What is your dream game development job?

What is your dream in terms of game development? I've made a poll. \/

 

I don't quite see the difference between "sell my own games" and "head my own company"

 

As fun as solo development seems to be, it can be frustrating as well. I'd like to work solo, or with a small team that has a similar vision. It seems everything has a downside in some area though.

 

This. One is illegal without the other in most countries.

 

Did he just edit in the "with employees" part or was that there before? Because it's different in that aspect.

I thought this was going to be about what specific game dev job one would want. Like, programmer or artist or writer or director or whatever.

 

Well maybe, but not in, for example, in the USA.

BTW, I'm really tempted to choose the "I hate making games. I'm just on this forum for lolz."

 

I selected 'To Freelance for Companies', but I'm available for individuals too. If both were there I'd have probably picked 'To Freelance for Individuals'.

 

You don't need a company to sell your own games. You can be a sole trader.

 

Well I know but can't your goal to be to sell games AND do it with a team? Seems selling games is implicit in heading your own company with employees, but then the sell games option should perhaps be "sell games solo".

Anyhow, I picked head a company, because I want to design and sell my own games, but ideally with contractors or employees helping me.

 

Initially I didn't think about that, and picked that option. Seeing the option below it however made me see it the same way you do--sell games solo.

 

Well no. There are several different legal structures that one can use to sell games. It varies country to country, but most countries allow for variations of sole proprietors, partnerships and companies. There are also several other structures that could theoretically sell games, including non profits, trusts, joint ventures and associations, but these will be less relevant.

The idea that you must have a company to sell games is an internet falsehood. The idea that having a company will protect your personal assets if you mess up the business side of things is also an internet falsehood.

 

Except where I live I guess.

 

My dream job is where get to make great games with outstanding people, work from home but get travel the world and make a great living.

 

Wow! Hope you achieve your dream some day :O




Mine would be to lead a small studio I think

 

To be the technical lead on a TrigglyPuff Simulator. Then to devise an AI algorithm to decide best insult meme or flame form for a FaceBook game CliqueBait which factions off social media into cliques who lob flames at other and you have to log in a click on the little avatar buggers or they croak..Oh..maybe that is happening already. Well let me do the little cutesie dolls avatars and score the best hits under several categories with my totally rigged but advertised as indifferent AI algorithm. The tagline will be CliqueBait - "Yer Gonna pay!" with each insult a microtransaction.

 

i guess finding enough like minded people who are motivated, skilled in their own fields and have a similar vision of the end product would be nice
but this seems pretty far fetched

 

Which country is that? I'm now curious to do some googling.

Honestly I can't see an economic system where restricting the ability to trade in your own name makes sense. Maybe North Korea is that nuts?

 

I'm the boss. The big boss. The BIG TIME boss.

I tell people who are so smart and motivated what to do, and they do it. I change my mind, I say, "Do it this way!" and they do it.

When the game I want exist, I say, "take a break!" and the timid geniuses scatter while I enjoy the game.


Seriously though, I'd just like to make a living working in the field in any capacity so that I can build skills, make contacts, and eventually be able to make a dream game or two on my own or with a small team of friends.

 

Is "southern Europe" descriptive enough? Really don't want to give out too much information.
Around here, if you dare make a penny from selling your products or services without, at minimum, leading a state controlled form of LLC, you get fined out the butt/locked up.
It's separate tax law and additional expenses that you can't cover unless
1. you are already employed and you're only required to pay 20% of the contribution, but this LLC is only valid while you're employed (full time) - meaning you usually don't have time/energy for afternoon development, making it unlikely you'll break even with expenses.
2. your LLC makes you more than minimum wage and you're otherwise unemployed.

 

Same here. Greece.

 

So not many people want to work for an AAA company? Doesn't surprise me. Can be a bit of a factory with long hours, "crunch" times with no overtime pay. But you have to be grateful for the job because its a "glamorous" job. And why pay interns when they will work for free? Call it "volunteering" and its all nice and legal.

 

I'm not too interested in any job that takes things to extremes. But from what little researching I've done, it sounds like some of the larger companies have pretty good work/life balance situations.

