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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.'"
'Nuff said.
A steady paycheck looks good on paper and many people are perfectly happy working on someone else's ideas for their entire lives. Eventually though, people with a creative streak have to have an outlet or they go insane. Sometimes a part-time hobby is enough, sometimes it means quitting the steady job.
I'm not sure why anyone refers to employment as a games developer as "steady". They are precarious outfits, pathetically dependant upon "hits" that may or may not come again, until they burn you out and drop you like a stone.
An easy explanation for developers "going rogue" is that the pay is so very very bad that the difference between unemployment and salary whilst you write the code is so small that it is not as hard a decision as in other lines of work.
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
Should I just bite the bullet and develop my prototype for Windows?
No, just do it literally. It's been years. If you haven't solved it yet and you're still posting the same old crap, your prototype isn't ever going to be made, much less a finished game.
Stop trying to hide your QQing under the guise of actually doing something development-related
Interesting quote from the article:
"Some of them cloak it all with this thin veneer of 'sticking it to the man' and being 'anti-DRM' and 'anti-big corporations.' Despite me giving a free demo, no DRM, innovative games, at reasonable prices with great tech support from a one-man company, the bastards still rip me off and take my stuff anyway."
So in other words, this guy releases his game with no anti-piracy DRM measures and people still play his game without paying him.
I get into piracy arguments with other folks all the time. They talk about how they want "DRM-free" music, information wants to be free, most modern music is crap anyways, etc. But when it comes down to it, they're just being cheap.
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
Go solo, everyone. Cut the unbilical cord and if you're a hard worker, you'll prosper. Then find about 10 of your previous coworkers, offer them a few bucks more an hour, and bill them out at 5X their pay to not just your old employer but their competitors, too. 3. Profit!
It's called being a contractor and the reason you charge 5x your old salary is because you have to pay your own social security, health insurance, 401K, etc etc etc.
There's a lot more to a W-2 salary than the money in your pocket after taxes.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why do game developers leave big companies to form their own companies? The exact same reasons other professionals leave big companies for their own companies. More breaking news at 10.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
I think you're barking up the wrong tree a bit here. History is chock full of studios founded by programmers, artists, and designers that broke off from their employer to do something interesting. In many cases, it was to escape the employer's risk aversion. i.e. It's not that games other than First Person Shooters don't sell. It's that large companies know that FPSes sell, so they don't want to take a risk on anything else.
The smaller studios, OTOH, have an opportunity to pursue new gaming styles and lines of games that don't have to align with what the big executives THINK will sell. Sometimes they make it big. More often, they manage to prove out the market before being folded back into a larger company. That larger company then sees "hot new opportunities" that didn't exist before. Could the large company have opened up the market to begin with? Sure. But why take the risk when someone else will do it for you?
The end result is that these smaller studios (these days often referred to as "Indies" partly due to the low investment capital needed to start making modern games) make their money in a tried and true business fashion: An exit strategy.
The fact of the matter is that very few small business owners make it big. (Investors like to tout the "90% of small businesses fail" number.) There's nothing inherently different about the gaming sector.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Historically != Modern Approach
* WiiWare
* XBox Live
* PlayStation Network
These are all services that Indies are able to break into these days. For a small investment (free - $600 for XBLA, $2000 for a WiiWare dev kit) you can make your game for one of these consoles, then offer it for download for a small fee.
Case in Point: Defend Your Castle went from a single-player flash game to a local multiplayer title that happens to be the third most popular game on the WiiWare service.
Now if you mean "Indie" to mean "Homebrew", you're barking up the wrong tree. Go get a copy of DevkitPro + a copy of Twilight Princess for the Wii. That will allow you to develop local multiplayer for a console. Another option is to support XBox 360 controllers on Windows PCs. They are designed as USB devices intended for plugging into either a computer or a console. You can then encourage players to purchase these controllers.
Assuming your homebrew title is good enough, that is...
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
in todays society, if you are programming for a company, you will have to put up, or no paycheck. In atleast 90% of america's economy it is political and ego stroking. Making someone look good. Only way you can get away from this, is if you are the Sole Programmer in a company of One... and at that, you will have to stroke someone's ego to atleast sell your code/product.
It may be an art form to the advertising & publicizing departments when promoting the games but to the decision makers its usually not.
1. Look at what kind of games are doing well at the moment.
2. Pick game engine to do the game based on money/engine popularity.
3. Pick a setting/environment.
4. Write a few bits of a story around the setting.
5. Try to add one or two bits of gameplay somewhere if there is enough time.
6. Churn out game as soon as possible.
Most game companies seem to focus on graphics and very little else.
