Management idea ... what is your opinion ?

hello everyone, i need your opinion in some issue, i'm planning on make a new small Studio, currently i have 5 people , the management idea is very simple , i choose the game that we are going to make ,then i list all the task(coding , art , level design .. etc) that the game need , after this , i give every task
Rate from 100% ,Finale, i choose the the person from my team to make the task , and the if the game receive incoming , the money will be divided upon us as the Rate of the task for everyone in the team . for example , if your task is coding , and the coding has 20% Rate , you get 20% from the money .

my question is :
1- what's your Opinion on this System ?
2- do you think System well work if some people from the team is working remotely ?
3- do you like to be part of the team(it's not offer, just Question ) ?
4- do you have tools(Software) that help the System?

 

You want people to work for you, but you are only going to offer them profit share? Not likely to work.

If you are expecting a profit share, you should probably be pulling people in at the partner level with decision making abilities.

Having an employer-employee relationship with someone you don't pay wages is illegal in many parts of the world.

 

BoredMormon is 100% correct. But even if you join as equal partners with equal decision-making authority, there are still big problems. What happens if a programmer has to leave halfway through development? If coding is 20%, does he still get 10% share? What if your estimate is wrong, and coding ends up being 60% of the work? Do you cut everyone else's pre-agreed share?

If you can pay everyone's wages upfront, you can make the decisions. Otherwise you need thorough contracts to handle changes, and you need very strong leadership to build and maintain a team that will stay together and remain enthusiastic about the project.

 

I think it is a bad idea.

The way I see it, either split inccome (if there will be any) equally, or offer them a salary. Right now you're trying to calculate the value of the work they're doing in form of percentage. While I see where you're coming from, I wouldn't really like working in such a team. Either you're partners, or you're in employeer->employee relationship.

As for "tools".... you can create lists of tasks and assign them to people via pretty much any bugtracking software.

 

My feeling is that it's pretty much always a good idea to split the income equally, regardless of whether one person is doing significantly more work than another (although if they're just along for the ride, it might be time for them to leave!)

The reason is that by doing so, by default no one feels privileged or underprivileged, or like their work counts for more or less than another's. And everyone has an incentive to make the game better in order to increase the total income and hence their own share.

Although that said, with profit share you'll probably get a lot of coming and going, and varying levels of interest/investment.

 

Someone working 1 hour a week getting paid the same would piss off everyone else, so no. Utter madness.

Feelings don't matter in business. Facts do. If someone does 3 hours work, they get paid for 3 hours work. This is a fact and everyone is happy with that.

 

Yep. I'd be absolutely livid if I put in 40+ hours a week into making a game and ended up getting paid the same as somebody who put in 40 hours total. It'd be a complete mess.

 

Should have been clearer, I mean everyone should be working roughly the same, it's up to you as the manager to get rid of people who are not pulling along. I wasn't addressing the question of some people not having the same availability, just that to a large extent the income split should be regardless of perceived effort or difficulty of work.

It's tempting to treat what is essentially a collaboration as a business, but I think the truth is that your biggest challenge in the absence of being able to offer ongoing pay is the unity of the team, and essentially ranking people based on anything like the type of work they do, or their level of expertise, imo, is going to create discord since everyone will have a different idea of how it should be done, and will feel like some people are being privileged over others - when you're not getting a pay packet this is easily a reason to leave or not bother to do a lot of work.

Fact is I think that a lot of what you get from people work-wise in this environment is going to be a question of their own interest or pride in their work, and if you imply that their vocation is not on the same level you risk rubbing them the wrong way and having them drag their feet - and by putting everyone on the same level you create an environment where group pressure can easily be put on individuals not putting in effort and not increasing the raw momentum of the team, simply because there's no other differentiating factor (no recourse for saying things like "well my work doesn't count as much anyway" etc).

I guess the best way to sum it up is that by splitting things evenly you have the best chance of preserving the best elements of your team while reducing the impact of the worst elements, whereas by ranking/ordering everything you'll likely either piss off or inflate the egos of everybody based on where they fall. That's not to say that you shouldn't make sure people are doing roughly the same amount of work though, in fact I think this creates an atmosphere that's more hostile to feet-draggers because everyone else feels more unified.

 

Equal share if everyone is sitting in an office working full time, or any variation where everyone is putting in roughly the same amount of effort (and everyone is reasonably confident that this is so).

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Trying to decide percentages up front is very difficult, imagine you decide to change the art style, if art is 20%, you have basically doubled the work required but the percentage is the same. Or alternatively you dilute everyone else's percentage after the fact.

As @hippocoder mentioned better to track hours. Everyone logs their time against a task and at the end of the project you divide up share based on percentage of total hours. This covers, rework, fixes, etc. If someone isn't delivering, then you remove them from the project BUT the hours they did deliver still count. This process should be codified in the initial agreements before anyone does any work.

