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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.
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.
Should I just bite the bullet and develop my prototype for Windows?
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.
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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.
Tax-wise, leaving your "stable" job adds to inherent features to your new job future: greater risk, greater reward.
I have had one W2 job in my life, and I will never do it again. All I saw around me was politics, inefficiency, vying for position, inefficiency, back stabbing, inefficiency, nepotism, and inefficiency. When I saw something that I could do better, faster, and cheaper, I had no reason to "sell the idea" to management because either they'd take it (and climb the ladder) or they'd sit on it due to a pet peeve.
This guy Peeler ignores the absolute greatest reason to quit and go solo: being called back in for sometimes 10X the pay, from your old employer. When I left my only W2 position (at a whopping $21 per hour back in 1992), within 3 months they called me back in, and I offered myself at $60 per hour. Within a year I was at $120 per hour, and had enough to hire own my W2 goons to play nice with the customer. And they were hired out at $120 per hour and paid quite a bit less (although I offer all of them the option to start their own business and subcontract, which many do).
For a gaming engineer, being an employed underling offers little other than so-called "stability." See how stable you are when you get fired or the company goes under. Out come the dreaded CVs, while you pound the pavement looking for another 40 hours a week W2 job. If you're a contractor, you can work for 10, 20, 50, thousands of firms on a regular basis, and if a few go under or cut you, you're out maybe 5% or 10%. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
It's like homeownership: if your boss knows you have a mortgage, you're screwed. He has no reason to offer you incentives (better pay, better hours, better perks, etc) because you have another God to pray to: your bankster. The same is true with a W2: your boss knows he's your only source of income, and as such you're stuck with bad pay, bad hours, bad perks.
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!
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.
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
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
These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground ; )
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Sorry; I just read the intro, and the first thing that clicked into my mind was a phenomenon known as [evolutionary] radiation.. where, a sudden opening in the environment causes species to diverge and experiment and evolve at rapid and experimental rates... this just FEELS the same... that given an industry that is far from 'fully grown', there's so much room for creativity, exploration, new paradigms of self-awareness, that it is having the same effect... a radiation of individuality given a wide expanse of possibilities.
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.
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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.
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.
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