It seems like every other week a game studio is massively laying off employees; sometimes after years of development. What I’m reading is that it’s a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors’ pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower salaries.
So, what’s holding back gamedevs from banding together to either unionize or start their own companies with better conditions that the purely money-driven studios? Why aren’t they trying to be better? Nobody willing to invest in them? Does starting a company together mean they will now be the bosses who have to answer to the investors, ensure returns, and fire employees? Is the world just an entire shit-cake?
Because game devs have to pay their rent.
If they go off to form their own studio, they probably have to take out a business loan to pay themselves for the time being. Interest rates are high right now, and rent and food are both expensive. It’s a huge gamble to make a game and put it out on the assumption you’ll be able to pay back 6%+ interest on whatever you took out. Games are not a reliable money maker. Especially from new studios.
Even if you get some sort of deal with a publisher to fund your first endeavor, there will still be strings attached to that, and publishers are pretty tight with the purse strings right now.
Which means really the only viable option, assuming you’re not already independently wealthy, is that you have to work another job to work on the game in the meantime, which means it will take even longer to come out.
Or be ConcernedApe.
Which means using up your savings and relying on your partner to support you
Except he also didn’t work on Stardew Valley full-time for the first
Stardew Valley FTW
So many Indie developers are making the mistake of thinking they’ll be the next [insert currently successful one-man dev here] and banking their careers and life savings on it. 99.999% of them are not.
Survivor Bias - you only see the ones that “survive”, which may lead you to underestimate just how many tried and failed and vanished from attention.
To add to this:
Ain’t no way a brand new game studio is getting a loan at 6%. If they can even get a business loan at all (good luck!), it would be at a much higher interest rate due to the risk, and/or require assets to be held in collateral (only an option if you’re already wealthy to begin with…)