Good luck to the guy. I wish more people would do this. I'd rather play an awful looking game with good gameplay than one of these 'interactive cut-scene' pieces of crap like most games are lately.
I have had one W2 job in my life
That speaks for itself. You really have had very little experience, and people should take your anecdotal analysis with a grain of salt. I have had many W2 and 1099 jobs, and in the long run I greatly prefer the stability of W2 jobs, even though I really enjoyed the weird hours, huge paychecks, and random nature of my early contracting jobs.
I'd say try it before you get too old, or at least give moonlighting a shot.
Go solo, everyone.
1099 jobs are great when you are young, healthy, and full of piss and vinegar and can afford to start life over again if you screw up. If you want to go solo over age 30, make damn well sure you have a contingency plan, or are networked and diversified out the yin-yang.
Also, don't get sick! Unless you live in a state that has passed laws allowing groups of people to pool money and buy discount healthcare, you are F-U-C-*-E-D. Once you go on record with a HINT of chronic illness, you will very likely not be able to get insurance. The government mandates that insurance companies sell you insurance if you have a pre-existing condition, but they don't mandate the price. You could very easily could end up requiring to pay $3~5k per month for health insurance.
I'm eternally grateful that W2 companies get such great deals on group health coverage.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
If you think that a 401(k) is for idiots, then you obviously have no understanding of retirement planning. Yes, if someones makes gobs and gobs of money, they could just put it in safe and take it out as needed. Here, in the real world, we have something called income taxes, capital gains taxes, inflation, and an average market return of 8-12% a year (depending on what view you take). Plus, if you are lucky like me, you can get matching on a 401(k) /cheer
Insurance is also only cheap if you have a clean bill of health when you get it and have a fairly binding agreement. Many insurance companies also reserve rights to drop customers in some situations. This happened to my cousin, who at 26, had colon cancer. She made a full recovery and was dropped by her insurance company later -- with full legality (so my sister, aunt, uncle, uncle and bro-in-law who are lawyers told me).
Also, lest we forget most start up companies fail. Contracting is great when one has a gig, however even persons with great talent lay idle sometimes.
Even if you are a badass at computer science, programming, etc unless you have a solid understanding of finance the odds are greatly against someone making solid money - also what about providing for a spouse & kids? I would feel pretty bad if I couldn't pay the bills because I planned poorly.
The fact of the matter is that very few independent programmers make it big.
I think that's exactly the mentality many developers are trying to escape by "going rogue". Many of them would be happy making a modest living, never "making it big", while creating the games they want to make.
There is another article in the same issue of Escapist that describes the history of Kingdom of Loathing. Nobody's getting rich there, but they jobs a ton of game developers would kill to have.
What is insightful about this comment?
There is a lot of space between a starving programmer and "making it big". Their goal is not to make it big, but to make a living with what they love.
You don't have to be Picasso to make a living with painting. You don't have to be Metallica to make a living with music. And you don't have to be Sid Meier to make a living with your games.
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.
Another fact of the matter is: independent programmers don't need to make it big. They just need to make a decent living doing what they love, and that's certainly achievable if you know your market well. That last bit is important. You're no longer just a programmer, now you're suddenly also a marketer.
I think before the 90's, games were the domain of the sole, rogue programmer. Creating the greatest Apple II game ev@r was possible. You don't need pro creative talent to make pixelated blobs to appear and blips/bleeps to happen in a way that is entertaining for the player. In those days, it was about evoking the experience in the mind of the player, not just their ears and eyes. I'm glad to see affordable tools magnify the creativity of the sole programmer such that they can compete again. As long as indie devs continue to understand their roots and don't get caught up in trying to out-Blizzard Blizzard.
Yeah, and the streets paved with gold. Because, you know, the game industry isn't run by a group of dinosaurs in a market with too little external pressure to drive out famously bad production practices.
The steady paychecks don't exist in a contracted world. The best tools and engines are things that were shaky when they were one-man hacked together ten years ago in C by someone who thought they should still have been writing assembly. The large teams of skilled colleagues are college kids being paid next to nothing while they're burned out by 70 hour workweeks in day one crunch mode shops.
If game design firms like this existed, the two year attrition in gaming wouldn't be 70%. This article is about fantasies of how the industry works, not realities; that's why the author can't figure out what's going on.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
The difference is that SLJ is Samuel L Fucking Jackson and has millions from his other movies to fall back on: he doesn't have to work ever. Random game devs are just working stiffs with a somewhat interesting job.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"