person, Third-Person, Isometric, or Top-Down. Describe single-player, multiplayer, co-op and pacing under Player Experience in Gameplay.

Reference Images Optional. Upload up to 5 reference images (max 10MB each) to improve competitor matching with visual style signals. You can drag and drop images or use the file picker. Uploaded images appear as a thumbnail grid with remove buttons.

Reference images are used alongside your text description when finding competitors. Our visual analysis model identifies games on Steam with similar art styles and aesthetics, then fuses those results with text-based matches for more accurate competitor discovery.

Your Core Features

The Your Core Features panel shows the features you picked in the wizard. Click × on a card to remove it, or click Add feature to open the Update Features dialog, which has the same deck and suggestions as the wizard. Click Done when you’re finished. Changes to your core features are saved straight away.

Changing your core features prompts you to refresh your competitors and report (see Keeping your report up to date).

Concept Description

The quality of your insights depends on how well you describe your game concept. Use the five text areas to provide detailed information:

Short Description Think of this as your elevator pitch. A concise summary that captures the essence of your game in a few sentences. What’s the core hook that makes your game interesting?

Gameplay Detail the core mechanics and player interactions. What makes your game fun and engaging? Consider aspects like:

• Controls and input methods
• Core gameplay loop
• Objectives and challenges
• Progression systems
• Rewards and feedback mechanisms

Narrative Outline the story, characters, and world-building elements. If your game is narrative-driven, provide details about the plot, setting, and character arcs. If narrative isn’t a focus, you can leave this section blank or briefly note that.

Aesthetics Describe the visual and auditory style of your game. Be specific about:

• Art style (e.g., pixel art, low-poly 3D, realistic, hand-drawn)
• Visual perspective (2D, 3D, isometric, first-person, third-person)
• Colour palette and mood
• Audio direction (music style, sound design approach)

Player Experience Explain how the player will experience the game:

• Pacing and difficulty progression
• Single-player, multiplayer, or co-op
• Session length (short arcade sessions vs. long story campaigns)
• UI/UX considerations
• Accessibility features
• Platform considerations (PC, console, mobile)

Applying Your Changes

Once you’ve filled in your concept details, click the “Apply and Save” button. This will:

1. Upload any staged reference images
2. Save your concept information
3. Analyse your concept and core features against our Steam game database (using both text and image similarity if reference images are provided)
4. Find the most similar competitors
5. Generate insights across all analysis tabs
6. Enable access to the Competitors, Art, Projections, Resources, and Marketing tabs

The competition summary and player sentiment are refreshed from the new comparable games. If either section fails, it shows a retry state instead of retaining evidence from the previous competitor list. If no close competitors are found, or gameplay matching cannot be verified, your previous report stays available and your edits remain ready to revise or retry. A new concept stays saved as a draft.

How Core Features Shape Your Report

Your core features aren’t just labels. Concept Compass uses them throughout your report:

• Competitor search favours games that share your core features, so your competitor list reflects what your game actually plays like, not just how it’s described.
• Resources tailors technical suggestions and challenges to the features you plan to build, and shows them on a Your Core Features shelf at the top of the tab. Click a card to open its feature report in a new tab, or use the Concept Details link to change them.
• Marketing and the Competition Summary all take your core features into account.

Keeping your report up to date

The report sections that lean on your competitor list (the competition summary, player sentiment, projections, and other competitor-derived content) are based on the list at the time they were generated. When something changes, a banner appears above the tab strip with a Refresh button:

• “Competitor landscape has drifted, click to refresh your report” appears after you add or remove competitors. Click Refresh to regenerate the competitor-derived content against your current list.
• “Your core features changed. Refresh your competitors and report to match” appears after you change your core features. Click Refresh to re-run the competitor search for your new features and regenerate your Resources, Marketing, Competition Summary and Player Sentiment. Competitors you added by hand are kept.

If both apply, the core features banner is shown, since that refresh covers both. The button shows Updating your report… while the regeneration runs, then the banner disappears. Concepts that haven’t changed since their report was generated won’t see either banner.

Competitors Tab

The Competitors tab helps you understand the competitive landscape for your game concept. It shows you games that are most similar to what you’ve described and provides insights into market uniqueness and crowding.

