Death of an Indie Studio
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This document summarizes the history of an indie game studio called Macguffin Games, from its founding to its eventual closure. It describes the studio going through periods of success making games, followed by financial problems as funding ran out ("Oh Crap No Money"). Personal issues, like the founder's wife leaving and him expecting a child, compounded the problems. Despite efforts to learn from mistakes and do things right with their games, the studio ultimately had to close down. The founder acknowledges they took on too large a scope for their games and lacked firm deadlines. However, he believes indie game development can succeed if developers are persistent.
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Death of an Indie Studio
- 1. Death of an Indie Game Studio Scott Macmillan Macguf๏ฌn Games
- 3. Why I did it.
- 4. A Brief History of Macguf๏ฌn Games Idyllic Prehistory
- 5. A Brief History of Macguf๏ฌn Games Rockinโ with Dokken
- 6. A Brief History of Macguf๏ฌn Games Oh Crap No Money
- 7. A Brief History of Macguf๏ฌn Games The Social Network
- 8. A Brief History of Macguf๏ฌn Games Oh Noes
- 9. A Brief History of Macguf๏ฌn Games Idyllic Prehistory
- 13. A Brief History of Macguf๏ฌn Games Rockinโ with Dokken
- 16. Graham Sternberg
- 18. A Brief History of Macguf๏ฌn Games Rockinโ with Dokken
- 20. A Brief History of Macguf๏ฌn Games Oh Crap No Money
- 21. Big Problem #1 Not enough money.
- 22. Big Problem #2 Whitney found someone to pay her.
- 23. Big Problem #3 I was going to become a father.
- 24. A Brief History of Macguf๏ฌn Games The Social Network
- 26. A Brief History of Macguf๏ฌn Games The End
- 27. Things We Did Wrong ? ? ? Things We Did Right ? ? ? ? ?
- 28. Things We Did Wrong Scope (aka Game Was Too Big)
- 29. Things We Did Wrong Lack of Deadlines
- 31. Take $50 bets from everyone. Brag a lot to everyone. Publicly pledge youโll give money to Jack Thompson.
- 32. Things We Did Wrong Respect and Learn Marketing
- 39. Purple Cow / Free Prize - Seth Godin
- 40. Purple Cow / Free Prize - Seth Godin Inbound Marketing - Shah and Halligan
- 41. Purple Cow / Free Prize - Seth Godin Inbound Marketing - Shah and Halligan What is Marketing - Harvard Biz School Press
- 42. Things We Did Wrong Understand The Market
- 44. Things We Did Wrong Scope Lack of Deadlines Learn Marketing Things We Did Right Know Your Market ? ? ? ?
- 45. Things We Did Right Learned how to fail.
- 46. Things We Did Right Found / Built a Community
- 51. Things We Did Right Learned how to code.
- 53. Things We Did Right Break things down into real tasks.
- 54. - Learn how to code.
- 55. โข - Do the first 3dbuzz.com tutorial on Unity, and code it. Due: 7/25/11
- 56. Things We Did Wrong Scope Lack of Deadlines Learn Marketing Things We Did Right Know Your Market Learn How To Fail Find / Build a Community Learn to Code Real Tasks
- 57. MONEY = TIME ART != BUSINESS
- 63. One year. $10,000 Art - $3000 $7,000
- 64. One year. $10,000 Art - $3000 $7,000 Sound - Free
- 65. One year. $10,000 Art - $3000 $7,000 Sound - Free Coding - 10 Months
- 66. 1.5 years? $7,000 Art - $4000 $6,000 Sound - ??? Coding - 13 Months?
- 67. MONEY = TIME ART != BUSINESS
- 68. Pure Art Pure Business
- 69. Pure Art Pure Business
- 71. Pure Art Pure Business
- 72. Pure Art Pure Business Us?
- 73. MONEY = TIME ART != BUSINESS
- 74. - Start a company. - Make a game. - Put the game on the market. - Lots of people buy the game. - Sit on a beach earning 20%.
- 75. - Start a company. - Make a game. - Put the game on the market. - Lots of people buy the game. - Sit on a beach earning 20%. - Start a company. - Start a game. - Never ๏ฌnish a game. - I spent a whole house downpayment wait crap. - Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.
- 76. Pure Art Pure Business Us?
- 77. In Conclusion: Maybe a company isnโt the right thing for some people. But if you want to make a game, for Godโs sake, do it. Nothing can stop you if you are persistent.
