<aside> 💡 This is WIP. Actually I dont remember writing it. Seems reasonable though.

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• How does a group of game developers grow out of the small, scrappy team with a surprising hit to a midsize/large game dev studio?
• The majority of game dev shops I have worked at were trying to make that jump, with varying levels of success.
• Growth is hard. Damned hard. Especially with the nature of game development. Companies that are in a position to grow are usually there because they have a big hit on their hands- revenue stops being a bounding issue, and you have to start now to capture lightning in a bottle again.
• And it's not just the core game development tracks you need to scale up, at the exact same time you need to bootstrap marketing, legal, HR, finance, business development departments.
• You need to integrate these into the game development process, while trying to figure out how to make a fun game all over again.
• And this is where I see one of the most insidious problems for midsized game studios- they become overconfident about their ability to make games. Success, plus this being their core competency, usually results in mediocre follow-up titles.
• Making a game takes skill, time, and money. Making a hit game takes all those things and luck.
• Misattributing luck for skill is death to a midsized game studio. Making a game is hard. Making the next game is even harder.
• It's harder because now you're integrating all those new departments into the process, which slows things down and forces you to consider new opinions- product/market fit, copyright, branding and IP, into the creative process.
• This means there's a hell of a lot more people involved. The easy joy of having a small team of friends building something cool is replaced with meetings trying to figure out the marketing budget for next fiscal year.
• Balancing the very real requirement of determining next year's marketing budget with replicating the magic that made your first game so successful is hard.
• Here's the thing, by virtue of being part of the founding group, the small group of friends that started the whole thing are usually the ones now “trapped” in marketing budget meetings.
• These people fucking hate marketing budgets. To their bones. That's why they're game devs. But what are you going to do? You're the boss now and society dictates you be at the top.
• Never mind that being at the top means literally 90% budgeting and the requirements of running a complex corporation.
• Never mind that what you are frighteningly good at is prototyping and iterating games.
• I can't tell you how many times in my career the founding members of some game dev studio left to start something new once things went corporate.
• It's the same number of times I've shown up to work with what was left in their wake.