Headline Statistics

At the top of the tab, you’ll see four key metrics about your competitors:

• Total Direct Competitors - The total number of games identified as similar to your concept
• Coming Soon - The count and percentage of competitors that haven’t released yet, indicating future competition
• Early Access - The count and percentage currently in Early Access
• Free-to-Play - The count and percentage offering free-to-play business models

These statistics help you gauge the current and future competitive landscape.

Uniqueness Score

The uniqueness score is a critical metric that indicates how crowded your concept’s market segment is:

The uniqueness score display shows three values:

• Low - 5th percentile of competitors’ uniqueness scores
• Median - Median Uniqueness score
• High - 95th percentile of competitors’ uniqueness scores

This range shows you that 90% of your competitors fall within this uniqueness band. The score is color-coded to help you quickly assess:

• Green - High uniqueness (favorable)
• Yellow - Typical uniqueness
• Red - Low uniqueness (crowded)

Below the uniqueness score, you’ll see contextual information explaining what your score means relative to the Steam median.

Competition Summary

Below the uniqueness score, you’ll find a short written summary of your competitive landscape: a couple of paragraphs describing the common ground between your competitors and where your concept could differentiate itself.

This summary is put together once, from your competitor list and core features at the time. If you change them afterwards, use the Refresh banner to bring it up to date (see Keeping your report up to date). If the summary hasn’t been written yet, click “Generate”; if it failed, click “Retry”.

Player Sentiment

This section pulls together reviews from your closest competitors to show what players tend to love and dislike about games like yours:

• A short overview of the overall sentiment expressed across competitor reviews
• What Players Like - the most commonly praised aspects
• What Players Dislike - the most common criticisms and pain points

Use this to spot features worth doubling down on, and complaints worth designing around from the start. Like the Competition Summary, this reflects your competitor list at the time it was put together, and the Refresh banner brings it up to date after you change your competitors. Click “Generate” or “Retry” if it hasn’t been written yet or failed.

If none of your competitors have enough reviews to draw on, this section will let you know rather than showing an empty summary.

Competitor Games Table

The main table displays your selected inspirations, manually added games, and automatic matches. Inspirations appear first, followed by manual additions, then automatic competitors ordered by gameplay relevance and search rank. Shared setting or visual style alone is not enough to qualify as an automatic competitor. You can:

• Sort and filter by different metrics using the “Customize Table” dropdown
• Download the complete dataset as a spreadsheet
• Click on any row to navigate to that game’s page
• Click the trash button on a row to remove that game from your competitor list

The table shows estimated revenue, estimated wishlists and percent positive reviews, plus two columns that help you judge how each competitor relates to your concept:

• Similarity to Concept - Very, Somewhat or Irrelevant, taken from the relevance ranking that powers the competitor list
• Discovery Method - Inspiration for a selected reference, Manual for other games you added, and Auto for discovered matches

The Similarity column appears once relevance classification has run. Inspirations classified as unrelated remain visible for reference, but do not contribute to comparable statistics, forecasts, competition summaries, or sentiment evidence. Below the table, the Add games picker lets you search Steam and add games manually; anything you add through it shows up with Manual in the Discovery Method column.

This table gives you a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape, allowing you to analyze pricing strategies, review scores, sales performance, and more.

Inspirational Underdogs

Below the main competitor table, you’ll find a special section highlighting “Inspirational Underdogs” - indie games that achieved success without prior Steam success. These games are particularly valuable to study because:

• Their studios have earned less than $100K on Steam when excluding the featured game
• They achieved high Steam DB scores despite limited resources
• They represent successful strategies for first-time or small indie developers

Each game in this table shows:

• Estimated wishlists, sales, and revenue
• Developer lifetime revenue (excluding the featured game)
• Steam DB score (quality indicator)

These examples can provide inspiration and demonstrate that commercial success is possible even without established studio resources.

Art Tab

The Art tab provides visual inspiration by showcasing the artwork and screenshots from your competitors. This helps you understand the visual standards in your market segment and can inspire your own art direction.

Capsule Art Carousel

At the top of the tab, you’ll find a horizontal carousel displaying the capsule artwork from all your competitors. Capsule art is the main promotional image games use on Steam - the artwork that appears in search results, wishlists, and the store page.

Studying competitor capsule art helps you:

• Understand visual trends in your genre
• Identify what makes certain games stand out
• Plan your own capsule art strategy
• See how competitors position their games visually

Use the left and right arrows to scroll through the carousel, or swipe on touch devices.

