Can’t speak to games studios specifically, but I’d say number one thing you should aim to do is hire people you know and trust. I don’t mean friends, I mean people you have worked with extensively. If thats not possible then try for recommendations from people you trust who have worked with the candidate extensively.
The first few hires will make or break a company and some references and a few hours spent on programming/art tests and interviews, is a lot to stake your livelihood on.
Technical ability doesn’t mean someone is productive, and even if they are it doesn’t mean they are good to work with or that they fit your own style or company vision.
The next couple years are probably going to be the absolute worst time to try and launch a studio, from an economic standpoint. Games being recession proof only really refers to sales numbers, though even those are going to see some pretty severe hits as unemployment continues to climb.
That’s not what the unemployment problem is? The unemployment problem is that we’re seeing global unemployment rates skyrocket meaning that people are going to have less money for games, especially in our present unique situation of people having been effectively unemployed for several months. This isn’t just in the US, but Canada and large parts of Europe as well.
Cashflow is going to be a very real problem going forth. The other problem going forth is that we’re also dealing with what can be classified as a global traumatic event, which is going to dramatically affect the functional output of a lot of people. The Onion may be satire, but it kinda does reflect what is a real problem.
Even things already in development are seeing issues (see the link in my original post) because of factors like these. Game sales are up now, but there’s a very real possibility that that is not going to be sustainable.
Which is why I mentioned having cash reserves. If you can outlast (or sell despite) the slump in sales then you have a good chance of getting a better game built for less money.
Having a better game seems particularly relevant with the curve that we tend to see in game sales (e.g. moving from top 10% to top 1% is much more than a 10x increase in revenue).
PS I’m not disagreeing with your main point, it is a challenging time to start a studio, just pointing out there are some potential upsides even in these dire circumstances.
I’m not asking if I should. I’m asking how I can best succeed.
You don’t know me, my circumstances or the circumstances of my business or games. If everyone was a pessimist and didn’t forge forward even in tough times then we would all be screwed forever.
I’m also hoping this information will be useful, not just for me, and not just now but well into the future for others to gain insight and build successful studios of their own.
Also, keep in mind that some great businesses actually do get started during a recession. Recessions can offer opportunities, because it mixes things up. For example, some large game studios might be slowing down development right now, and that could slightly reduce the competition on launch day for games from other studios. If a studio makes something that the market likes, then that studio will make money even during a recession.
Running a business can be difficult regardless of industry and market conditions. Best of luck with your plans.
What’s the benefit of hiring employees versus contractors? Some legal/financial incentive? Don’t answer if you already thought all that through. I just raise the question in case you hadn’t.
Just my inexperienced outsider opinion but it seems like a lot of trouble studios large and small face is issues of leadership, ownership, creative vision, that sort of thing. It’s probably a good thing to have dissenting opinions, but if you don’t have clear methods for handling that it can be big trouble.
Anyway, hiring contractors is nice because you just give the instructions and they do it.
Couple important things I want to learn from an interview of potential contractors:
Will they answer “I don’t know?”
How careful are they when making time estimates? Are they cocksure? Or meticulous?
Do they have a body of finished, professional work they can reference?
Not important that we “click”, but is important is they make effort to communicate effectively. It takes experience to understand the need for precise communication and it takes constant discipline to practice, so IME people who go above and beyond to communicate clearly is usually your winners. Anything less is a real gamble.
Due to my own lack of experience at the start of things I knew I wasn’t able to judge people in a practical sense for their technical skills. So instead I just looked for “finishers” - people who were completing their own non-trivial projects - who could talk about what they did, why they did it, what they could have done better, and so on.
I figured that I was doing a lot of on-the-job learning, so anyone at least as good as I was could do the same. So with that in mind the most important thing was that they could see things through to the end.
I also look for a cultural fit as well as a skill fit. People can and will pick up new skills, but changing an attitude or fundamental mindset is… hard.
Having formal organizational knowledge, and some general procedures about how to do the common things where consistency matters. Assuming you’re hiring smart people you don’t want to cramp their approach, but you do need to make sure people aren’t re-inventing the wheel for things you already have a solid approach to.
I have nothing against either, but I think long term I want to build an empowered team with a sense of ownership and pride in what they’re a part of and i think permanent staff is a big part of that. However I know some contractors that like to remain as contractors for their own reasons even though they work at one studio for an extended period.
I don’t have a lot of experience working over long term with people in a new business. The best piece of wisdom I have heard from someone who has, is not to rely on people valuing the long term mutual benefit of working together over the short term possibility of taking something valuable and running. Always do small test projects together to know what someone is really like.
Although it varies from place to place, many countries don’t let you hire a contractor and treat them like a full time employee (mainly because unscrupulous people use this approach to try to get out of providing the benefits that a full time employee deserves).
Shoddy practices aside contractors are typically more expensive, even after you take in to account benefits due.
As an example (Australian company) we used to use a base metric of ~70% of contractor earnings to determine the salary we would offer a contractor who was being transitioned to full time. After superannuation, leave, admin overheads, insurance, bonus, etc, this came out around 15% cheaper than having them on as long term contractors.
