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Why Game Developers Go Rogue
cliffski writes "Jay Barnson interviews the new crop of indie game developers.
How could anybody abandon the steady paychecks, access to the best tools and engines, large teams of skilled colleagues and the glory of working on one of next holiday season's blockbusters for a chance to labor in relative obscurity on tiny, niche titles?
Steven Peeler was a senior programmer at Ritual Entertainment. For him, leaving and forming the one-man studio Soldak Entertainment came down to a desire for creative freedom. 'I really wanted to work on an RPG, and Ritual only made shooters,' he says. 'There were some annoying politics going on that was really frustrating, I disagreed with the direction the company was taking, I was really tired of pushy publishers and I just wanted to do my own thing.'"
You can be the greatest programmer in the world, but until the realities of the market are well understood, you're going to be starving.
The fact of the matter is that very few independent programmers make it big. Those that do either got lucky or had a good understanding of business. It's easy to go off on your own and create what you want, but it's a completely different thing to garner interest in the product and sell it for a profit.
The reason why game developers "go rogue" is because they are inherently a seat-of-the-pants type personality who see personal pleasure and freedom as the highest attainable goals. While those are fine goals, without a solid business understanding, those goals area farther away from the independent game developer than if they stayed at a large employer.
You would think the big game developers would make their people sign no-compete contracts.
Overly broad covenants not to compete are not enforceable. The State of California in fact considers non-competes to be against public policy. The justification is that everybody has a right to work in the field in which he was trained. Ask a lawyer in your state for details.
Programmers are no different than any other profession. Why do small companies exist and how to they find talent to push them up the food chain? Some folks do not care to plug into the large company mentality. Large projects ran by enterprise minded project managers can be stifling. Small companies allow you to be a critical asset and not just an amoeba swimming in the larger developer pool.
You're missing the best way to do it, IMHO: contact an Asian microconsole manufacturer, and work with their ROM to develop your own game.
There are numerous (maybe hundreds?) Asian microconsole manufacturers, and all of them are happy to license their subsystems cheaply. The one I think of most often when I come up with my brilliant (and soon forgotten) video game idea is Jakks Pacific. They have a great subsystem that can probably unite more than one player, and it outputs to SDTV standard. I'm fairly sure (but not 100%) that they even have expandability options so you can even offer updates via a plug-in cartridge.
Contact one of these companies and see what they can offer you in terms of licensing their subsystems. Get their backend code structures, and start developing. Yes, I'm sure they're limited in resolution, game size, etc, but it's a great way to get your foot in the door for little money, and see if you have what it takes to develop an entire game from scratch.
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I was a "developer-producer" of a series of BBS doors that ended up multiplayer. This was an amateur hobby, but one of our doors ended up successful enough (about 100 installations multinode). It took seriously 15 designers to make this text-based game, including copywriters, ASCII graphics artists, C or Pascal code developers, integration developers, alpha testers, beta testers, customer service people, and one MASM assembly language programmer who I don't think had any social skills or even knew how to dress himself. It was a BIG game to implement, and it had no real graphics or high end interactivity. So I'd think a video game with multiple players means a HUGE leap of faith, a big risk, but maybe a big reward.
Good luck.
Make a prototype. Develop it for the PC but make it portable. Pimp your prototype to smaller development houses. All three major console developers are trying to promote indie games through their download services, so if you have a solid prototype and are good at selling your idea, you'd have a shot.
Alternatively, grab the XNA development kit and a XNA Creator's Club membership, and target your game to the 360. Your audience will be limited to other XNA Creator Club members, but you can go on to pimp your idea later.
Rycross:
I established a S-corporation, which is basically a corporate entity where the profits and losses flow to and from the shareholders. Eventually I had multiple S-corps, so I incorporated a C-corp holding company for certain assets which I lease back to my S-corps.
Finding gigs is the hardest part, but if you've saved a few years of expenses (and everyone should), you can generally find work fairly quickly. The key is to be prepared to travel, if necessary, and pound the pavement to get those first gigs. Once you're in with a few businesses, word-of-mouth does its job. I'd save that 80% of my new clients are referred by old clients, who get a nice reward for the referral.
Starting out initially is the big scare, but it can be done while you're working your W2 "job." There are MANY organizations who need some simple needs, and are great stepping stones to securing better work (and higher paying work) once you've cut your teeth. Every day I see another opportunity for someone with even basic skills in a variety of markets. If I could clone myself, I'd be a billionaire. Note that I do not advocate self-employment for money reasons primarily, I advocate them for job stability and happiness. It boils down to the "all your eggs in one employment basket" feeling I have: when you have many customers, you have more time to handle your own desires, and have a bit more stability if you can enter various industries and markets so you're not tied to one market that may have its own ups and downs.
Feel free to email me and ask some questions.
Having worked in a computer game development studio for two years and received a job offer at another, I can safely refute your statement. Game development companies pay just a bit under market for the positions they fill, and usually retain people for a number of years.
