Hi

oh this is strange to me.

Maybe it's because I come from the moding space, not directly from the indie space?

But so many people assume FREE or volunteer labor is not worth it or is always doomed to failure.

I see posts everywhere that say “you get what you pay for” and that volunteers can't be trusted to do anything… that Rev share is ALWAYS a scam, That anyone who volunteers for game dev is a loser who isn't very skilled.

This fly's in the face of a lot, but never the less people are always putting me or others down for free labor situations.

And yet, from my experience, money changing hands doesn't solve anything, it just brings a new level of problems.

This may be why we have lots of lone wolves?

yea, managing a team is hard, recruiting the right people is hard. But it's possible.

Maybe my experience is an exception to the rule?

It seems like a self perpetuating assumption?

people get what they expect?

Maybe it's a money worth assumption?

In my decade of being in this space, I've seen a lot of resumes, I really mean A LOT, and most of them are reasonably skilled and experienced., with few NEWBS…

From my perspective,

Anyone can pay someone to do something, but very few can inspire volunteers to action.

Thoughts?

GeneralJist said:
Anyone can pay someone to do something

Sounds like you can't.

fleabay said:
Sounds like you can't.

Well, I have in the past, and almost every time, it turns into a headache for me.

And I don't get substantially better results.

Edit: Well results that offset the headache and hassle, most of the time it leads to more complexity and hassle all around.

GeneralJist said:
Anyone can pay someone to do something

Anyone with money, yes.

GeneralJist said:
but very few can inspire volunteers to action.

Yes, agreed.

These combined two true statements do not mean that “anyone with money” can get good people and make a good product. It takes more than money. And it does not mean that “inspired volunteers” are the best way to go. My career since the 1980s has been based entirely on paying experienced developers, for publishers like Atari, Activision, Yahoo, and more. Companies like that cannot get free volunteer labor, or even promised-revshare labor.

GeneralJist said:
I see posts everywhere that say “you get what you pay for” and that volunteers can't be trusted to do anything… that Rev share is ALWAYS a scam, That anyone who volunteers for game dev is a loser who isn't very skilled.

Consider statistics. If (making up numbers here) 60-70% of paid professional projects result in completed products, it's probably less than 20% of volunteer projects that do. The 60-70% figure is low, for the sake of argument. And 20% is surely an extremely generously high percentage.

GeneralJist said:
This may be why we have lots of lone wolves?

I'd posit that has more to do with people wanting to work on their own ideas rather than other people's ideas.

GeneralJist said:
I see posts everywhere that say “you get what you pay for” and that volunteers can't be trusted to do anything… that Rev share is ALWAYS a scam, That anyone who volunteers for game dev is a loser who isn't very skilled.

I wouldn't go with the absolutes, but as a general trend I'd say it holds true.

That's especially true if you want to bring a product to market. It is rare for a hobby group to follow through on the effort required to complete a large project. It is also rare for a group to go through all the legal hoops to ensure a proper product out to market. There have been some improvements in that generally with open source where people have created high quality licenses, but anything more generally requires more record-keeping than hobby developers and volunteers are willing to do.

For putting out a commercial product, are you absolutely certain that every source is properly licensed and has a signed assignment of rights? That's something I have seen kill well-intentioned projects when they couldn't get the legal elements in order so potential publishers dropped the project.

Revenue sharing and profit sharing models are almost always a bad idea, as covered over and over again in the business forum. Hobby projects are almost always going to fail. I've seen thousands of them started, seen discussions on the forums for many thousand more, and I have only seen a couple ever become profitable products.

It can happen, but I'd guess the success rate is one in many thousands, possibly as far as one in several hundred thousand if we count all the young kids wanting to make their AAA-killer RPG or their Minecraft clone or whatever they want over their holiday break.

GeneralJist said:
very few can inspire volunteers to action.

Agreed. Charismatic leadership is one of many essential ingredients for success, and it isn't common.

GeneralJist said:
Anyone can pay someone to do something, but very few can inspire volunteers to action.

In either case you need to convince people to spend time on your dream. Convincing with money is just a lot simpler as everybody needs that stuff for food, cloths, roof, SO, and kids.

You can convince volunteers too.Flourishing open source projects typically have a working program, a number of active developers, and a player community around it. Obtaining the latter is just a lot harder to do.

volunteers just disappear with barely if any work done, despite having given their word, its rare to get one that actually pushes the project forward, so its a myth, or maybe its a cultural thing because ive had project leaders disappear on me as well

when the employee relies on the money to survive, and the leadership relies on recovering the money they are spending to survive, they are all forced to work