- 78. Thank you! Special thanks to the Boston Indies crew. Email: scott@macguf๏ฌngames.com Twitter: @MrMacguf๏ฌn
Editor's Notes
- Introduce self\nMaking games for almost 10 years now.  \nCurrently Viximo.Three years of life and then death of my indie studio, Macguffin Games.\n\nPurpose:\nPass on some of what I learned.\nSome lessons are big, some small\nAll of them were useful and important things to me once I’d discovered them.\nPlan\nFinish up my talk in about half an hour\nLots of time for questions.  \nAsk me anything you want.\n
- Plan to have slides and notes up by tonight\n\nIf we get audio or video from this event, I’ll get that up there soon afterwards, same URL.\n
- Started MG 3.5 years ago \nafter leaving my job as an AP at Blue Fang Games, a Boston area games company.\n\nMany previous attemptstry\nsomeone on the team would drop out\neverything get derailed\nEach time, though, I’d get a little closer.\nWanted for same reason I got into games industry at all: \nWanted to make games.\n\nNot just be involved - wanted to make myself.\nQA and Production\nWanted to make something I could point to and say yeah, I did that.\nNot just be one of 40-60 people \n
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- Idylic Prehistory\nBefore it all got serious. \nHad an idea for a game (luke)\nStarted w teaching self how to code\nworked from home full-time.  \n\nNot much for hard deadlines at the start. On purpose - we viewed as chance for me to do my thing.\n\nSpent a lot of time during this period getting better at coding, refining the idea AHD.\n\nTowards the end of this period, I was getting increasingly mood-swingy, getting really upset at my lack of progress, and starting to act a bit weird from being cooped up in the house all day, every day.\n
- AHD:\n\nStrategy-RPG\n\ntells story of civil war bewteen noble houses\none found magic - cannibalizing spirits of ancestors\n\nHorrific civil war\nbad guys fled to a new continent\n\n
- takes place in a new continent\n\nyour house followed the bad guys here\nnow the direction of the story is up to you\n\n\n
- flexible content system - game events chained to stories\nall events and plotlines routed by an ai\n\nwanted to write a plot about hunchbacked lepers, could do that\n
- Rockin’ with Dokken\n\nTreatws Macguffin more seriously with a company\neventually got All Heroes Die to beta & started selling it. \n\nStarted with two big changes.  \n\n1st - space at betahouse, three days a week\n
- Betahouse - coworking space in Cambridge\n\nBetahouse was a lifesaver.  \n met and joined a completely new community - the Boston start-up and technology scene.  \n\n\n
- This was also the time where I got much more active in the Boston game development community - \nhelped start a game conference here in Boston called GameLoop\nAlso helped start Boston Indies, \na monthly meetup for indie developers, which within a few months had 40-50 people showing up every month.\n
- The other big thing that happened was that Graham Sternberg, an old friend of mine, came on board as the Macguffin Games artist and art director.\n
- He was later joined by his sister, Whitney Sternberg (slide of wonder twins), who took over the coding duties from me.  Neither was getting paid, and they did fantastic work.\n
- So during this period things were firing on all cylinders.  This culminated with the launch of the Beta of All Heroes Die at PAX East last year.  \n
- It was buggy as hell, there was little content, and the UI wasn’t anything like what we wanted - but it ran, and we had a game.\n
- The “Oh Crap No Money” period began shortly after PAX, \n\nbig shift - mode where we were concerned with staying in biz\n\ncaused by three things \n
- 1- realization that it would take more time than we had to 1.0.  (pic of pilot from mad max)\n
- 2 - Whitney left for a job that would actually pay her money. \n
- 3 - I was going to become a dad in July - income\n\nAs this phase wound on, I came very close to closing the company.  Instead, we ended up rebooting.\n
- The Social Network - alternately, The Macguffins Go To Facebook.  \n\nInstead of folding, I doubled down.  We expanded the team size, I got investment from some of my friends and family, and we made a Facebook game.\n\nIdyllic prehistory - focused on the idea\nrockin’ - focused on the product and its execution\nnow - focused on survival and money\n\nstill doing so with a game we believe in, but the shift was unmistakable\n\n
- The game was called Mustache Mercenaries, and was a turn based combat game where the player controlled steampunk robots, with each robot piloted by a historical character like Abraham Lincoln or Harriet Tubman.\n\nOur now-funded team cranked out a working prototype of the game in one month, and got it to Beta in three more.\n
- The End - Then, in December of 2010, we ended up shutting it all down.  \n\neven though we got the game into a decent state very quickly\nnot enough money to get it to a state where it could make us money\n
- Now, let’s get down into what I think we did right and wrong.\n
