Our secret developer blogs allow well-known mobilegamer.biz readers to rant about the mobile games business anonymously.
Here, a veteran developer and consultant reveals their struggles working with startups who don’t know what they’re doing – and worse, don’t pay their contractors…
I hate the startup world. I think it’s shit.
The current system has allowed investors to just throw the dice and put their fingers in as many pies as possible, taking 20% or 30% of these companies for as little as they can. It’s spread betting, basically, and the investors know that a bunch of these studios are going to die in six months. But they don’t give a shit.
Even when they do find a winner, then often the investor needs to acquire even more shares to keep the company going and growing, and the founders end up losing more and more.
As a consultant who helps these studios build the game that’s in their pitch deck, it’s clear a lot of these guys haven’t got a fucking clue what they’re doing. Most of them have never actually made a game, and when you tell them it’s going to take a year, not the six months they thought it would, they blame you, not themselves.
What makes things worse is that game development, in general, goes really slowly right now, because programmers are disproportionately powerful. The good ones are rare, and they can pick whatever projects they want, so it’s very, very hard to get decent programmers consistently even if you have money and a solid plan – it’s literally a dice throw.
Worse, more often than not, these start-ups don’t honour their contracts. They give you, say, a 10 month contract but don’t have the money to actually pay you for 10 months, so they cut it short with very little notice. Sometimes they won’t pay you at all.
I’ve turned work down to commit to a longer contract, then found out that the studio has gone bust and there’s no way to get paid. It has actually happened so many times that even when I do sign a contract, I expect that the money will run out before the game’s finished. Often, the forecasting and estimates have been wrong from the start.
I’ve also abandoned projects before the studio runs out of money just to make sure I get paid. A friend of mine almost had a nervous breakdown working on one game years ago, which ironically was meant to be peaceful, heal-the-world kind of game. The person running it was awful, and had completely underestimated the development process. I’m not even sure if they got paid for it in the end.
There’s also just so much wasted time. You’ll be talking to someone for ages about helping out on a project, really getting into the detail of it, and when you ask about pay they talk about giving you share options instead – way before the thing is even made, let alone worth anything. I have talked to many startups where it turns out there’s no actual money in it at all; they could have said that right from the start, but they string you along for as long as possible hoping to sell you the dream.
I’m glad I ducked out of some of those games when I did – a couple were like watching a car crash happen in my rear view mirror.
There are so many people in game development that really shouldn’t be doing this at all. My advice for developers consulting with new companies is to go in with open eyes. If you’ve got a contract for six months to a year, it might only last three months before they run out of money or change strategy because they don’t know what they’re doing. Approach it month by month, and keep your options open.
Are you the next secret developer? Email neil@mobilegamer.biz with 500 words on any topic you feel deserves more discussion, and we’ll consider it for publication. Everything is 100% anonymous, so you can speak freely.
