Where Are All The Good Education Games?

PRINCIPLE: The economics of creating high-quality educational content don't work under traditional models - new approaches are needed. (This feels more like a specific challenge than a first principle)

The natural thing that I thought of when I first thought of teaching with games was playing games that can teach. And that’s what we set out to do.

We partnered with the team that built Minecraft.edu, Minecraft’s educational platform, and Gamestar Mechanic, one of the best games about game design, along with a number of successful consumer games like Never Alone, which sat in the permanent exhibit at MoMA. The idea for the game that we wanted to build was simple at one level: let’s build a game where the whole idea is that everything is hackable. You’ll traverse worlds and games and discover that if you can wield the power of code, you’ll find easter eggs and pathways everywhere. We wasted years of our life and 7 figures doing it. But it taught us what we needed to do. I hope that this might be a lesson for those following us.

Otto von Bismarck: “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” Perhaps these lessons can help you learn from my mistakes.

The Endless Mission was a quest-driven adventure coding game of epic proportions. That was the problem. Every quest required more budget. Our question was, how do we keep this mission alive with a budget that had run dry?

We needed thousands of hours of gameplay to fulfill the vision of this epic adventure. We would never be able to build that many levels, but if we built tools that let our community build the levels, then the community could build the game.

We started on this journey of using games to teach, we thought the obvious thing that most people think about when they think about games. We thought about playing games. But it turns out that good games cost a lot to build.

I once got on stage to talk about the reasons why educational games of the world are so bad. Why is it that there isn’t a single educational game title in the top 100 most successful games?

I said, on stage, that you could build educational games cheaply. Indeed, we were building coding games for tens of thousands of dollars. We were paying emerging market studios to build those games. We had a great little engine, of a core design and engineering team that managed multiple game studios making these games.

In parallel, we were working on a parallel strategy to build The Endless Mission, a much bigger budget deep dive coding education game. It was vast, ambitious, layered with tools and quests. We spent many, many millions of dollars on this game.

We were doing great. Until we ran out of cash on all of it.

Big budget vision and the small targeted games, alike, both strategies needed budgets that were multiples of what we had originally estimated.

Yes, you can build prototypes of educational games cheaply. To be fair, some of those games climbed to the top of the Hour of Code most played games within their first days of being published. But none of these games had any of the polish of a game that actually succeeds on the open market.

Yes, some people will scrape by on ramen noodles and sweat equity to build their passion project into a commercial game. And for that person to hire a decent engineer, designer and artist for a year will cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But the reality is that it costs a lot of money, and takes a long time, to build a great game. Good indie games can easily cost millions of dollars. AAA games can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. We recently did a brainstorming session with some designers to revitalize one of those small games. As we got to brainstorming, we imagined a magnificent world with mind-blowing features and a story that quite literally brought me to tears. To take that small budget prototype to a game that would be worthy of being played by millions of people, which was fully within reach if we could only manifest what was in our minds, would cost millions of dollars.

“Building a mid-level indie game requires a large, specialized team working together over several years, with each role contributing to a different aspect of development. You’ll need engineers to create the core mechanics and systems, a creative team to design 3D models, animations, and environments, and designers to develop gameplay, levels, and narrative. Each of these functions requires professionals earning salaries between $80,000 and $180,000 per year, with teams often consisting of 15-20 people working full-time. With each 3D asset taking days to weeks to create, and engineers spending months building and refining the game, labor alone quickly adds up. Salaries for the team over 2-3 years can easily reach $7-8 million.

Beyond the creative and technical roles, you’ll need project management, marketing, community engagement, and operations teams to oversee the project’s workflow, keep the development on track, and promote the game to players. These roles are critical for managing deadlines, coordinating work, and ensuring the game has a strong launch and community engagement. Along with the cost of software, infrastructure, and marketing, this adds another $2-3 million over the course of development. In total, developing a mid-level indie game with a team of 20 people over 2-3 years can easily cost around $9-10 million, reflecting the complex, iterative process needed to create a polished, immersive gaming experience.”

This is to build a single game. There are definitely cheaper games, but they're also far more expensive games. And usually when people are thinking of the great games that they would want to have be educational games, they are thinking of games that are even more expensive than this.

These games are hard to make money on when you have the single goal of trying to find the fun that will sell millions of units. Few people, read none, are ignorant enough to spend millions of dollars chasing an educational game to teach a niche topic on the hope that making learning fun is simply a matter of playing a game. It's just too hard and risky to make money on.

We discovered that if you're going to have educational games to play, someone has to build those games, and there simply isn't enough money to build all of the games that you would need to have in order to teach all of the things that you would want to teach.

You can map all the play patterns in the world to learning patterns. You can do all the research in the world that games can teach. A lot has been done. But you then need to be able to build those games. I assumed that making games that tightly tie those learning patterns and those play patterns in a way that is genuinely fun would naturally follow from proving that these two things are tied. But great games don't follow from the discovery that kids learn in games. The research already shows that they do. The games follow from one simple premise. If you can make money on them, people will build them. And that has not been proven. So few people are investing meaningful amounts of money in building really quality educational games.

So we faced a dilemma: games are incredible teaching tools. But how do you build truly stellar learning games if there isn’t enough money to build those games? We found an answer to that question. A really powerful one.

I want to capture the various lessons that got us there so that we can save others the pain.