Why Does Your Company Exist?
Every company or team should have a mission they are driving towards and an aspirational vision for who they will become if successful. But too often, vision and mission statements are treated like branding artifacts or website filler; impractal, lofty, and ultimately useless.
At Proletariat, we crafted a mission and vision that were practical, grounded, and designed to be useful every day. They shaped how we hired, how we prioritized, and how we built culture.
In this post, I’ll share the mission and vision we used at Proletariat, why we wrote them the way we did, and how you can write statements that actually help your team make better decisions.
Proletariat’s Mission and Vision
Mission Statement
To create innovative experiences with rich IP at the frontier of entertainment.
Vision Statement
To become a beloved game studio with a diverse team doing our best work for our players.
Mission vs. Vision: What is the difference and why do they matter?
You’ll find dozens of definitions online (including unhelpful ones from Wikipedia), but here’s how I break it down:
Mission: What can we be the best in the world at?
This is about what you uniquely do better than anyone else. It clarifies your competitive edge and core focus. It explains what your company and team will do, and more importantly, what you will not do. What dent do you want to make in the universe?Vision: Who do we become if we’re successful?
This is about aspiration. It should inspire your team and guide your culture into building something bigger and better. What do you and the universe look like with that new dent?
Every decision made within the organization should be in service of progressing the mission to accomplish the vision.
How We Applied Them
The word choices in these statements were deliberate. For the mission it reinforced the type of work we did:
"Innovative experiences" led us to be innovative in gameplay, storytelling, art style and more. It prioritized originality and pushing the boundaries of genre conventions. It also meant we would not pursue fast follows or red oceans.
"Rich IP" encouraged us to think beyond mechanics and product to create meaningful worlds that would resonate with our players.
“Frontier of entertainment” drove us towards emerging platforms, new ways to build community, and to invent new go to market strategies.
For the vision it shaped our values and inspired us into becoming something better:
"Beloved studio" reminded us that trust, respect, and radical candor mattered, especially in how we supported our team, our players, and our industry.
“Diverse team” shaped everything from how we approached hiring to how we ran our development process to who was included in our meetings.
"Best work” meant making tradeoffs to ensure the team could be proud of the work they were doing both individually and as a team. That could mean anything from providing important resources to protecting time for polish.
“Our players" kept the focus on the community because without them we could not be successful.
What made them work
To make these statements stick we considered some key areas:
They were specific. We chose the words carefully to have a strong perspective that we felt uniquely fit the company we wanted to build. The broader your mission and vision statement, the less valuable they will become in defining your company or team.
They were actionable. These statements were each meant to answer a single question that would impact the daily work of the team.
We used them to make real decisions. If your mission and vision don’t help you make hard decisions, they’re not doing their job.
They connected to our values. Each value reinforced the path to our mission and the behavior needed to achieve the vision.
Final Thoughts
A strong mission and vision aren’t just for pitch decks or website About pages, they’re daily tools to guide decisions, align teams, and inspire action. Done well, they help your company focus on what matters most. A great mission grounds your work in what you can do better than anyone else. A great vision points toward who you want to become.
You don’t need to craft the perfect statement on day one, but you do need to commit to defining and refining it as you grow. Your mission and vision should evolve with the company, but they should never be meaningless. When used well, they become rallying cries for your team and magnets for the people who believe what you believe.
If your team doesn’t know why the company exists or where it’s going, you can and should fix that.