Your company’s reputation matters. Really, really matters. With the amount of involvement communities of players have with one another and with communities of other players, every time you take a reputation hit it reverberates throughout a huge chunk of your potential user base. How do you preserve your reputation? Don’t do things that are disreputable. It’s as simple as that. The internet has a permanent memory, so anything you do that can harm your reputation will not be forgotten, whether you like it or not.

Design the game for your audience, not for yourself. This is the hardest one in the world to follow, because all developers have opinions and preferences. Determine your game’s intended audience, and design the game according to what they will like, not what you will like. If you want to make a game for a broad audience, this is especially important, because game developers are generally extremely skilled and experienced gamers, and we are a limited audience.

No feature creep. It’s better to have a short list of tightly knit features than a long list of features that don’t play nice together. Even if you have 100 awesome features, if they don’t all work well together, they will actually make the game worse (not to mention less accessible, because it’s hard to learn that many features). It’s much better to focus on a smaller set of features, make sure they all play nice together, and polish the hell out of them.

Launch dates matter. This is especially true if there is a behemoth in your launch date midst, ready to launch just before or just after your game or expansion. You should really do what you can to launch your game at least a month or two before or after the 800lb gorilla’s SKU hits the shelves, or else your game’s sales will suffer greatly (and possibly permanently).

Do not launch an unfinished product. There may be extenuating circumstances that somehow necessitate the launch of a buggy product from a business perspective, but the game will most likely fail in today’s market, especially if it’s not particularly unique. Do everything in your power to launch a high quality, polished product, because first impressions can make or break a game with the level of competition in the genre today.