 

Interns don't work like that. They are paid. They also can be more expensive than not, as they reduce the productivity of staff that are coaching them, and there is still ramp up, non productive time to what is a short term position. There are also restrictions on what they can do, and how much they work. There are many advantages to internships, but cheap/free labor and increased productivity aren’t ones.

Some AAA / large companies are great to work for, others not so much. The bad ones are well known amongst people in the industry. Like everything in the world, they are all different. The industry is huge, so the ‘glamour’ part isn’t really an issue if you are at that level. Maybe when you are breaking in, but once you are in it’s about connections and who you want to (or don’t) with and career related opportunities (which the name of the company doesn’t play a big part really).

 

To me it's not about that, but about ideas. I have a bunch of my own ideas I want to work on.

If I got a position like David Gaider had for Dragon Age (replaced by Patrick Weekes) or Casey Hudson/Mac Walters had for Mass Effect I'd like that. Being in charge of the narrative direction for an IP. Chances of that are infinitesimally small if it's not my own thing, though.

 

Actually I think most of them are pretty nice places to work these days. I would imagine people prefer indie because they have control over their own destiny. The bigger the company, the less control you'll have but the more security you could potentially have.

Some companies doing big software or big games allow hero developers wiggle room to do their own thing, but that's only because those people (much like me) work best doing our own thing rather than being under a yoke. The lines between personal fulfilment and company progress are blurred, everyone wins.

This doesn't suit the majority of people who just want security and prefer to develop other passions in life.

 

Well I've worked for a small company in the UK in which the "interns" weren't paid. Or at least just paid the bus fare there and back. There's lots of industries in the UK like that. The fashion industry is another. That's why you have to be quite wealthy to get the internships in the first place. There is minimum wage in the UK for over 18's but companies can always find ways round it.

People are trying to stamp it out but it's hard to do so. Because there's a fine line between an unpaid "intern" (illegal) and a volunteer (legal). And also the unpaid interns don't want to complain because they think they'll get a job in 6 months time. Unfortunately a lot of these little companies only last 2 years and so it ends up with lots of unpaid labour and no job at the end.

I'm not sure whether unpaid interns are morally wrong. After all its mainly richer people who do the unpaid internships. But it is kind of making rich people richer from unpaid labour which is kind of... cheating. I guess.

 

I left triple-A because I wanted to do my own thing like @EternalAmbiguity. I've worked at a few large companies, and while I don't doubt there are some terrible ones like the kind you mention, I haven't encountered any. The companies I worked for treated employees quite well. And I have never encountered an unpaid intern. Like @zombiegorilla said, they are usually paid, and even then they often aren't making meaningful check-ins. Typically they're more of a liability, and the company is investing in them in the hopes that they'll be able to grow into a useful role with enough training. As far as I know, in the US, it is in fact illegal to make money off an unpaid intern if you are not also training them.

In fact I feel exactly the opposite way you do. The factory with long hours and crappy pay is indie development. If I wanted a normal work-week and fat money, I'd go back to triple-A haha. I'm indie because I want creative freedom.

 

My dream job is to win the App-Store lottery with some silly little toy-app that millions of people download and throw money at, and then use my earnings to subsidize a lifetime of experimental game development cranking out whatever crazy ideas that pop into my head.

I like experimenting with game design. But experimentation is inherently risky, and does not always lead to profits. So in order to do mainly R&D work, you need an established source of funds that won't run dry anytime soon. Acquiring such a revenue source is oftentimes a matter of circumstances and luck, especially if you want access to it without any strings attached. A lot of people get their hands on it by finding investors. But investors require profits, which limits what you can do with their money.

So for now, it's just a matter of working a day job, and tinkering in my free time with small-scale projects that may or may not turn a profit eventually. You'll know if I ever do get that dream job. I'll be trumpeting it from the roof-tops.

 

With the rise of the robots, modern factory work isn't that bad. Most of it involves knowing the right time to kick the robot to get it running again.

Wow. Just got back from google. How on earth does you country function while suffocating innovation and entrepreneurship?

In my country I can literally just start trading. I don't even need to register for sales tax until the business hits a threshold. And starting a company is normally only relevant once you get big enough to need to hire employees. Even then a company is not strictly needed.

 

Well... It really... doesn't?