- Things Macguffin Did Wrong #1 - Scope\n\nshould have been more realistic from the start about the size of AHD\nwhile maybe I could have taken my time over years to make it while working a full job\nwasn’t something I could do on a limited timeframe while teaching myself how to code\n
- Things Macguffin Did Wrong #2 - Lack of Deadlines\n\nThe Idyllic Prehistory period of Macguffin was marked by a serious lack of deadlines or other constraints.  Now, at the time, this was by design.  When my wife and I made the decision together that I’d try to start this company, we weren’t focused on a timetable, we were focused on my learning how to code and getting All Heroes Die off the ground.\n\nby Rockin’ with Dokken period, the lack of deadlines was a big problem.  \nGraham wanted to kill me - changing decided things, backtracking\n“perfect” is the enemy of shipping a game. you need “good enough” quality.\n\ncaused by a real lack of deadlines. \neven though better, we still had nothing that told us, you need to ship by X or you go out of business\n\nThe deadlines were easy to come up with later  - Independent Game Festival and the PAX Boston Indies Showcase.  \nDevelopment of the game at that point started to leap forward, driven by the fact that we would publicly look like fools if we didn’t get it done.\n
- In his book “No Plot? No Problem!”, \n\nChris Baty, the founder of National Novel Writing Month, \n\ntalks about some ways to motivate yourself to finish a novel in one month.  \n\nterror and the possibility of public ridicule are excellent motivators.  I found that many of the same methods work fantastically for indie development.\n
- read the slide\n
- Things Macguffin Did Wrong #3 - Respect and Learn Marketing\n
- Marketing is often a dirty word, especially for people working in a creative space like games.  For most of my game development career, marketers were clueless people that sat in board rooms at EA or Activision, blew millions on mass market ads, and often delivered garbage results.  Many games I’ve worked on, the dev team grumbled afterwards that the game would have sold fantastically, except that we got screwed by marketing.\n\nThe fundamental disconnect here is that, as a creative person making something, we almost always come from the point of view that our creation, this thing we’ve put blood, sweat and tears into, is special and awesome.  If we didn’t think that, we wouldn’t have worked so hard for so little on it.\n
- Marketing is often a dirty word, especially for people working in a creative space like games.  For most of my game development career, marketers were clueless people that sat in board rooms at EA or Activision, blew millions on mass market ads, and often delivered garbage results.  Many games I’ve worked on, the dev team grumbled afterwards that the game would have sold fantastically, except that we got screwed by marketing.\n\nThe fundamental disconnect here is that, as a creative person making something, we almost always come from the point of view that our creation, this thing we’ve put blood, sweat and tears into, is special and awesome.  If we didn’t think that, we wouldn’t have worked so hard for so little on it.\n
- Marketing is often a dirty word, especially for people working in a creative space like games.  For most of my game development career, marketers were clueless people that sat in board rooms at EA or Activision, blew millions on mass market ads, and often delivered garbage results.  Many games I’ve worked on, the dev team grumbled afterwards that the game would have sold fantastically, except that we got screwed by marketing.\n\nThe fundamental disconnect here is that, as a creative person making something, we almost always come from the point of view that our creation, this thing we’ve put blood, sweat and tears into, is special and awesome.  If we didn’t think that, we wouldn’t have worked so hard for so little on it.\n
- The sad reality is that no one knows about your game.  And a shockingly large percentage of the people in the world wouldn’t care even if they did.\nYou, as a game developer want to make the best game you can.  But if you’re running things as a business, you need to be thinking well past that launch date, and you need to understand how you will make large numbers of people aware of your game. Once they’re aware of it, you need to get them to like it. They need to like it so much that they will pull out a credit card and spend money on it. No matter what you think, this is not easy.\n
- I have two recommendations on this subject. First, read a couple books on basic marketing. After it was far too late to help me, I asked some biz dev and marketing folks that I know for their recommendations. These follow:\n\nPurple Cow and/or Free Prize - Seth Godin\n“He absolutely thinks his bum smells like roses, and parts of Free Prize read like a self help book, but fight through it.”\n\nInbound Marketing by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan\ngood intro to internet marketingfor a total noob. \n\nWhat is Marketing? - Harvard Business School Press\nThe book gives a VERY basic run-down of marketing and the things that someone who plans to do marketing should think about.\n