Gameplay Screenshots Gallery

Below the capsule carousel, you’ll find a grid gallery of gameplay screenshots from all your competitors. This collection shows you:

• The visual quality standards in your market
• Common UI/UX patterns
• Environmental and level design approaches
• How competitors showcase their games

The gallery uses lazy loading - as you scroll down, more screenshots load automatically. This ensures smooth performance even with hundreds of images.

Interacting with Images

Click on any image (capsule art or screenshot) to open a context menu with three options:

• More Details - Opens the full game details page in a new tab, where you can dive deeper into that specific competitor
• Open in Wide View - Opens the full-screen image viewer, where you can browse with the arrow keys, pin notes, clip the screenshot to your Scrapbook and close with Esc
• Remove from Competitors - Removes this game from your competitor list if you don’t consider it relevant

Projections Tab

The Projections tab provides data-driven forecasts to help you set realistic expectations for your game’s potential performance.

What these forecasts assume

Before the numbers, one thing worth being explicit about:

Steam’s catalogue is dominated by releases that never made a commercial attempt. Averaging over all of them would tell you what happens to games nobody tried to sell, which says nothing useful about your game. So we measure your concept against the games that did try.

Evidence Quality

At the start of Projected Performance you’ll see how much evidence stands behind the forecast: Strong, Moderate, Limited or Very limited.

This reflects two things: how many comparable games we found, and how closely they actually match your concept. Ten loosely related games count for less than three close ones, so a big competitor list does not automatically mean a strong forecast.

Underneath, two figures explain where the numbers come from:

• Effective sample - how many genuinely independent comparable games the forecast rests on. It’s usually lower than the raw count, because near-duplicates and distant matches contribute less.
• Competitor evidence vs Steam-wide baseline - the split between your specific competitors and a Steam-wide baseline of genuine commercial releases. When comparables are scarce we lean on that baseline, and the range widens to say so.

A unique concept will naturally lean more on the baseline. That’s not a problem with your idea; it means there is less directly comparable evidence, and the forecast is honest about it.

Which competitors were used

You’ll also see a line like “87 similar games found · 62 used for the forecast · 18 too few reviews, 4 too recent to measure, 3 no data available”.

Every similar game stays visible in the Competitors and Art tabs. You should see who else is in your space. But not all of them can inform a forecast:

• Too few reviews - not on course for 10 reviews by the end of its second year on sale. We judge every game at the same age, so a three-month-old game with eight reviews (on track for about eleven) counts, and a ten-year-old game that crept past ten reviews over a decade does not. This is our proxy for a release that never made a commercial attempt. We make exceptions for games with a strong pre-launch wishlist following, and for studios with a track record of successful releases.
• Too recent to measure - released less than 30 days ago. A game with six reviews after three days is not the same as one with six reviews after three years, so we wait rather than counting it as a poor performer.
• Not yet released - upcoming games inform the wishlist estimate only; they have no sales history to learn from.
• No data available - we’re missing the specific measurement. We leave these out rather than counting them as zero.

That last point matters: a missing figure and a figure of zero are different things, and we never treat one as the other.

Why recent releases count for more

Steam is a different market from five or ten years ago, so we weight your competitors toward recent releases: a game’s influence halves for every three years since its launch, on top of how similar it is to your concept. Your evidence panel shows the typical comparable release age, counted by influence.

Recent games have had less time to sell, though, so we never compare them at face value. Every competitor is measured over the same two years: we project younger games forward along the curve Steam reviews actually follow (a typical commercial release has about 60% of its two-year reviews after its first month, and 90% after its first year), and scale older games back to what they had sold by their second birthday. That way a strong six-month-old release reads as strong rather than as half-finished, and a decade of slow sales doesn’t make an old game look like a launch-year hit. The Steam-wide baseline gets exactly the same treatment.

Projected Performance

Each metric is shown as three figures:

• Low (P10) - a pessimistic but realistic outcome; roughly 1 in 10 comparable releases do worse
• Typical (P50) - the outcome to plan around; half do better, half do worse
• High (P90) - a strong outcome; roughly 1 in 10 do better

We deliberately don’t show an average. Game outcomes have a very long tail. Across the 52,000 commercially-released paid games we measure, the average is roughly 40 times the median, so an average is pulled far above what almost any release actually achieves, and it swings wildly depending on which breakout hit happens to be in your competitor list. The typical figure is the one to plan around, with P10 and P90 marking the realistic spread.

