I saw many game startup company advertise for Artist, programmer and Musician. The startup company offer no salary but commission upon sale of game profit. Will this method work ? Have anyone seen game-company with such model and are fairly/highly successful ?

If money is your goal, chances are you are wasting your time considering those "companies".

I''ve been reading these boards myself for a few years and I''ve yet to see any successful project started on these message boards. I still think it is possible. I would say %99.9 of people who post for help wanted start projects which is way out of their scope.

John

No I don''t know of any companies that are successful under this model. Game development is hard work and the people who are good at it either make/sell their own shareware games or work for a company that pays them. If you are not paying them then the good ones will not work for you. That leaves only hobby developers or those without the skill to get a job. Running a business using these sorts of people isn''t going to work. They simply don''t have the motivation/ability to get the project done. Just look around at the mod/hobby/online game arena. Hundreds of people launch game development projects only for them to fail soon afterwards as people lose interest and drift away when they find out just how hard making a game really is.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions

ID Software started out making games in their spare time.

Yes, but the industry has come a long way since ID was making games. Not only the technology, but the focus on marketing.

quote: Original post by Davaris
ID Software started out making games in their spare time.

That has nothing to do with the question being asked. It makes no difference if they made the game full time or in their spare time. The key point is that they owned the game/company that they created and got the money generated from selling the game.

The orginal poster is proposing to set up a company and employ people but not pay them until the game is finished/has sold. Those employees have reduced/zero ownership in the game/company compared to id and the money they recieve at the end will reflect that lack of ownership. This means reduced reward for their work, which will result in reduced motivation. As detailed in my previous post the reduced motivation will mean that games are less likely to be finished and the reduced reward means you are less likely to attract good people in the first place as talanted individuals will be able to get jobs which offer payment during development.



Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions

[edited by - obscure on April 22, 2003 8:45:46 AM]