Full-time employees are making a commitment to the company:
some small part of this is contractually enforced (for example notice periods)
some of is due to the nature of delayed earnings (e.g. accrued sick leave and holiday leave are of no use if a company goes out of business, annual bonus wont be paid if you don’t last the year, etc),
promotions and career progression comes in to play here as well, and you can think of this as a delayed earning too (contractors might increase their rates but don’t so often get ‘promoted’)
much of it is the perceived nature of the transaction: a full-time employee works for the company, a contractor does work for the company
most contacts have fixed periods: 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, its not a social faux pas for someone to leave after their contract expires, if anything its expected unless contract extensions have been discussed prior
You also have a modicum more control over full time employees.
If you asked someone to spend the next month writing training material for their role, a contractor could reasonably say “No I’m not interested in doing this” and leave. Although an employee could obviously quit if asked to do something they didn’t want to, they probably wouldn’t.
EDIT: Forgot this one… generally many more people are looking for full time work as compared to work as full-time contractors.
Contracting generally implies setting up a structure of some kind, additional accounting/admin overhead, your own insurance, your own equipment, etc. Plenty of people do it, but its not the norm.
A lot of this is about social norms and perception, so you can always raise exceptions, but general rule of thumb: full-time employees will have much more attachment to the company, particularly if it is an early stage venture.
If you want to best succeed you should wait. If you actually paid attention to what I said, you’d realise that I didn’t say anything about you or your games. What I did say was that we are in the midst of a global economic and health crisis that is dramatically affecting the ability to secure and maintain funding and productivity. [quote=“Murgilod, post:3, topic: 787244, username:Murgilod”] The next couple years are probably going to be the absolute worst time to try and launch a studio, from an economic standpoint.
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* [quote=“Murgilod, post:5, topic: 787244, username:Murgilod”] The other problem going forth is that we’re also dealing with what can be classified as a global traumatic event, which is going to dramatically affect the functional output of a lot of people.
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* [quote=“Murgilod, post:5, topic: 787244, username:Murgilod”] Even things already in development are seeing issues (see the link in my original post) because of factors like these.
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Care to elaborate on this? I’ve been practically working solo for 2 years now and solo coding for over 9 years now so I think i’m a little fuzzy on things a team would need to do to maintain cohesion.
That’s from a production standpoint, but then I also imagine there’s a lot of HR procedure that needs to happen as well. I mean everything will probably be fine and run great… until it doesn’t.
What if you have two employees that don’t get on for example?
Unstructured brain-dump of dubious quality, but here goes.
I imagine it’ll vary somewhat from team to team. Basically, if you joined another team, what is all the stuff you would want to know to integrate with doing things “their way”? In no particular order…
Daily processes. What stuff do you expect people to do each day, and how? When is something “done”?
Project management processes. How do you manage projects? How are tasks assigned? How is all of that stuff communicated?
Coding and other technical standards.
QA procedures.
Release procedures. When are things allowed to be delivered to people outside of your team?
Communications. What should people tell each other / you, how, under what circumstances? Eg: is Facebook messaging you a status update ok?
What gets documented or recorded, where, how? Templates if necessary.
What to do when there’s a problem.
Documentation for current projects. If you give someone else a task, what do they need to know to do it without asking you questions? (You might not need to go that far, though.)
What decisions can be made by who?
How do you handle software and other licenses?
That’s not complete, and I don’t know how useful it is.
Broadly, I try to think through all of the work that a team does and figure out which things should be consistent and where it doesn’t matter. For the bits that should be consistent, make sure people have appropriate instructions or other information to be able to do that.
For HR stuff I’d start by looking up “Employee Induction” and starting there. I would include the most important parts of the above in it.
Another one is health and safety. It probably depends where you are in the world, but here that’s a big ticket item.
In both cases record keeping is an important aspect. First, make sure you do all of the right stuff, but then also make sure you’re recording it so that if something goes wrong anyway (employee dispute, injury, etc.) you’re in minimal hot water. Just thinking through what records you’ll keep, and where, will get you off to a start there.
The other part is having some kind of regular review process. It’s not the most interesting topic, but thankfully this stuff doesn’t have to take long. Make sure these things are raised in team meetings occasionally (quarterly or something) so that everyone has a prompted opportunity to raise issues before they become problems. Also have occasional individual catch ups for the same purpose, which you could even make informal so that people are happier to bring up “small” things.
I don’t really have much advice on conflict management, as I don’t have a lot of experience there - thankfully!
Some guesses as to why:
Really encouraging and pushing good, open team communication probably helps avoid a lot of this.
Even earlier, focusing on team and cultural fit when bringing new people in probably helps there too.
When conflict does arise, even in the early stages where it’s just friction, making sure you remind people of the underlying common goals can help lubricate things a lot. It’s not about what either party wants, it’s about what’s best for the team / product / customer (whichever is most relevant).
Don’t hire india people… jk you should make a blog tho and record your experience anonymely, then maybe you can get something useful. Srsly i dont know any people with brein that run a company, but i know some that have no idea what they do and it still works… world is weird.
