In a recent post by Jake Simpson, who runs a small (around 10 people) gamedev studio, he believes the the AA segment of the games industry is on it’s way out. He says:
it’s basically the end of quite a lot of development as we know it. AA is gone almost entirely – try getting a budget of $3-4m out of anyone right now, see what happens.
He may be right, I don’t know anything about the AA (or AAA) games industry. However, there is one thing that does seem obvious to me… when you have a team of people working on a game (or any software project), there are certain overheads like communication between team members that you just don’t have as a solo developer. Time is taken getting everyone to understand the vision, to agree to the tech stack, the architecture, the design, coding standards and so on.
Around 20 years ago I worked as a C# developer for a media company. We were a team of around a dozen programmers. This wasn’t games so there were no artists, musicians, writers etc but still, we were all working on different parts of the software that had to work together as a single shipped product.
We had daily meetings, we had to get our code to work with other people’s code, we had to make sure we all adhered to the standards set out by the company, we had to try not to break the build for everybody when we checked something in!
When you’re working all by yourself, a lot of this overhead simply doesn’t exist. You make all the decisions yourself and you don’t need approval for anyone else. You are the only one who needs to understand your game, it’s features, the architecture, the design and the code. This saves time and arguments!
So not only can a solo developer be more productive but there can be less financial overheads. A professional studio has to provide a set salary to it’s staff; a solo developer can be frugal while they are working on their game to save money. A studio has to provide all the best office equipment for the staff and make sure they comply with laws and regulations. A solo developer can just make do with what they have.
Personally, I am very lucky that my living expenses are low enough that I only need to work in a job part time to cover my living expenses and furthermore, I work an evening shift which means I get to work on game development before I go to my job! This is huge in terms of productivity and focus. Sometimes I get tired towards the end of the shift in my job, but I don’t care about that – I get paid anyway!
Not everyone has the luxury of the free time I have, but I would wager that most solo devs have some free time that they can use to make their game. If you have your living expenses covered by a job and have some free time spare each week to work on your game, you’re in a better position than many of these AA studios.
A solo developer who is already covered financially doesn’t NEED their game to sell hundreds of thousands of units (though that would be nice of course!) We can keep learning, keep improving and just keep going without having to worry about running out of money.
Studios don’t have that luxury. They have a minimum amount of income that they need their game to earn in order to keep everybody paid and to keep the lights on. If they run out of money it’s game over! So if Jake Simpson’s prediction is correct, what does that mean for the solo gamedev?
Well, for a start most indie games aren’t competing with AAA games. People are going to buy the next GTA, the next Elder Scrolls game, the next Call of Duty and that will have no impact on your small indie project. But I do think there is competition between solo devs and AA devs. It’s all classified as “indie” and generally the price point is lower. Your competition is other games with a similar genre and similar price point.
So, if more AA studios end up shutting up shop because they can’t survive financially, it doesn’t affect AAA but it should mean that potentially more solo devs working from home get a shot at extra visibility right? At least I hope so. I always think it’s sad when a game studio of any size has to close but that’s real people who have now lost their livelihood. But I always try to look for the positive in everything so this post has been my take on Jake’s rather gloomy post. Whilst it’s bad news for AA, I think it’s good news for us solo developers.