Cheap and Fast, Grow Your Own, and the Dirty Work

I will assume that, as a future company head and chief visionary, you are a good judge of talent. You may be considering additional staff beyond your core team. You may decide to hire promising industry newcomers who arrive with stars in their eyes, passion in their hearts, and a competitive hunger in their bellies. They represent your first opportunity, as the Grand Poobah, to nurture and grow your own talent as a legitimate alternative to hiring high-priced mercenaries to help your team in a moment of knee-jerk desperation.

You may be tempted to low-ball their base salaries and make these newcomers pay their dues through regularly long hours and gopher tasks. This may have been what your first games industry employer did to you, however, it will only leave your prospective employees embittered, burned out from neglect, and severely distracted from the very jobs of which they have always dreamed. Are you going to hire promising resources and, essentially, get in the way of the success they are building for you? These newcomers, just like your core veterans, are taking just as much of a risk in trusting you, their “seasoned” leader, as you are in trusting them.

You are going to be running a business and building products that, God willing, are going to pay your bills and then some. You are not obligated to shelter newcomers from what most in the games industry have had to endure early in their careers. The financial commitment you are about to make with your private investor does, however, obligate you to avoid “cheap hires and fast fires.” You should give them reasonable starting salaries with employment terms that allow them to perform a clever mix of simple and challenging but achievable tasks without distractions, thus, encouraging them to truly earn their keep and your trust.

Rather than having young and angry employees who never forget what you did to them, you can have promising, overachieving, vibrant colleagues who never forget what you did for them. They will run through brick walls for you, 9 times out of 10, and through word of mouth, your reputation as a forward-thinking manager will transcend the success of your products.

Most employees, after all, prefer to simply enjoy their jobs without giving a second thought to the results of their annual review, the ETA of the next bonus, or the status of their stock options. P4 – promise, performance, product, and profit – is the traditional and modern day path towards the stock options, performance bonuses, and salary increases of which many people dream. Provide reasonable salaries, with the potential for improvement through goal achievements, and your team will dream of developing your products.

If you still feel the need to have a specific set of employees to handle all of the lowest level dirty work, then, make arrangements with your local college of choice to hire one or two interns for each of your departments. You will, yet again, find yourself in a position to be interviewing and choosing from a number of promising industry newcomers. If you intend on abusing your would-be interns, you will be sorely disappointed to learn of another fairly common gotcha’ regarding school policies. Some policies obligate interns to work only during “normal business hours.”

Yes, 9-5. Who knew? Those same policies prevent an intern from working any more than three 8-hour days per week, while other policies allow five 4-hour days per week. And, just so I am crystal clear, schools always manage to find out the truth about how you treated their students, especially if you could do no better than $7.50 per hour in exchange for the completion of your grunt work.

Your effort will ultimately be better served in simply preparing a collection of well-designed, challenging assignments (which could be product-related), paying your interns $10.00 per hour, and daring them to survive and excel within your mini-development gauntlet in order to qualify for a potential full-time staff position.

Single-Minded Focus No More

Most people enter the games industry loaded with “passion for the product,” proclaiming that they could never imagine working in any other industry, ever. It is much easier to maintain that passion and perspective when someone else is running the show (even if that someone else is THE MAN). Just let THE MAN lose hair and sleep over the daily and future operations of the game company while you sit there, surrounded by your colleagues and your favorite action figures, enjoying an almost single-minded focus within your development discipline, tasking away on your specific widgets.

That cozy scene is no more, as we fast forward from your days of working under the merciless gaze of THE MAN to where you are now: mere days or even hours from taking your rightful seat alongside THE MAN among the ranks of the elite, as a game company owner.

The Remainder Will Test Your Resolve

The remaining “moving parts,” outside of the Core Four, are enough to test the resolve of the most passionate game developers aiming to start-up. These interconnected brain teasers are company focus, product focus, business model, production cycles, product life cycles, resource requirements, resource valuations, resource incentives, geographic location, and funding commitment, as well as your position as the top dog, in this general order of importance. Your depth of identification will determine how serious you are about running your own game development business.