- I have two recommendations on this subject. First, read a couple books on basic marketing. After it was far too late to help me, I asked some biz dev and marketing folks that I know for their recommendations. These follow:\n\nPurple Cow and/or Free Prize - Seth Godin\n“He absolutely thinks his bum smells like roses, and parts of Free Prize read like a self help book, but fight through it.”\n\nInbound Marketing by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan\ngood intro to internet marketingfor a total noob. \n\nWhat is Marketing? - Harvard Business School Press\nThe book gives a VERY basic run-down of marketing and the things that someone who plans to do marketing should think about.\n
- I have two recommendations on this subject. First, read a couple books on basic marketing. After it was far too late to help me, I asked some biz dev and marketing folks that I know for their recommendations. These follow:\n\nPurple Cow and/or Free Prize - Seth Godin\n“He absolutely thinks his bum smells like roses, and parts of Free Prize read like a self help book, but fight through it.”\n\nInbound Marketing by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan\ngood intro to internet marketingfor a total noob. \n\nWhat is Marketing? - Harvard Business School Press\nThe book gives a VERY basic run-down of marketing and the things that someone who plans to do marketing should think about.\n
- Things Macguffin Did Wrong #4 - Understand the Market You are Entering\n\nThis was a lesson learned doing Mustache Mercenaries.  \n\nknew when we a lot of things we didn’t know about the Facebook market.  \n\nspent several weeks \n reading everything I could find on the web\ndropping emails to helpful industry folks\nand otherwise researching the market.\n
- By Beta, thought I had a good handle on it.  Didn’t.  \n\n“quirky and different for Facebook” - press and traffic.  \n\nThe reality was, no one in the gaming press really cared about what we were doing, and when we did get a little press, the readers cared even less.  It was a miscalculation to think that core gamers cared about a Facebook game, no matter what president was piloting what robot.\n\n(Kickstarter, GSW anbd Joystiq, 3 pledges.)\n\nOn this one, I recommend you do what I did, but better. \nRead everything you can from trade websites for your release platform\ntalk to people that play the games\ntalk to people that are currently making those games successfully. \n\nTHEN have a lot of extra money to carry you through your inevitable learning lessons.\n\nDon’t be afraid to write a brief and politely worded email to a total stranger in your field. \n\nMost of those people are happy to help, but have very little time. \n\nIf at all possible, make your questions brief, to the point, and most importantly specific. \n\nA question like, “tell me about the environment for selling stuff on iOS” is terrible. A question like, “where do you go for your news and analysis for the iOS market?”, or “what are you most worried about in the iOS market over the next year?” is a lot better.\n\n\n
- These errors were all big things\n\nby end of run, they had ended up costing us tons of time and energy, and had lowered our chances of success.\n\nnot too hard on self - I was a noob in a lot of ways with business, and I learned as I went, often through mistakes like these\n\nNow, for the things we did right.\n
- Things Macguffin Did Right\n\n#1 - Learned How To Fail\nRunning a business is an exercise in failing constantly.  \nMake decisions all the time - big and small\nYou’ll make wrong ones all the time - you’re making something new, doing something you’ve never done before\nif you get hung up, you will become paralyzed\n\nInstead, make the best call you can w info you have & move on.  \n\nessential that you learn from your mistakes\nwhen you know you were wrong, figure out why. remember it for later.  \n\nEventually you’ll internalize the knowledge that most of your bad calls didn’t have horrible consequences.  Life went on, you fixed the problem, rinse and repeat.\n
- Things Macguffin Did Right #2 - Found / Built a Community\n\nBy the end of the Idyllic Prehistory period, I was losing my mind.  \nSitting at home all day, every day and coding was slowly driving me completely crazy.  \n\nI knew I needed to get out of the house while working.  \nTried cafe and library, but it turned out what I was really missing was the social interaction of going to work.  \nback n forth of ideas, being in a place with other people all focused on their work\n\nI dealt with this in two ways.\n\n
- 1 - Betahouse, a Cambridge based co-working space.  \nRent a part-time desk for a couple hundred dollars a month\nwork there three days a week.  \n\nIt changed my world.\n\nworking env that wasn’t the same place I played WoW\nintroduced me to an entire new universe of interesting people, many of whom were also small business owners, most of whom were also techies and nerds.\n\nThat was the community I found.  \nThen there was the community I helped create.\n