 

• I work at home. Check!
• I live in a beautiful place. Check!
• I call the shots. Check!
• I make good money. Check!
• I've done this for over 20 years. Check!
• I miss working with more than one other person.

 

It doesn't.

Young people are leaving and old people are voting for state expansion which weights even more heavily on young people's future economic prospects. And since the "meager" amount of money (taxes and endless borrowing) now needs to be split between even more gubmint programs/organizations (we get a new one every couple of weeks or so), officials prioritize immediate profits over making sure the economy will still be afloat when they retire.

Of course we COULD let it crash and finally point some fingers and start fixing this horrible situation but EU won't let us.

It's the same all around the world, but countries with low GDP especially feel it.

A few months ago some officials were (not satire, BTW) discussing whether flea markets without tax should be legal. I thank reason and arguments that didn't go anywhere.

Yes, I know first world countries have it great, no need to rub it in.

 

Do cats count as people? *looks around*

 

I think they think they do, for sure.

 

Disappointed in the lack of votes for the 'lulz' option.

 

If you'd asked me five minutes before reading your post, I would totally have described Greece as a first world country. But you are right, what you are describing sounds far more like developing world corruption problems. Don't get me wrong, our government still has the occasional corruption issue, but it's more along the lines of 'guy takes his wife on a political trip with him and she has a free tax payer funded holiday' sort of stuff.

It comes up every once and a while here, but it's generally considered to be more costly to enforce then the revenue gained. Plus it discourages entrepreneurship, which is one of the best ways to get your GDP up. It's better to leave small businesses to grow pretty much tax free (or even give them grants to grow). Once they become sustainable, then they can be taxed.

State expansion by itself isn't a bad thing. I currently live in Australia, which practically invented the welfare state model. There isn't much of anything the government isn't part of in some fashion here.

The difference seems to be most of our government agencies are designed to make business and general life easier, not harder. (Some of them epically fail at this, but that's the intent). We even have a local government body that's designed to help local game developers take their games to market. They do things like provide funding, build networks and contacts, business mentoring and so on.

The EU is proving to be a really interesting experiment. Giving up control of monetary policy while retaining control of governmental spending.

If our government does something especially dumb (which happens from time to time) and crashes the economy, then the dollar crashes as well. This gives a boost to the export industry, brings in more jobs, and gets the economy back on track. So as long as we don't do anything really stupid, like engage in a war that destroys production facilities, the economy will bounce back. And in the meantime we can vote out the incompetent government.

The EU has removed that safety valve. It's impossible to simply devalue your currency to deal with a mismanaged economy. Which probably means your country will stay in a perpetual half crash, rather then being able to properly crash and recover.

Good luck I guess? Not sure where I'm going with this post.

 

I want to work in a AAA studio.

 

I think that has been a part of our problem: We thought we were a first world country too

(and maybe in some (few) aspects we were, but it still was very very uneven and weird).

That has never, ever, been true here. And it's getting worse.

 

To freelance for companies and I'm just on this forum #forlolz.

 

Tell that to children who are born into debt.

Which is not inherently a bad thing but only as long as you keep your border closed and controlled.

Is that quote from public (read:goverment funded) school or the ruling party pamphlet?

Do you think a private company would be unable to do so? And don't forget it could be done without extracting money from people at gunpoint. Same for welfare.

Yeah this is pretty accurate. I would, however, replace the word "interesting" with "brutal" or "satanist".

 

Yeah!!! Same here..I think thats what we all Dream about . Best of luck

 

I'm pretty sure he's already achieved his dream.

 

I will steal your structure if you don't mind

• I work at home. Check!
• I live in a beautiful place. Check!
• I call the shots. Check!
• I make money. Far from good money but growing slowly in nonlinear "up and down" very disturbing and scary fashion. But on yearly basis it is a growth.
• I've done this for only 3 years. Check!
• I enjoy working alone for now.
  
  
  Dream is to continue doing this and see where it will lead me. Given my personality type i don't think i would be happy in corporate environment like AAA studio (insert possible offer with good salary to change my mind ). But to become my own corporation, that is another story . Long way to go for that. Maybe i will be happy with just freelancing just like i do already. Who knows, time will tell.