Reviews - projected Steam review count in your first two years. Sales - projected unit sales on Steam in your first two years, taken directly from comparable games’ sales estimates. Gross Revenue - projected revenue in your first two years, before Steam’s cut, taxes and returns.

You’ll also see sales implied by the review forecast, a cross-check that converts the review projection into units using the typical sales-per-review rate across Steam (the median rate our sales model estimates across all games, with its spread applied to the Low and High figures). Expect it to land near, but not exactly on, the sales projection: the two are derived independently, and agreement between them is a good sign.

Competitor Performance

Separately from the forecast, this table shows the raw spread across your competitor list: the median, the bottom 5% and the top 10% of each game’s figures to date, whatever its age. These are plain descriptive statistics: not weighted by similarity or recency, not put on a common two-year footing, and not blended with any baseline. Use them to sanity-check the projection against the actual games in your space. Rows marked with an asterisk (*) are estimates, or derived from estimates; review counts come straight from Steam.

Wishlists are broken into three rows:

• Pre-Launch Wishlists - what competitors had when they launched, plus everything unreleased competitors have so far. This is the closest guide to what you need going into launch.
• Post-Launch Wishlists - wishlists released competitors have added since launch.
• All-Time Wishlists - pre-launch plus post-launch, across every competitor.

Competitors that launched before we began tracking followers have no pre- or post-launch figure and are left out of those two rows. Reports saved before this breakdown existed keep their single Wishlists row.

Distribution Charts

Below the targets table, you’ll find three histogram charts showing the distribution of:

• Estimated Wishlists
• Estimated Steam Sales
• Estimated Steam Revenue

These visualizations help you see the full range of performance among your competitors, not just the medians. Look for patterns like:

• Bimodal distributions (two peaks) that might indicate different successful strategies
• Long tails indicating rare breakout successes
• Clustering that suggests predictable performance ranges

Gameplay Length Expectations

This section estimates how long players expect a game like your concept to take to finish. Use it to scope your content and estimate production costs: a game players expect to finish in 5-10 hours needs very different content from one they expect to play for 50.

• Expected length - the middle completion band among your competitors, weighted by how closely each matches your concept, so near matches count for more than loose ones. Below it you’ll see the range covered by the middle half of similar games.
• Estimate confidence - High, Medium or Low. It combines how many closely matched competitors have a completion time, how closely they agree, and how confident our completion-time model is about each of them.
• What shaped this estimate - explains anything that lowered confidence, such as few comparable games or competitors that vary widely in length. When many competitors are built for ongoing play, we flag it: treat the length as typical playtime rather than time to reach an ending.
• Competitors’ Time to Complete - a histogram of your competitors’ completion bands, with your expected band highlighted.

Completion bands come from player-reported times on IGDB where available, otherwise from our model. Raw hours are never shown, only the six bands: <2h, 2-5h, 5-10h, 10-20h, 20-50h and 50h+.

Price & Revenue Forecasts

This section helps you determine an appropriate price point for your game.

Suggested Price

The suggested price display shows three values based on competitor pricing:

• Low - 25th percentile of competitor prices
• Median - Median competitor price
• High - 75th percentile of competitor prices

Below this, you’ll find a histogram showing the distribution of initial prices among all your competitors.

Revenue Projections Calculator

Use the interactive calculator to model different pricing and sales scenarios:

1. Price - Enter your proposed price (defaults to the median competitor price)
2. Sales - Enter an estimated sales figure (defaults to the median competitor sales)

The calculator then shows a detailed revenue breakdown accounting for:

• VAT/Sales Tax - Calculated based on your selected location
• Returns - Default 8% of sales (Steam’s average return rate)
• Regional Pricing Adjustments - Default 12% reduction for regional pricing differences
• Discounted Sales - Default 10% reduction for sales and promotions
• Steam’s Cut - 30% platform fee

The final Net Revenue is what you can expect to actually receive.

This calculator helps you understand the difference between gross revenue (what players pay) and net revenue (what you receive), which is crucial for budgeting and planning.

Resources Tab

The Resources tab provides technical and development guidance tailored to your specific game concept and core features.

