McGraw-Hill Education
Should we build games, or partner for them?
As Design Strategist for McGraw-Hill's game-based learning initiative, I framed the company's entry into educational gaming — and made the call that kept it out of an expensive in-house studio.
The opportunity: meeting young learners where engagement already lives — without rebuilding the company to do it.
A fast-growing market, a slow, costly way in.
McGraw-Hill needed a position in educational gaming across PreK–5 Reading, Math, Science, and Social Studies. The market was real and growing fast. The obvious way to enter it — building games in-house — was the wrong shape for the company.
The central tension: how to control cost while shipping games that meet the demands of learning standards. In-house game development meant new headcount, long cycles, and templating per learning objective — fixed, recurring cost against an unproven internal capability. I synthesized inputs from product sponsors, creative, and CTB assessment scientists into one strategy.
What the market and the classroom were telling us.
Market forecasts, a competitive read of Pearson, HMH, and Cengage, and teacher survey data converged on three insights that pointed away from building and toward partnering.
The risk wasn't demand — it was the cost of building.
The market was large and growing double digits, but the fixed cost and long cycles of an in-house studio were the real exposure. The strategic question shifted from "is this worth doing?" to "how do we enter without absorbing studio overhead?"
Teachers were willing — but wary.
70% saw games boosting engagement, yet a games-as-entertainment bias persisted, alongside 1:1 device gaps, bandwidth limits, and accessibility needs for special-needs learners. Adoption depended on respecting those realities, not just shipping a game.
"Game" meant three different products.
Learning games, game-based learning, and game-based assessment are distinct bets with distinct risk. Without separating them, standards alignment and sequencing would stay muddy — so a category framework had to come first.
Build the studio, or partner with proven ones.
The decisive exploration was a build-vs-partner analysis. I modeled both paths against staffing, cycle time, risk, and content leverage — and recommended against the one most companies default to.
Build an in-house studio
- Staffing: hire designers, engineers, producers, artists, and testers.
- Cycle: high cost, long timelines, templated per learning objective.
- Risk: unproven capability, fixed cost regardless of outcome.
Partner with proven studios
- Staffing: leverage existing studios — no new headcount.
- Cycle: faster time-to-market on studios' existing engines.
- Leverage: pair MHE's content depth with studio craft — variable cost.
The decisive recommendation: partner and license rather than build. It let McGraw-Hill enter the market without the salaries, tooling, and multi-year overhead of a studio — and it was adopted.
A framework, a risk map, and a plan to act on.
I gave leadership a shared vocabulary and a phased path: start with the familiar, then advance toward the products that differentiate the company.
Learning Games
Skills practice, retention, fluency. Familiar to teachers, supplements instruction, replaces worksheets — and can be adaptive and differentiated.
Game-Based Learning
Mechanics designed around specific learning goals — open-ended, exploratory, story-driven, where failure becomes an opportunity.
Game-Based Assessment
Data gathered organically from gameplay — "stealth assessment" that measures not just skills, but how students learn.
The action plan I delivered to leadership
- Acquire or partner with small, proven game studios — the cost-avoiding core move.
- Run games & technology surveys to find data-system synergies and analytics readiness.
- Scope psychometric research with CTB for game-based assessment validity.
- Assemble a cross-disciplinary team and ship one stand-alone product for a single sub-brand.
- Mandate data capture and analysis in every game-based product released.
The strategy was adopted — and executed.
McGraw-Hill ran the partner model, not an in-house build: Filament Games for Science, Building Blocks for Math, and existing MHE content like Reading Wonders and Everyday Math extended into games — routed through partners and app-store distribution.
What I'd do differently
The framework and recommendation landed, but I'd push harder on the unresolved piece: the revenue and pricing model for digital-only products. I flagged it as a risk; next time I'd bring a costed pricing hypothesis into the same deck, so the "how we partner" decision and the "how we make money" decision moved together instead of in sequence.