I think it really depends on the company, size/structure of the team, and if they really care what you think.

This has been a very informative thread. Thanks to Simon for the input.

I have been contemplating a start up company. I don''t have any programming experience, however, I do study everything I can get my hands on concerning the subject. In this, I hope to gain an understanding of what the design team will be doing.

One thing I have found is that the industry lacks artists and sound techs. This would be where I would like to drive my talents toward. I have a bit of 3-d experience (mostly in backgrounds).

In creating a buisness plan for said start up, I have come up with the following:

-I hail from the pen and paper type RPG genre with 20+ years of creative experience and many contacts in the industry.

- This company would exsist mainly online (with legal,publishing and shippping being handled locally).

- Not only would the company produce PC and possibly cross-platform games, but print material for the D20 OGL genre and possibly development of it''s own Gaming System. This way when times are tough trying to get one game to the break even point, other finished projects can make up the difference and projects in progress can keep the team busy and employed.


I still have research to do on the following and hope that those ''in the know'' here, may help to enlighten me:

What is the prefered form and rate of pay for each type of team member? Is royalty pay the standard? Do most team members make a salaried paycheck? What kinds of benefits do game companies offer? What types of benefits would you like to see your game company offer?

What was the most succesful game your company generated? How many copies were sold to break even? What was the retail price of said game? What was the production cost of said game? How long was the game on the market before it broke even?

I still have much research and many quetions to be answered before I can form the buisness plan. Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks;
Troy

quote: Original post by Structural
I have a question regarding this:

If you make it as a game programmer do you have influence on the game itself. Can you give input on the gameplay or add ideas regarding the game in general?

I''m curious because I almost finished my first intern-period at a company that makes/programs embedded systems, but from what I have seen is that the influence the programmers have on the actual product is very limitted.
I was hoping that in the game industry I could use my artistic abilities and ideas together with my programming skills, instead of being the ordinary coding-grunt.

A games programmer has a lot of input on design issues. Games tend to change *a lot* from their initial designs - there''s no way to know whether something will work from a playability point of view just from words & diagrams in a document. That''s the biggest difference with games programming to ordinary programming - the product you''re developing hasn''t been fully planned and designed - you start with a rough design and build on that.
Furthermore once a gameplay feature gets implemented and becomes playable, new ideas to complement that feature often come to light from all over the team.

As neurokaotix said, the size of the team can have an impact on how much input you get, but the average sized team has reasonably regular production meetings where the whole team can provide input. The only time this gets difficult is on the major Japanese type 100 man teams where you can''t fit all the team into the same meeting room.



--
Simon O''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com

Palcadon:

quote: One thing I have found is that the industry lacks artists and sound techs.

I find that view puzzling - if anything there are many more relevently skilled and experienced artists than there are programmers.

Programmers tend to post much more on boards such as this and generally be more vocal (in electronic terms anyway), but I''d disagree strongly about the industry lacking artists. In average games companies the number of artists tends to outnumber the number of programmers in my experience.

Audio people however is a different situation entirely. Audio has traditionally, and still is treated as something which gets outsourced to a specialist company. Only the larger developers have in house audio people, and usually only one or two people at that. There are hundreds of games audio outsourcing specialists though - usually 1-2 man teams, often ex-in house guys.


What is the prefered form and rate of pay for each type of team member?

For a general ballpark idea, take a look at the salary survey at www.gamasutra.com and/or www.igda.org. Salary levels do differ by area and by company.

Ordinary yearly salary is preferred with bonuses on top. Common bonuses include: share options+dividends, royalty share on titles you''ve worked on, company profit bonuses, project completion bonuses, milestone completion bonuses, golden handshakes, recruit-a-friend bonuses for finding new staff etc


Is royalty pay the standard?

The deal between the publisher and the development company usually is "advance on royalty" and "royalty on breakeven", yes.

For individual members of staff, depends on the company - some pay higher salary without royalties, some include the performance related bonuses with lower royalty share etc.

Benefits vary massively too - private healthcare, pension schemes, gym membership, social events, free subscriptions to trade publications, free job specific books, paid/subsidised trips to trade shows (GDC, E3, SIGGRAPH, EGDC, ECTS etc) etc, free pizzas/curry after 8pm, free taxi home after 10pm etc.
Some even include subsidised housing (i.e. company buys a house and rents rooms in it to staff at cheap rates). Company cars aren''t common []


What was the most succesful game your company generated? How many copies were sold to break even? What was the retail price of said game? What was the production cost of said game? How long was the game on the market before it broke even?

Unfortunately you''ll find it very difficult to find any developer who''ll answer those questions for you. I know most of those answers for Creative Asylum, though corporate confidentiality and the fact that both competitors and customers may be reading prevents me from revealing the answers!...

...You''ll find some rough ballpark values and further discussion on www.igda.org but nobody is going to reveal those details.

On top of that, every game has it''s own particular set of circumstances which do things like cause delays in break even, for example with Pac-Man:Adventures in Time (a full price officially licensed title), during the publishing/break even period the publisher (Hasbro Interactive) was bought out another publisher (Infogrames) which introduces all kinds of accounting and legal delays.

There are so many other factors too that taking a figure from someone elses title would be a bad thing to do - your profit margins are different than ours, your title may be better/worse than ours, recieve more/less advertising, get prominent placing in more/less important stores etc.

--
Simon O''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com