Your Core Features

A shelf at the top of the tab shows the core features you picked. Each card opens its feature report in a new tab, full of implementation advice, common pitfalls and production cost estimates for that feature. Want to change them? Use the Concept Details link beside the shelf. If you haven’t picked any yet, click Add features.

Technical Suggestions

This section breaks down the technical requirements and considerations into four categories:

Systems & Mechanics Key technical systems you’ll need to implement, such as:

• Physics systems
• Enemy and NPC behaviour
• Networking infrastructure
• Core gameplay mechanics
• Save/load systems

Art & Visuals Visual development considerations including:

• Art pipeline requirements
• Asset creation needs
• Visual effects
• Animation systems
• Rendering considerations

Audio Sound design and music considerations:

• Music composition needs
• Sound effect requirements
• Audio implementation systems
• Voice acting considerations

Level Design Environmental and level design considerations:

• Level structure approaches
• Environmental storytelling
• Pacing and flow
• Replayability features

Each suggestion is formatted with a bold label followed by specific details to help you plan your technical approach.

Potential Challenges

The Potential Challenges section highlights potential “hard problems” you may encounter during development. These are aspects of your concept that:

• Require specialized expertise
• May consume significant development time
• Could present technical obstacles
• Might require innovative solutions

Being aware of these challenges early helps you:

• Allocate appropriate time and resources
• Consider whether you need additional team members with specific skills
• Plan for technical research and prototyping
• Potentially simplify your concept if needed

Research & Assets

This section provides practical tools for finding resources and information.

Research Suggestions A curated list of search terms specifically relevant to your game concept. Use the navigation buttons to browse through different keywords, then click the social media and search engine icons to:

• Search Google for general information
• Find YouTube tutorials and gameplay videos
• Discover relevant Reddit discussions
• Find TikTok content for inspiration and marketing ideas

Asset Search Another set of curated keywords focused on finding art assets, music, sound effects, and code assets. Click the platform buttons to search:

• Unity Asset Store
• Sketchfab (3D models)
• Itch.io (indie assets and tools)
• GameDev Market
• ArtStation (high-quality art)
• CraftPix (2D game assets)
• TurboSquid (3D models)
• OpenGameArt (free assets)

These pre-generated search terms are tailored to your concept, saving you time in finding relevant resources and references.

Suggested Publishers

If any of your competitors were published by a company other than their own developer, this section surfaces those publishers as potential partners worth approaching. Only established publishers with at least five released games are shown. Each publisher appears as a card showing:

• A collage of capsule artwork from their four most recently published games
• The publisher’s name and the titles of those four games
• A link through to the publisher’s company page (it opens in a new tab), where you can review their full release history

This section only appears when an established third-party publisher can be identified among your competitors. Self-published competitors won’t produce a card, and that’s expected for some concepts.

Marketing Tab

The Marketing tab helps you prepare your marketing strategy and Steam store page content.

Store Page Suggestions

Short Description A generated template for your Steam store page short description. This text is crafted to:

• Highlight your game’s unique selling points
• Appeal to your target audience
• Follow best practices for Steam store pages
• Include relevant keywords

You can edit this template to match your voice and vision, then click “Save” to store it with your concept.

Suggested Tags Tags are crucial for discoverability on Steam. This section shows the most common tags among your top-performing competitors, organized by category:

• Genre - Core genre classifications (e.g., Action, RPG, Strategy)
• Theme - Thematic elements (e.g., Fantasy, Sci-fi, Horror)
• Visuals/Aesthetics - Art style tags (e.g., Pixel Graphics, Low-Poly, Realistic)
• Player Support - Gameplay features (e.g., Single-player, Co-op, Controller Support)

Competitor Socials

This section displays the social media profiles of your top competitors (ordered by Steam DB score). Each competitor is shown as a flip card:

• Front - Shows the game’s capsule image and title
• Back - Displays links to their social media profiles

Study these to understand:

• Which platforms your competitors prioritize
• How they present themselves
• Community engagement strategies
• Marketing channel selection

You can click on any social media icon to visit that competitor’s profile.

