Frequently asked questions

A decision-ready report: a clear recommendation on your question, the analysis behind it, and the evidence behind that. Findings are tiered by confidence, comparables are named, and the "what we'd do next" is explicit. It's built to be taken into a greenlight meeting or an investment committee as-is.

Days, not months. Exact turnaround depends on scope, and we confirm it before any engagement starts: if we say Thursday, we mean Thursday.

Anything the games market holds the answer to. Should this game be made? How should it be positioned and priced? Is this genre worth entering? How is our live title really performing? Should I invest in this opportunity? If your question doesn't fit a standard report, that's what Custom Research is for.

Yes, that's the point of the sample report. Request one, and judge the analysis, the method and the recommendations for yourself. No pricing call, no pitch deck.

No, it's a different decision, not a missed one. The market your title was signed into is not the market it will launch into. Publishers use Critical Compass on in-development projects to track titles against evolving market expectations, keeping positioning, pricing, marketing and scope relevant right up to launch.

Proprietary technology: large games-market datasets worked by custom-built, games-industry AI agents and workflows. They do the heavy reading at a scale no research team could. Our data scientists and analysts then shape, verify, and stand behind every insight. Nothing reaches you unchecked.

AI does the synthesis; our analysts do the judgment. Every report is verified by a human who understands this industry before it's delivered.

Four families of signal: market and sales data (revenue, unit estimates, install bases, category trends), storefront performance (wishlists, reviews, pricing, launch trajectories), social and community channels (sentiment, community size, what's resonating), and competitive intelligence (who you're up against and how they're genuinely performing).

Ask it, then ask it again: general-purpose LLMs hallucinate and spiral into wrong analysis. They have no proprietary market data, no games-specific methodology, and no analyst standing behind the output. You'll get a fluent answer; you can't get an accountable one. We built Critical Compass because studios deserve in-depth analysis at a fraction of the cost.

Dashboards give you data and leave the interpretation (the hard part) to you. Traditional research firms interpret, but slowly, expensively, and too often with methodologies imported from industries that behave nothing like games. Critical Compass gives you the finished thought: a specific answer to your specific question, from people and technology built for this industry only.

We don't sell certainty, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. What our record shows is the inverse: across five years of private operation, the platform has correctly identified every project failure in advance (including how it would fail), validated by independent back-tests. Success has many parents; failure has patterns. We read the patterns, and we're transparent about the confidence level of every finding.

Then you'll hear it from us plainly, with the reasons and what would have to change. It's not the report anyone wants, but it's the one that saves years and budgets. We'd rather lose a comfortable conversation than let you lose your business.

Client-confidential data is segregated by engagement in every case, via secured hash keys per company, user and document. Your confidential material is stored and access-controlled within its own engagement workspace, and never appears in another client's outputs.

No. Client-confidential materials are never used to train models or inform any other client's work; only our proprietary market datasets improve the platform.

Critical Compass is a separate product with a simple rule: the analysis serves whoever commissioned it, and no one else sees it. The agency side of GYLD is precisely why the analysis is good; we've sat on your side of funding and publishing tables for years. But reports are never shared across clients, prospects, or our own deal work.

You do. Use it internally, take it to your board, your publisher or your investors. We retain our underlying methodology and datasets; the analysis we build on your question is yours.

Developers, publishers and investors, from teams inside SEGA, Epic Games, Amazon, Gameloft and Focus, to studios of five. The entry report was priced deliberately so that the people who most need a clear read (small teams betting everything on one title) can afford one.

The Pre-Launch Viability Report starts from US$5,000 and comes with one free re-run. Custom research, post-launch analysis and agent builds are scoped to the question: tell us what you're facing and we'll quote it straight. No retainers required, no ongoing subscriptions needed.

Your question, and whatever context you can share: ideally a pitch deck or a GDD, a store page, or simply the concept. The less you have, the more the market data does, and the earlier you can pivot before spending money; but the more you share, the sharper the read. Everything you send is covered by the confidentiality terms above.

Tell us the decision you're facing: that's the only input that matters. We'll point you at the right product, or tell you honestly if we're not the right fit for it.