Runway Math: Mapping Your Seed Round to a Game Timeline

To map seed funding to a game development timeline, divide the raise by your monthly burn to get total months, subtract six to nine months for raising the next round, and spread what is left across prototype, production, and soft launch. Each phase should end with proof an investor can see, such as retention data.

Why months matter more than dollars

Founders tend to think of a seed round as an amount. Your board thinks of it as a number of months.

The game does not care about either. It cares about how many weeks of focused work you can buy before the money runs out.

Converting the raise into months early changes the conversation. "We have 800,000 dollars" sounds like plenty. "We have 18 months, and we need to start raising again in month 10" sounds like a plan with a deadline.

Step 1: work out your real monthly burn

Burn is everything that leaves the bank each month. Founders often count the build cost and forget the rest.

A complete burn line usually includes:

• Studio or team cost for development
• Founder salaries, even modest ones
• Tools, licences, and cloud services
• Legal, accounting, and company admin
• Test budgets for ads and playtests
• A small reserve for the unexpected

If you are weighing an in-house team against an outsourced one, our post on in-house versus outsourced burn math compares the two in detail.

Step 2: reserve the fundraising months

Common startup advice is to start raising the next round with six to nine months of cash left. Raising takes longer than founders expect, and a game with no fresh data is hard to pitch.

That reserve comes off the top. It is not spare money. It keeps the lights on while you pitch, and it keeps the team working so the data keeps improving during the raise.

If your plan needs every month of runway to reach the proof point, the plan is too long. Cut scope, not the reserve.

Step 3: map the phases to the months left

Here is an illustrative example, so say you raised 800,000 dollars and your full burn is about 45,000 dollars a month. That gives roughly 18 months. These numbers are for planning only, and your own will differ.

Notice that the soft launch ends around month 11. That leaves seven months of reserve, which sits inside the six to nine month range.

Step 4: tie every phase to investor proof

Each phase should end with something an investor can look at. Progress reports and art reviews are useful, but they do not change a valuation. Data does.

The proof that tends to matter most at each stage:

1. After prototype: playtest notes showing people understand and enjoy the core action.
2. After production: a stable build, a working analytics setup, and a clear content plan.
3. After soft launch: D1 and D7 retention, the share of players who return one day and seven days after installing, plus early cost per install from small ad tests.

Our post on the questions boards ask at month six covers what investors tend to probe.

What happens when a phase slips

Phases slip. When they do, the slip comes out of the reserve, not out of thin air. A two-month delay in production turns a seven-month reserve into five months, and suddenly you are raising under pressure.

Three moves keep a slip from becoming a crisis:

• Cut scope at the first sign of a slip, while the cut is still cheap.
• Report the slip to your board early, with the revised timeline and the plan.
• Protect the soft launch date above everything else, because that is where your raise data comes from.

How much game a seed round actually buys

A useful check is to look at what different budgets typically produce. Our breakdown of what 50,000 dollars buys in game development gives one reference point.

The honest answer is that most seed rounds buy a focused first game and the data to raise on it. They rarely buy a full live-service game with years of content. Planning for the first and pitching the second keeps everyone on the same page.

What we would do

We would build the timeline backwards. Start from the date you need to begin raising, put soft launch data two months before that, and work back to today. If the phases do not fit, the scope comes down until they do.

Then we would review the burn and the timeline every month with the same one-page sheet, so the board sees the same picture you see.

The short version

• Convert your raise into months by dividing it by your full monthly burn.
• Reserve six to nine months for raising the next round. Treat it as untouchable.
• Map prototype, production, and soft launch into the months left.
• End each phase with proof an investor can see, ideally retention data.
• When a phase slips, cut scope early and protect the soft launch date.

If you want a second opinion on how your raise maps to a realistic build, we are happy to look at it with you.

Related reading: Setting a game budget with investors watching, Reporting game progress to investors, Why game projects go over budget