- In 2010 I started grabbing beers with my friend Jim Buck\nanother local game dev that ran his own one-person show.\n\nstarted publicizing our meetup, and within several months we had about 50 people showing up each month.  \n
- It was the start of the fantastic community we now call Boston Indies\n\nincludes full-time indies \nlocal devs from bigger companies that work on their own stuff\nhobbyists that did stuff when they could, \nfriends of ours that wanted to support the scene, \n\nand occ. someone totally random\n
- Creation of the Boston Indies community far more important than MG.  \n\nIt pulled together ppl that have since helped each other \nmake and enjoy games\nshare knowledge with each other\nand support each other through the highs and lows of game development and life.\n\nBoth communities essential to progress I made with Macguffin Games and both our titles.  \n\nWithout them, I’m sure I would have given up less than half-way through.\n
- Things Macguffin Did Right #3 - Learned How To Code \n\nif can’t code, project held hostage to the person that can\nnot big deal if everyone paid, their job\nbut in a casual partnership where no one gets paid?\n\nIf you’re starting up a one-person studio and don’t have the money to hire freelance coders, it’s essential that you know how to code.  \n
- remember 5th grade projects\neveryone graded based on the group\nalways one kid that did nothing\n\ntranslate to your indie studio\n\nYour whole project has now ground to a halt because someone acted like they were in 5th grade, and flaked out on you.  \n\nThis happened to me repeatedly.  And to be honest, on at least one occasion in there, I was the 5th grader.\n\nIf you are starting a studio for reasons similar to me - you want to make something yourself - you need to know how to code.  Otherwise, what’s the point?\n
- Things Macguffin Did Right #4 - Break Things Down Into Real Tasks\n\nThis may seem somewhat obvious to some people, but it had a huge impact on me. \n
- Look at this task: \n\nThat's not a helpful task.  That's a goal.  Hell, that is easily 6 months to a year.\n\nNow, how about this:\n
- Now THAT is a useful task.  It is useful because it is specific.\n\nToo often, we mix up the goals we wish to accomplish with the steps that will get us there.  \n\nOur brains do a funny thing when faced with tasks too big to easily trace from start to finish.  They avoid doing them.\n\nYou can see this at work when you have to clean your house, and it's a total mess.  You often don't know where to begin, and sometimes because of that, you don’t even start.  But other times, you just don't worry about how you'll get it ALL done, and instead just start working on one item at a time.\n\nThat's how you get things done.\n\nIf you are ever looking at something you need to do and are avoiding getting started, or you find yourself at a loss how to get going, you need to break that end-goal down into smaller items.  Just put together the first three concrete tasks you must accomplish to hit that goal, then a fourth task called "figure out three more tasks".\n
- Ok, now I've gotten through what I consider to be the minor items.  These, I think, are good pieces of advice.\n\nBut now I have the two big things.  I've saved them for last because I believe they are crucially important things to understand if you are looking at starting an indie studio.\n
- Money equals time.\n\nArt does not equal business.\n\nSince we shut Macguffin down in December, I had some time to think about things.  These were the biggest lessons I'm taking with me as I move forward in life.\n\nLet's start with the first, Money = Time.\n\n"Time is Money!" is something we hear all the time in movies, yelled by cliched industrialist fat-cats.  But what does it really mean?\n
- Ok, every day you need money to live.  You buy groceries, you put gas in the car, and you do things for fun.\n\nThis is pretty much a given.  Everyone gets this.  Yes, time is money.  That's why I need a job, so I can pay money for the things I need to live.\n\nBut now, look at it from the point of view of a business owner with a set amount of time, and a set amount of cash - which is exactly what you'll be if you start a company.\n
- Ok, every day you need money to live.  You buy groceries, you put gas in the car, and you do things for fun.\n\nThis is pretty much a given.  Everyone gets this.  Yes, time is money.  That's why I need a job, so I can pay money for the things I need to live.\n\nBut now, look at it from the point of view of a business owner with a set amount of time, and a set amount of cash - which is exactly what you'll be if you start a company.\n
- Ok, every day you need money to live.  You buy groceries, you put gas in the car, and you do things for fun.\n\nThis is pretty much a given.  Everyone gets this.  Yes, time is money.  That's why I need a job, so I can pay money for the things I need to live.\n\nBut now, look at it from the point of view of a business owner with a set amount of time, and a set amount of cash - which is exactly what you'll be if you start a company.\n
- You've got enough money to live for a year.  Past that, You've got $10,000 to spend on developing your game.\n