Marketing Ideas

The final section provides creative marketing ideas specifically tailored to your game concept. Each card contains a marketing strategy or content idea with:

• The marketing channel or platform
• A specific actionable idea
• How it relates to your concept

These suggestions are designed to inspire your marketing strategy and help you think creatively about promoting your game. Common suggestions might include:

• Content marketing approaches
• Community building strategies
• Influencer collaboration ideas
• Social media content themes
• Event participation opportunities
• Cross-promotion strategies

Comparing Your Concepts

The concepts table on the Concept Compass home page lets you compare concepts side by side and decide which one to take forward. By default it shows each concept’s name, when it was last updated, its status and scope, its Expected Gameplay Length and its Projected Sales (Typical). Select a column heading to sort by it.

Choose Columns to add or remove figures, such as team size, engine, gameplay length confidence, projected revenue, or the raw competitor medians (uniqueness, wishlists, sales and revenue). Projected figures are the Typical values from the Projections tab; Median figures are plain competitor medians. Your choice is remembered on this device, and Reset to defaults restores the standard columns.

A dash means a concept hasn’t calculated that figure yet. Concepts created before gameplay length and projected sales were added fill them in the next time you open them.

Adding a Concept to a Project

When you’re ready to start building, Add to Project turns a completed concept into a ready-to-use plan in the Workspace. Draft concepts need to be completed first.

1. Choose Add to Project in the concepts table, or in the Project setup panel at the top of an open report.
2. Pick a project you own, or choose + Create New Project to make one. A new project gets the concept straight away.
3. Choose Add to Project. The project’s Workspace opens and shows progress as each item is added.

Your project receives:

• Draft GDD: an editable game design document based on your concept. A newly written draft sizes its scope and roadmap to the gameplay length players expect.
• Project Vision: a whiteboard of the pitch, audience, experience and pillars. Its production brief shows the expected gameplay length beside team size and scope.
• Competitor Radar: the competitors found in your report, including each game’s time to complete and the typical length across them.
• Research Board: findings, projections, gameplay length, resources and marketing ideas.
• Concept Report: a copy of your report as it was when you added it, with a link back to the concept. Teammates on a shared project see this copy.
• Capsule Art Analysis: an editable gallery and colour studies, when your concept has competitors.

You can keep editing your concept while this runs, and progress is shown in Concept Compass too. Items can be edited as soon as they appear. If something goes wrong, choose Retry unfinished setup; anything already added is kept. Your Scrapbook research stays where it is.

Keeping a project up to date

Each concept is linked to one project, and each project to one concept. Once linked, the button reads Update in Project, and Go to Workspace takes you to the project.

Editing your concept doesn’t change the project by itself. Update in Project stays greyed out until you change something the Workspace uses, such as your concept details, core features, inspirations, reference images or competitors. Choosing it replaces the generated items listed above with fresh versions. You’ll see their names and confirm with Overwrite and Update, because any edits you made to those items are lost. Other Workspace items, research and project settings are kept, and if the update fails, the previous items stay in place.

To link the concept to a different project, choose Update in Project in the concepts table, then Unlink from project. The old project keeps its items and its copy of the report. Deleting a project keeps its concept, and deleting a concept keeps the project’s items and report copy.

Projects are part of a subscription. On a free account, Add to Project explains what’s included and links to the plans.

Older concepts with a Draft GDD tab

Concepts created before design documents moved to the Workspace keep their Draft GDD tab. When you add one of these concepts to a project, its saved draft is used if it still matches the concept; otherwise a fresh one is written.

The draft in that tab is based on your concept details, core features and inspiration picks, so changing any of them leaves it describing a different game:

• If you haven’t edited the draft yourself, it’s rewritten in the background the next time your report updates, after Apply and Save on Concept Details or a Refresh from the banner above the tabs. You’ll see “Drafting your game design document…” while that runs. This is part of the edit you’ve already used, so it doesn’t cost another one.
• Once you’ve edited the draft, nothing is replaced automatically. The tab shows an Out of date note saying what changed, with a Regenerate this draft button. Regenerating writes a completely new document, so you’ll be asked to confirm first and can download a copy before you do. On a pay-as-you-go report, this uses one of your edits.

