Manifesto for a Game Development Studio (or any creative tech company)

Also, your site’s security certificate is really messed up.

There ought to be some kind of clause that hold you, the (original, principal) owners of the company to the manifesto. Like, “We will shut down the company before requiring 50 hour work weeks” or something.

Adam,

great thoughts in there!

The biggest point I have is the one that is not stated out loud in the manifesto. Not only do you require a lot from yourself and the management, but you also demand a lot from the employees in terms of their maturity level and ability to deal with risks inherent in a startup.

For the manifesto to succeed you need matching employees that go beyond of simply doing it the agile way and owning their work. You need people who are able to consider the good of the company (beyond their own shares/wages). Any sort of political infighting would kill the manifesto quite fast.

It would be pretty cool to draft an employee manifesto to match your company manifesto.

Some detail comments:

1. You get roughly 4 hours of actual work out of a 7,5 work day. I’d rather keep Friday as a working day and work to 20 actual work hours per week.
2. If you go with 4 work days and you will get (want it or not) 4 hours per day out of it, and then allocate 20% of that to “google time”, you have roughly 13 work hours per week remaining. Are you sure you can get things on that?
3. Customer development seems like a good model to attach to your manifesto. At the very least all business tasks should be handled similarly to engineering tasks (agile that is)
4. You can use equity to compensate for the reduced wages, but it also means that you need to manage the upside you promise (equity is worth zero unless there are dividends or liquidity).
5. When everybody is a shareholder it also means a lot more opinions that you need to take into account. 4. and 5. together imply quite a bit of management effort (not saying that you shouldn’t do it, but you need to reserve time for it)
6. May be it is the Nordic culture where I’m from, but full transparency on wages sounds really challenging to accomplish.
7. I really like the self-development and the buck stops with the directors section

TBH, there is more to comment and commend, but gotta get back to work =).

Interesting…

To be honest, I’d love to work for a company like that and I’d do it in a heartbeat, with a couple of (practical, slight and personal) caveats. However, most of those would be mitigated depending on the project and my possible role in it.

I’m definitely keeping an eye on this thread.

Does sound like a good and interesting system, my only worry is regarding remote workers not being paid as much?

Unless you are providing the hardware, they will surely be less of a resource drain on the company that a drop in salary would be counter productive especially for motivation when your being so apparent with salaries.

Either way, I’d be interested in this and seeing how it turns out so good luck!

Granting equity is a big risk. If the business runs into any trouble, you’re almost certain to get to fight minority shareholder lawsuits on top of that. If your concern is fair compensation, a profit sharing plan is probably a better idea.

@Antodologo: I agree in general with the idea that there’s only so many productive hours in a brain in a day, but you have to remember that none of us are going to be focused all day long. We eat lunch, we stop and chat about TV Show X with a coworker, etc., and each one of those little breaks gives the gray matter a break and a recharge. I’d say that in an 8-hour work day, I typically get 5-7 hours of productive time, assuming I’m not being impeded by pointless bureaucracy or bad processes. On the days I have to contend with the processes that are in place to assuage the ego of middle management or our NNPPs, then I’m closer to Jussi’s 3-4 hours of productivity…and those days I usually go home and get another 3-4 hours of productivity on a pet project.

I’m constantly amazed at how many of these “common sense” rules of productivity fail to take into account that 80% of the IT workforce (and I’m being generously low here) are managed by people who have no clue how to manage creative or technical minds. These people aren’t performing poorly because of technical limits to the human mind or psyche, they’re performing poorly because they’re forced to deal with bad practices and/or have had their spirit broken to the point where they don’t care anymore. If you have an engaged developer who isn’t hampered by management for the sake of management, then they find ways to make themselves more productive because — amazing concept here — they /enjoy/ what they do for a living!

There are a lot of really good ideas here, but I think your manifesto is suffering from a bit of ‘kitchen sink syndrome’. I think this stems from the engineery idea that we can predict every scenario and prepare for it. That’s simply not true, you’d be better off with fewer rules and a better hiring process that weeded out more potential problems.