- You're not an artist, and you plan to spend $3000 of that on art.  That leaves you with $7000.  \n
- You plan to make your own 8-bit sounds for the game, so that will cost you nothing.\n
- And, you're an ok coder.  You think you can get this thing coded and to a version 1.0 in, say , 10 months.\n\nGreat!  We've got our timeline, we have lots of slack time, and we even have budget left over.\n
- Fast Fwd 6 months\n\nYou aren't anywhere near where you thought you would be.  You're 6 months in, you don't see any end in sight.  You don't think you can finish coding the game in one year, meaning you’ll run out of time and money before you release.\n\nAdditionally, your artist bailed, and you replaced her with another that was more costly.  So now you're spending $4000 on art.\n\nWhat's more, you made a mistake when you thought that music wouldn't cost anything.  It wouldn't cost you any money.  But it would take time.  Time that you no longer have.\n\nSo now you need to fix things.  The only way that you can now gain time is by spending money.  You could possibly spend money on a sound designer, and get them to create the sounds.  That would free you up entirely to code on the game.\n\nYou can also spend some of your money on coding help.  What if you spent your whole $6000 on a coder?  Maybe you could finish the game in 2 months.  Then you'd have time to do the sounds yourself.\n\nThis is exactly the problem that a person running an indie studio full time has.  You have a very set amount of money, and usually a set amount of time.  And if you can't cram your game release into the time you have, then will find yourself forced to spend that money to do so.\n
- Ok, I've explained how money and time are essentially fungible.\n\nNow, what does that have to do with business and art?\n
- This all boils down to:  Do you want to be an artist, or do you want to be in business?\n\nIf we look at these two ideas as being opposites of each other, on the one end we have pure art.  Art for art's sake.  You don't care if your work ever sells.  You might not even want to sell it.\n\n
- As the main example of that, I'll cite Henry Darger.  Most of you have probably never heard of him, and with good cause - he's pretty obscure.\n\n
- Henry Darger was a custodian and recluse in Chicago, who died in 1973.  When he died, his landlords discovered an entire body of artistic work in his apartment, including a 15,000 page book he had written, along with hundreds of color illustrations for it, another 10,000 page book, and tons of other work.\n\nNo one knew about any of this before he was on his death bed.\n
- For the opposite example, pure business, I'll put Zynga.\n\nRegardless of what you think of Zynga’s games and/or their business practices, Zynga is a company that is laser-beam focused on the raison d’etre of all efficient for-profit companies - making money. \n\nThey are not in it for the art.  They're in it for the benjamins, and they are very, very good at it.\n
- And what's in the middle?  That's where most indies fall.  We're not doing this completely for the money - I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that the indie lifestyle doesn't exactly equal rolling in cash.\n\nBut if you're looking at setting up a company, you're not a pure artist, either.  Or at least, you shouldn’t be. A company's sole purpose is to be a vehicle for the creation of wealth for its owners.  You can make arguments that this isn’t necessarily true - say for non-profits - but that’s not what we’re talking about here.\n
- Now we understand that Time is Money, and Art is not Business. \nWhy is this useful?\n\nStarting a company not for everyone. \n accounting\n filing for incorporation\n finding funding\n finding office space\n PAYING for office space\n\nAlso -> clock ends w you going out of business.\n
- Most people think: start company, make game, make lots of money, enjoy my success. \n
- \n\nYou need to think about the fact that it could go a lot like: start company, start game, not finish game, spend tens of thousands of dollars for no appreciable purpose. Or maybe, start company, make game, sell 20 copies of game, close down company and go find job.\n
- Thesis: Lot of us that are here in the middle. What we REALLY want to do is be creative. \nDon’t want payroll taxes, or W-2 and 1099 tax forms, asking investors for money. \nWant to make games\nMaybe even just one game\nand personal rewards - satisfaction, pride, the respect of our peers.\n\nIf you think about it and that’s you\nmaybe think about not starting a company.\n\nNot trying to discourage people from chasing their dreams\nwant to make sure you actually chase the dream you want, and one you can achieve.\n\nIf you’re not sure, talk to someone you know that owns their own business. Ask them about the risks and rewards of doing that.\n\nObviously lots of issues with holding down a full time job\nlack of time\ndeadlines don’t have teeth\nhard to focus after work\n\nNot saying its easier\nbut challenges each way\ntake the time to understand what you are jumping into\n\n
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