Best Practices and Tips

Writing Effective Concept Descriptions

1. Be Specific - Instead of “a fun platformer,” say “a precision platformer with grappling hook mechanics and speedrunning focus”
2. Use Industry Terminology - Reference established genres, mechanics, and styles that help the algorithm find similar games
3. Focus on What’s Unique - Highlight what makes your game different from existing titles
4. Consider Your Audience - Mention who the game is for and what player needs it satisfies
5. Update Iteratively - As your concept evolves, update your concept details to get more accurate insights

Interpreting the Data

1. Context Matters - High uniqueness can signal whitespace, while low uniqueness can still work if demand and execution are strong
2. Look at Ranges - The low/median/high values show you the realistic spectrum, not just a single prediction
3. Consider Outliers - Study the “Inspirational Underdogs” to see how similar games succeeded despite limited resources
4. Use Multiple Data Points - Don’t make decisions based on one metric; consider competitors, projections, and market trends together

Using Projections Responsibly

1. Projections Are Estimates - They’re based on similar games’ performance but can’t predict breakout success or failure
2. Plan Conservatively - Use the low or median projections for budgeting and planning, not the high projections
3. Consider Evidence Quality - Limited evidence means the forecast leans on a Steam-wide baseline rather than your specific competitors; treat those projections as rough guidelines
4. External Factors Matter - Marketing skill, timing, game quality, and luck all significantly impact actual performance
5. Update Regularly - As you refine your concept, regenerate your report to get updated projections

Saving and Managing Concepts

• New concepts save automatically as drafts while you use the wizard, and changes are saved when you click “Apply and Save”
• You can create multiple concepts to compare different ideas
• Return to the concepts list by clicking See All Concepts
• Delete concepts you no longer need from the concepts table
• Revisit and update concepts as your idea evolves

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should I update my concept? Update your concept whenever you make significant changes to your game design. Small tweaks may not significantly affect the analysis, but major changes to genre, mechanics, or target audience should trigger a refresh.

What if evidence quality is Limited or Very limited? It usually means your concept is genuinely unusual, which isn’t a bad sign in itself; it just means there are fewer closely comparable games to learn from. The forecast leans more heavily on a Steam-wide baseline of genuine commercial releases, and the low-to-high range widens to reflect that. Treat those projections as rough guidelines, and consider additional market research.

Why were some of my competitors excluded from the forecast? Every similar game stays visible in the Competitors and Art tabs, but only some can inform a forecast. Games with very few reviews after a month on sale, games released in the last 30 days, and games missing the specific measurement are all set aside, and the panel tells you exactly how many and why. This keeps the projection describing serious commercial releases rather than being dragged down by unfinished or unmarketed ones.

Can I trust the revenue projections for budgeting? The projections should inform your budget but not be its sole basis. Use the low or median projections as one data point among many. Remember that actual results depend heavily on execution, marketing, and timing - factors that can’t be fully predicted by historical data.

Why don’t I see my favourite competitor in the list? The algorithm identifies competitors based on similarity to your concept description and core features. If you expected to see a particular game but don’t, it might mean:

• Your description or core features don’t capture elements that game has
• The game is significantly different in ways you hadn’t considered
• You should update your concept description to be more specific

To steer the search, add the game under Games that inspire this idea in Concept Details and choose Apply and Save. You can also add a game only to the current competitor list with the Add games picker below the table; this does not make it a search inspiration.

Do I have to pick core features? No, the Core Features section of Gameplay is optional and you can skip it. But choosing even two or three gives Concept Compass a much clearer picture of your game, which usually means more relevant competitors and advice. You can add or change them at any time from the Concept Details tab.

Why does my short description need 100 characters? The short description is the main signal Concept Compass uses to find your competitors. A couple of full sentences gives it enough to work with; a one-liner tends to produce vague matches.

Why don’t I see a Suggested Publishers section? Suggested Publishers only appears when at least one of your competitors was published by a company other than its own developer, and that publisher has released at least five games. If every one of your competitors is self-published, or their publishers are too new to have a track record, there’s no publisher to shortlist, so the section stays hidden rather than showing an empty state.

How do I use this tool with the rest of Game Oracle? Concept Compass works alongside our other tools:

• Use Game Gap to identify underserved market segments, then validate specific concepts with Concept Compass. Game Gap segment detail pages include an Open Concept Compass button that hands the market signal straight into a fresh concept in a new tab, and a Game Features section with features worth considering for your core features
• Browse the Feature Directory to find core features and read their reports before you commit
• After getting your projections, use Data Explorer to dive deeper into specific competitors
• Study outliers and underdogs using our detailed game pages
• Clip competitors, quotes and charts to your Scrapbook, then use Add to Project to carry the whole concept into the Workspace and start planning

If you have any questions about using Concept Compass or interpreting your results, drop us an email at support@game-oracle.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.