For example, why are you approving/disapproving 20% time projects? That defeats the whole purpose. If you have intelligent, dedicated employees who have an incentive to ship their projects you don’t need to babysit them. If you do need to then they shouldn’t have that freedom to begin with.

However, I think that’s a moot point since the whole 20% time concept doesn’t fit so well into a game company. It works great for google because the idea is that people working on their own projects are the most passionate, but google is a general software company who will own the project when it ships. A start up game company doesn’t have the resources to sell a secondary product. And that’s just the software engineers, what are your artists and game designers doing with their 20% time?

Also, while feeding employees is a good idea you’re already straddling the line of food cop. Not that you’re wrong, food choices can have a big impact on productivity, but limiting vending machines based on what you believe to be a good choice is asking for fat-guy resentment. I suggest you shorten that whole section to “Teams will have a weekly budget for eating socially and fresh, free snacks will be provided to everyone during the workday.”

Thirdly, I would advise against paying people less for telecommuting, particularly since you’ve so strongly connected pay with value to the company. Either telecommuting by employees is allowed or it isn’t, and if you want to discourage them by penalizing their pay and forcing them to be available by IM then you probably just don’t want it. If having employees on site is important for the success of the company then they have to be on site, period.

Finally, why do you need such a battery of defenses against the ‘unscrupulous’? If they’re good employees then you don’t need to defend yourself against them and if they’re bad employees you need to get rid of the bad apples because they’re dangerous. You should have quarterly peer reviews(peers are much better at finding the flotsam) where the verdict is either positive, needs retraining or bad apples. Come up with a training plan for those who need it and bad apples should get 30 days to turn everything around or be removed. Bouncing them from team to team is just going to drain all the good employees you have.

/IMHO

Adam

Great article as always and I want to say I completely support this manifesto.

I would however say that whilst it is a great bottom up strategy for organisational design and structuring a technology and/or game company it does not address directly the top down industrial structure and environmental factors that have forced modern video game developers to operate their studios in such a opportunist manner seemingly dismissive of the complete knowledge base of modern organisational and HR management theory i.e. putting the employees first.

Whilst I will not make apologies for video game studios and their owners who on a daily basis design their studio structures around the directors benefit first and the employee’s quality of life and benefit last I have a certain sympathy towards the studio’s plight as they are operating in an industry that has for the most part forced them to work in this manner to remain operational and even then quite usually not even profitably.
Game studios are driven by a desire to make the games they want to make. This usually means console and high quality online games. To do this they have little choice but to work under the publishers who are famous for their ill treatment of studios on a whole. The publisher business model sap developers ability to generate significant profits, retain IP and allow them to generate enough revenue to improve their lot in life.

Many more studios would quite happily subscribe to your manifesto if they were unbridled from the yoke of the publisher business model or were even more willing to change the types of games they wanted to make or markets they wanted to operate.

I would make an argument for the creation of a sister document i.e. a Publisher Manifesto for existing publishers to subscribe to with its principle aim of treating their developers fairly and equitably.
I would certainly make the case that a manifesto for each of these organisation types would have to be subscribed to before the industry can create studios and publishers that put employees first for the industry to be an environment where all companies can operate and grow to the betterment of their employees.

The biggest problem is that people don’t like disruptive ideas like this one.

You’re going to have problems from all ends trying to implement this. Investors and publishers aren’t going to like the idea of not squeezing every bit of work out of people, and the increased costs of communication as Matthew Weigel points out above.

Your employees are also going to have to really adjust their expectations to match what you are offering. The entry-level people are already obviously willing to throw away their lives to a game company for the opportunity to work on a game. They’re not going to care about only working 4 days out of the week. The people who will appreciate that are going to be the more established people with families, and if you only hire them your salary expenses will go through the roof, making your investors cranky.

You’re also ignoring the fact that employees will often willingly put in extra time. When I was working on Meridian 59 at 3DO, I went in on holidays to do a bit more work to improve the game. I was one of the few people working on it, so it wasn’t like anyone else was going to pick up the slack. Why would I take a 20% pay cut if I’m going to willingly want to work on the game project as much as possible, anyway?

