Decision To Hire 3rd Party Studio?

Hey guys,

I am a Computer Science student with high hopes to one day run successful game studio.
I would say I have a intermediate/mild advance knowledge of C# and unity. I have a great game idea but the scope would be heavy to take on alone. And I find looking for unpaid employees well does not work well. I feel like I could write the game but it wouldn't be as good as a professional writing it? Although I want to get better at programming but doing this game alone would take me far too long. Eventually my plan was to leave development after school and manage a software company which would be started by me. So right now i'm trying to figure out what to do. Should I hire a 3rd party to do it. Or do it myself and try and hire free lancers here and there?

 

Unless you have bundles of cash stashed away in a trust fund somewhere, hiring a third party studio to take over everything except the writing is going to be way too expensive. Programmers alone could easily run you up to $10,000 a month.

If this is an idea you're really passionate about, you should consider some things. First, is it absolutely necessary that you start developing this game right now? Maybe this is something you can work on over time as you're finishing your studies or working for a different company. Once you have your startup squared away and have a good team of people behind you, then you can look into starting the actual development process.

In the meantime you can keep iterating over the writing. Flesh out your characters, deepen your plot, there are many ways you can use the significant amount of time ahead of you to make the idea better. You might look into creating a Game Design Document, if you want to get into the minute details of what your game is about.

Either way, it feels like you're trying to take on a huge task without any real way of completing it.

There's nothing wrong with big ambitions, you just have to make sure you approach them realistically.

 

Up to? Some guys bill >15k a month.

@NightwalkerStudio you seem to be approaching this without idea of what is involved. If you're serious, you need to get your own experience beforehand either on smaller test projects or in the industry. Your massive, budget guzzling project is not the time to be finding your grasps with game development.

 

Most guys do. I was just hoping to kind of softball it in like that. But given the (admittedly assumed) circumstances for this particular person, still too expensive.

 

I'd approach this the other way. Shelve your game for now. Approach a studio of interest. And get a job working for them.

After a year or two you will know game dev from the inside, and have better skills to start your own studio.

 

Nah don't do it. You gotta have a load of cash to go that route.

 

If you have the money and don't mind losing that money, you should hire a studio. It is conna cost you. USA, for example, has minimum wage of 15k per year, and skilled professionals from same region would up to 10x more than that. So if you're going after EU/USA personnell, you'll need at least few hundreds thousands or preferably few millions of USD.

If I had this kind of cash on hands and didn't mind losing it, I would hire an established studio with decent track record for some of the ideas I had.

Of course, if you're asking this question here, it is unlikely that you have enough money for this...

 

Okay thank you all so much for your input!
I do have industry game development experience. But I wasnt there for the planning stages unfortunately. The company did all of that and then just hired me in to develop.

Okay to switch gears, how do you guys feel about unity networking situation. I feel like its pretty expensive. But way easier to integrate then creating your own back end server.