A lot of studios go under, I admit. But it's not too hard to find your next position, often working alongside the same people you've worked with before. The pay is not "very very bad" or anywhere near unemployment wages. The author of the original cited article (my brother) has had a few rocky times with a few different studios, but manages to be the sole breadwinner for his family of four in a middle-class neighborhood just fine as a developer for a smaller studio.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
Err... not quite... let's go through those one by one:
Heh. Some people are under the impression that game programmers end up millionaires, like John Carmack, but the vast majority are actually paid a piss poor wage. And it becomes even less tempting once you do a total of the time worked, including unpaid overtime (some companies don't even just do it for the final crunch, but most of the time), and divide your wage by it.
The inside joke is that they haven't offshored games to India and China yet, because those guys don't work for _that_ little.
So trying for indie, I dunno, seems a lot less of a loss. You don't even need to sell many copies to make the same wage as before.
1. Not everyone works with a Sid Meier or Will Wright. There are a lot of game programmers working for a lot less talented designers. In fact, your average entry job probably will be for some no-name company making a flop, and with a designer who makes up for less skill by having a bigger ego.
2. The movie will show _you_ and get you a bunch of fans, if you're a talented actor. Those best directors and writers will make _you_ shine. If you're a talented game programmer, the best you can hope for is that you'll be a name by the half of the credits, and the designer is treated by the press and fanboys as the only one who mattered. It's more akin to being the third cameraman on the credits of a movie. So it's a bit easier to break away as a game programmer, because the ego factor to keep you in line just isn't the same.
3. Those actors are often allowed a lot more creative input, to those directors and writers. Harrison Ford is the perfect example with his changes. Probably the best known being the scene where Indy shoots the swordsman. As a game programmer, probably nobody will give a shit about _your_ vision. The testers have more of a chance to change anything than you do, and God knows that for a bunch of companies the testers are ignored.
4. Up to what age do actors get to play and be worshipped? The average game programmer is chewed up and shit out by the games industry, as a burned out husk, before reaching 30. A lot of them even earlier. Sometimes having celebrities shit on you, still is just being shit upon.
While the games industry does have a couple of very skilled people, the average programmer there is there only because he wanted very little money and generally didn't mind the overtime and being treated badly. And again, will make up for lack of actual skill, by being legends in their own minds.
Most games won't even break even, and end up subsidized from the profits of EA's sports games and the like.
Plus, there's a lot to be said about the "glory" of being one of the guys whose code was launched buggy and untested, and had reviewers and players ranting about poor quality ;)
And again, most of the glory will go to the game designer, while you'll be lost in the credits.
So to sum it all up, being a game programmer is very very unlike being a super-star actor. The whole ego thing that works for actors... well, as a game programmer you're probably more motivated by either (A) a misguided sense of altruism, as in, "ah well, at least I'm doing something useful and making it possible for other people to have fun," or (B) being unrealistic enough or in outright denial about your position and chances for something better. Or often both.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How could anybody abandon the steady paychecks, access to the best tools and engines, large teams of skilled colleagues and the glory of working on one of next holiday season's blockbusters for a chance to labor in relative obscurity on tiny, niche titles?
Maybe it's because the paychecks are NOT steady, the tools are NOT so great, the colleagues are fresh out of college and kiss too much ass, and their is no glory in being credited on the latest bug-fest of a movie license sellout. I'm looking at you, ElectronicArctivision.
It's often the niche titles that yield the biggest successes. After all, if you're a highly skilled developer or designer, and you're forced to work within the mold of a big-name company, you're probably watching that skill go to waste. Only the freedom of a small, indie shop will give you the room to stretch your imagination and flex your hacking muscle.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Steam makes it possible for independent developers to get wide exposure and delivery of their games. Audiosurf is an independently developed game on steam available for $9.99 that has consistently ranked in the top 10 for sales beating out even major Valve titles like Half Life. The game was developed over the period of a year by one guy in his basement and I wouldn't be surprised if he's made a substantial amount of money off sales possibly even making it possible for him to quit his day job.
Perhaps I was not clear enough, I do not eschew insurance entirely but rather advocate its judicious use for situations for which it is warranted. A high deductible health insurance plan (HDHP) combined with a health savings account (HSA) very nicely fits the bill. Once the savings ball is rolling you can periodically adjust the deductible as the balance in the account increases or your individual tolerance for risk increases or decreases. Now I will grant you that this is not the best option for everyone. For example, people with regularly recurring medical expenses that are moderately high but not high enough to satisfy the deductible OR people who, through either misfortune or their own doing or both, incur medical expenses in excess of $5 million dollars or so (but really you are screwed anyway at that point because almost nobody could afford to pay out of pocket for those kind of expenses and a state run health program is likely to deny your treatment and let you die anyway because they will not pay a huge amount to save the life a single individual and thereby endanger the solvency of the system for everyone else). However, for most of the rest of us the HDHP + HSA plan is quite viable because many expected medical expenses over one's lifetime are relatively small compared to what can be saved over time in the HSA and involve planned expenses and NOT catastrophic emergency care (which is why the HSA is combined with the HDHP).