I think you need to approach this like a game design. What are the goals you’re trying to reach? Instead of just throwing out features, consider what the root problems are that you want to resolve. Quality of life, freedom and flexibility for people to have lives outside of work, equality, etc. Consider those first, then start writing a manifesto about that. Then make a plan like this to show one way to handle these issues, and discuss the tradeoffs intelligently.

As I said, this is a disruptive idea and throwing it out there is more likely to make people who matter (who are also used to the current system) recoil than agree with them. So, show what problems you want to tackle and go from there?

I’ll post on my blog and trackback here to get the discussion going.

I like a lot of this, but really it sounds like an attempt at a Utopian, idealistic run at how a company should run.

For one, people in the gaming industry already usually get paid way less than their counterparts in other industries. A programmer in the gaming community may get … 50-60k to write code, while an IT programmer doing SQL code or what have you, will make past 6 figures. Reducing that an extra 20% and calling it good because you work 30 hours a week is counterproductive to me. The argument that you work in a “fun” industry making video games won’t fly here, methinks. Not that you’re using that, just making the comment.

I work 4 10s and I really like my 3 days off, so that part I like, but I also like the idea of 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. 6 hours is easy to do and as a thought (since I didn’t see it mentioned) you could have 1 of the 5 days be a telecommuter day. People work from home, but you have a central login site via VPN or something that people have to sign in to.

A lot of people have issues with telecommuting because they can’t keep tabs on their employees, but in a setup like this, where you’re giving a lot of control to the teams, there’s a lot more at stake to the whole team when 1 person decides to slack off and not work while they’re at home.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to get a LOT more done and actually want to work when I’m in my home surroundings rather than work. Offices feel forced and huge wastes of gas and other resources. So you could still keep your 4 days a week in the office and leave the 5th day (could be your 20% day even) for telecommuting and still run 30 hours.

The other thing I’ve found is that having someone manage the project with that specific skill set works wonders. Project managers (IF they know the technology they’re dealing with) can be very helpful. If this just falls to someone on the team and isn’t an outside person, it could work as well.

On the whole, it’s a nice manifesto, but I agree with Pyschochild. If you approach the problem the same way you do the product you’re going to make, you’ll effectively find what’s wrong with your current or past situations and remedy those to make your situation one that you’d prefer to work in.

Wiqd – Are you American, by any chance? It’s just that the comment that people in the games industry get paid less is, while not exclusively American, far less true in the UK.

The figures, pulled very roughly from several sites, are £24k average UK, £30k average Games and £32k average IT.

“(with free alcohol)…
Healthy food; healthy environments”

These are mutually exclusive. If you’re complaining about chocolate but sponsoring booze, there’s a disconnect somewhere.

I would strongly suggest outsourcing any job that’s not directly related to producing your product, such as customer service, IT support, human resources, accounting, etc.

I would also like to suggest a plan for the eventuality of getting ahead of schedule on any part of any project. When any team gets ahead of schedule, there should be something like company-owned VIP seats at the local baseball stadium, or season passes to local attractions like zoos and theme parks. The company should own at least one small shuttle bus for purpose of transport to such activities.

To promote physical health and creative freedom, there should be ample courtyard or lawn space around the office to allow mid-day sun bathing, frizbee, and hacky sack breaks. Company sponsored after-work sports, like volleyball, pool, darts, and bowling would also be nice.

Managers should sit amongst the people they manage, with the same furniture (desk/cubicle, chair, lamps, etc). There should only be one or two rooms in the building with a door (besides storage closets, bathrooms, and mid-day nap areas). Nobody gets a private office or parking space.

P.P.S. Don’t actually produce whole games. Be a game developement service company and have teams that specialize in game components, like UI, Graphics, Audio, Physics engine, Content creation tools, etc. Then you can bill out by the hour to your customers, and your customers will be game companies rather than gamers.