It's still going to be difficult to manage (e.g. as @Billy4184 mentioned what happens when people value their time more highly than others), and there's a lot of detail to sort out, but its the best combination of equitable and manageable in my opinion.

PS I wouldn't recommend doing this until you have managed multiple projects in person, or remote projects in a more normal employment setting (i.e. people getting paid).

 

I guarantee people will inflate their hours, even if they don't mean to.

If 1 programmer works while watching TV and 1 doesn't, do they both log hours at the same rate, even though one is likely doing less work?

Does senior and junior programmers log work at the same rate?

What about a senior artist and a junior programmer?

What about someone who actually never gets anything finished, but puts in 40 hours a week for a year?

Revenue share is horrifically complicated among strangers, and only slightly less so among people who know each other well.

 

Even in an office in a paid job people work different amounts. The same person might work vastly different amounts per week even over the course of a year, even though paid to do the same amount of hours. If someones rate or standard of work drops too low they are removed from the project.

Generally this will work better with a small team of similarly skilled individuals. But if you take on someone highly skilled you make it clear to them that they will still only get the same rate as everyone else. Your job as a leader and manager is to ensure the people fit the project.

If you take on someone junior you do so with the consent of the team and again make it clear to the new person what they are expected to deliver. Maybe you instigate a trial period, etc. But once they are part of the team they are on par with everyone else.

They don't, they would be removed after a few weeks. A key part of this (or any good project, really) is peer review.

Its undoubtedly complex, but most of the issues are the same issues you face when managing a paid remote team, in many cases this is a lot simpler as you don't have disputes over money, a vast array of scammers to deal with, etc. The main difference is that the talent pool will be a lot smaller, its going to take much longer to assemble a team, and a lot of work to maintain it. You are probably going to need to seed your project with either people you know, or some paid content, to inceltivize people to join it.

 

This thread is a mess. Bottom line is that it's dangerous to try and structure a system like this because you can't predict the future. No matter how good your intentions are, it's impossible to know who will do what work and how the flow of your project will change things down the line.

I'm definitely not qualified to offer a solution for you, but I will say that companies offer fixed wages and salaries for a reason: they just work, and everyone agrees that it's fair.

I can appreciate being in a place where you can't afford to pay people up front, but if you're more interested in finding people to create your vision than you are in collaborating with others for a common vision, then you're navigating murky waters with profit sharing.

 

To be blunt, I wouldn't even consider profit sharing to be a rational reason to join a project - for work that's not part of a regular paycheck (and even so) I would only join it for the experience of working with skilled people on an interesting idea. That's kind of why I think splitting it evenly is a good idea, since that way you will cull anyone who takes it significantly into account (since everyone thinks they're better and deserve more).

I think what a lot of people forget in thinking of collaboration is that - at least the way I see it - it's really great (and very rare) to be part of a team of people with skill, ambition and a solid work ethic - and that's really all there is to collaboration. If you can't offer that environment, there's not much else that can possibly make up for it (including the ethereal promise of profit sharing).

 

No way. The "disputes about money" come at the worst time: After negotiation. Once you've launched the project and money comes rolling in, how do you handle disputes about payment? With a lawyer.

And if they say, "Well, I'll just take my part and go. You can't use anything I worked on."? You're screwed unless you already have contracts. And that would mean you've been dealing with the money situation all along. You don't save *any* headaches by going revenue share. You only add to them.

 

If you started doing this and didn't have contracts then your not doing it right. You should already have very clear provisions about ownership of assets: either rights are transferred as part of doing the work (in exchange for revenue as per agreement), and/or a clause allowing the project owner to buy the rights in the case of a dispute (for example by paying the person for the work done).

I've done a few game and asset store collaborations, and also worked in a few start-ups for equity, revenue-share, etc. All of them ran smoothly and some of them made reasonable sums of money. Admittedly the ones making the larger sums were mostly based on in-person relationships but a lot of the work was still done remotely.

If you do anything badly its probably not going to work. Here finding the right people is the key: skilled, friendly, good communicators, grown-ups (i.e. not teenagers starting their own 'studio' in the collaboration forum), etc. This is by no means easy, but its certainly possible.

 

Even in the best case scenario where the project does make money this is still a bad way to go about things. Since you are even thinking of this payment model i would have to assume you have no investment or money on the front end. So in this case how do you expect people to even afford to do the work? If you had upfront investment why would you not figure out what needs to be done, and get people on salary or contract who can do the work?

My last point is about quality of work, anyone who is good at there job and knows their worth and will want money up front for work done or they would want to be partners if they think the project has a chance. Knowing that this leaves people who lack experience who are looking to break into the industry. Sometimes you can find gems among these people but often you simply don't or you find people that really nees a proper production cycle under there belt to work in a more unstructured environment like this.