Your perspective on these parts will also expose your true feelings about involving the core members of your development team in major decisions that affect both company and products. Those core members can be considered your co-founders, with or without a true ownership stake, not just your first employees.

What Came First – the Company or the Product?

People in any industry will tell you that you cannot have a company without a product. There are an equal number of people who also insist that you cannot have a product without first establishing a company foundation. When I combine my experience and modern day common sense, the result is a vote for company foundation. Whether your company is comprised of on-site or outsourced production, large teams or streamlined skeleton crews, you need to have a solid business backbone that keeps your team steady and on-target. The games industry, in just five short decades, has become a poster child for approaching this order from the wrong direction.

Either way, when it comes to your first product most people will agree that you need to apply laser focus to one, well-planned production at a time. If the retail stars align, then, you move forward from there with more products, which creates a potential fork in the road for your company. The immediate focus of your company is on your flagship product, but if that product just happens to result in fantastic sales, you will undoubtedly have some options to at least consider. You will have lived long enough to see your original funding source paid in full and ready for another go, or, you move on without him. Sales may be so great that you are flush with cash.

You can continue as a one at a time company or you could choose to pursue one product at a time with multiple skus. And, then, there is the possibility of expansion from one development team to multiple teams, which potentially doubles all of your expenses and responsibilities. This represents a great opportunity for some and outright insanity for others. Opportunity rewards the prepared, and you do not have to wait until opportunity belts you in the face in order to have planned for it. The same depth of imagination you use in game development can be used to prepare you for the best and worst in business and product development.

Speaking of depth, you and your colleagues may have established what type of game product would satiate your collective development desires, but to what depth have you done so? Your product focus should be as much about what you wish to develop as it is about what excites the paying public. Do you even have a target audience? Maybe you have multiple target audiences, because you product will have a broad array of gameplay mechanics.

In any event, your first product focus will involve either a copy cat product or an original IP. If you are going to build a copy cat product with a new twist to spice things up, then, your product may do well enough to have established a new revenue stream for an otherwise tired genre. Researching how many similar products already exist in the marketplace - as well as any available sales figures - will quickly help you determine if adding one more knockoff is absolute overkill . . . or that most of the existing competitors were not designed and executed nearly as well as expected by developer and consumer alike. While the quality and value of an entertainment product can be subjective, said research can mean all the difference in the world to your brilliant success or miscalculated failure.

If you are going to create a brand new IP within a brand new genre, with intense-but-fun gameplay mechanics, an otherworldly art style, and a revolutionary new GUI, your chances still may only be 50/50 that your product will sell through the roof or be pulled from retail spaces everywhere. The “it” or “coolness” factor associated with a new original product is still derived from your effort to deliver a spectacular digital experience and the public’s interest in receiving that experience. You may have an absolutely stellar idea and a great product in the making, but only in the minds of hardcore game developers. This happens all the time, and the public, even after a barrage of slick marketing ads, will ultimately determine how your maiden product is remembered.

Will it be as a niche, quickly selling about 50,000 units after launch but falling off the radar just as fast? Will it be as a Cult Classic, slowly selling about 100,000 units after launch but gaining in popularity and sales years later? Will it be as a Blockbuster, exploding out of the gate with millions of units sold and sequels in sight?

Attempting to figure out how your first product will be remembered is the least of your worries if you are unaware of the following entertainment software facts. Video games are popular in almost every region of the world, and, yet, they are still discretionary, almost perishable goods that exist only for the pleasure of the end user. Video games are not part of the line-up of daily necessities like clothing, food, medicine, shelter, or transportation, even though many college students would have you believe otherwise. Video games also just happen to be the long lost step-children of traditional board games and toys.

While the games industry continues to show steady growth even during the current economic downturn, the incredible profits are being driven by a relative handful of the most familiar, popular, and risk-averse franchises around. Your core disagreement with THE MAN may involve how focused he is on the mass market bottom line rather than refined innovation and product quality. If his products, however, are part of that relative handful, then, THE MAN may continue to be an obstacle in your perceived path towards top quality independent video game success.

Go To Part 1 – 2 – 3 – 4