Lukewarm Results: Why “Almost Good Enough” Is a Dangerous Place to Be

Pocket Gamer Connects London 2026 was a great reminder of how differently game developers define when a project is “ready” to scale or even ready to test.

I had several conversations about how much content a game needs before teams feel confident enough to move forward. What struck me most was how widely those confidence thresholds vary, and how often that confidence only arrives very late in the process.

In my view, many teams wait too long and try to do too much at once: too many UA channels, too many or D30+ metrics, and too many experiments running in parallel.

When I asked what metric really mattered, I was surprised by how many people said they weren’t confident until they could measure longer-tail Dx ROAS. In practice, that means months of development before you can even answer a very basic question: should this game exist at all? Months time spent before you can tell whether the core is fun.

Personally, I’m far more opinionated about early engagement. What happens on Day 0 tells you far more about a game’s potential than any long-tail metric ever will. To me, building monetisation structures or polishing deeper UX is relatively easy compared to finding fun. Fun is the hard part.

The danger is that once you finally get to testing, especially after months and months of development, you want the results to be positive. And numbers can be deceptively comforting.
175 Day 1 retained players out of 500 installs sounds quite good, but it isn’t. It should be treated as a warning sign. It’s not disastrous, and it may feel close enough to targets, but it’s still not good enough.

In today’s market, adding features or polishing UX will not fix weak early engagement when the core fun isn’t there.

We like to think, “surely we have the skills to turn good into great.” But this isn’t about execution skill or knowledge. It’s about whether you’ve found something that creates a real emotional response.

Lukewarm experiences are easy to make. Strong emotions, whether excitement, tension, joy, or obsession, are harder. If a game isn’t original enough or fun enough to provoke those emotions, players won’t bother, no matter how clean, clear, or beautiful it is. At that point, it’s not a content or polish problem but a mediocrity problem. And many of us know how brutally hard it is to push a mediocre title uphill.

So should teams get to results early and pivot immediately when results are lukewarm? In 2026, I’d say yes. Definitely.