But life is much more like poker, you can play perfectly and still lose. Or play terribly and win. I realized this viscerally after a few years in venture capital. 
But first, applications for SPEEDRUN close in just 12 hours! 
1/ Metrics > Team > Ideas. Doesn't matter what kind of genius thesis you have on a particular market, if a startup is blowing up everyone knows it. Strong retention, high growth, tons of deal heat. The hard part is picking out a sustainable game from overnight flashes in the pan.
Battle royales were first popularized by fiction, the 2000s Japanese film "Battle Royale," The Hunger Games, etc. Transmedia works! 
It starts three years ago when I was still working @McKinsey focused on biotech/healthcare. Like many fresh consultants out of college, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next.
At Riot we called this game primitives, at Blizzard psychographic profiles. And you can deconstruct it further. But this is a good starting point.
1/ Let's start with the market. In the existing gamers I sampled, crypto usage is becoming more widespread amongst US gamers. But web3 games are still relatively nascent among them, with only 6% of gamers having played. 
A couple hypotheses I wanted to test: 