Hello Fastlane forum!
I just joined the forum and recently finished reading UNSCRIPTED and wanted to introduce myself and share my story! Maybe you guys can give me some honest feedback. I found the book in a moment in my life where I am questioning everything, so a lot of things made me think and some left me in doubt. I'm looking to make up my mind and start going full-steam forward once again, I hate feeling like this!
I turned 30 years old this year and spent the last 6 years building a game studio here in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It has been a long and very rewarding challenge, starting a company in a very incipient industry, in a developing country. I learned SO MUCH and lived things I didn't expect to, which was amazing. I found an amazing team of people with like-minded goals and we hang on until now. But even though we found recognition and many forms of success, that did not translate to financial success. We started part-time and not paying ourselves, until we got some deals and funding, and nowadays we grew the team and are making enough to pay a small-to-average salary to everyone and have some runway in the bank for a few months ahead. We weathered a big storm this year as we almost ran out of money, and I made it my mission to find new clients and projects to keep us afloat and it worked. I believe we finally reached a point of near financial stability and we could start growing/scaling from here. The influx of new potential clients and opportunities has been steady, even if nothing big or special, but enough to pay the bills and maybe raise our pay if things keep going. That all sounds great, but at the same time, now I find myself tired, probably burnt out, and with lots of family problems messing with my head and time (parent with a degenerative disease) and I'm not sure of what path to take next, or what is the "Fastlane" way forward.
I am a digital designer and I always knew I wanted to work with everything digital and interactive. That could include games, or not. And for the first years of my professional life I worked with lots of different areas like web design, graphic design, animation, etc. I wanted my own business and tried a few things but nothing worked. Until I found a group of people making games and really working their asses off. And as I had a lot of the skills needed and a vision of what we could do, I joined them. In the past 6 years we launched a few games, got funding, deals, clients, and started making a name for ourselves in the industry.
We have been 6 founders since very early, and each of us has been very necessary for the business. Over time, I learned I can be a good leader and earned a respected leadership position. I'm CEO of the company and I handle B2B clients, publishers, deals and overall longterm strategy (and of course I also do a bit of everything, manage projects and still do some art or UX work). So I'm pretty happy with what I accomplished, but it's very very tiring to develop a business with 5 technical founders. I often feel dragged out, not because they don't agree with me (usually I can show my point and they do, and when they don't it's also healthy) but because they're not as involved with the business processes and I have to go through the work of explaining everything so it makes sense for the whole team. We're all horizontally equal in terms of shares and salary, and I believe we needed everything to be equal in the beginning, so people would have skin in the game and be motivated. But things changed, our business changed, and I got a lot of feedback over time telling me this is not the way to go and that I should have a higher share of the business. As the business develops, I see a bigger gap growing between me and them. I don't believe I'm more important than them or better, but that my work has a bigger direct impact on the business' lifeline and they're not really worrying about that so much as I am. That's something I'd like to change in the future as we scale, but I haven't found an answer for how.
Other than that, I feel kind of tired of game development. I think my business got much farther than many many game companies I know, but it's still not enough. This is a very competitive industry and a lot of great products are only selling a handful of copies right now. There are other avenues for making money with games and I've been targetting them, but after reading UNSCRIPTED , I was left thinking if this kind of business, together with this number of founders, would actually even allow me to free myself financially. I make the math and the amount of revenue we need so we can make the whole team financially free is so high, we might have to strike a hit. I also feel like we're building "jobs" for ourselves and not scaling a business. We created the game dev jobs we wanted, but with a lower salary. That's OK for a lot of people, but it's not what I want right now. I can make games by myself for fun in my free time and that could be enough for me.
That kind of thought has led me start a few side projects by myself in the past few months. I created a blog about a hobby of mine to learn how making money with a website works; I am finishing a simple game by myself with a different concept I never tried before and want to launch it to see what happens (would make probably nothing, but I'm learning); I have been reading a lot about blockchain and Web 3.0 and thinking about how I could build something with that (it could even be a game).
In the end, I think a lot of the root of my problem is that I kind of stopped caring about the work I do every day. I really want to have an impact on society and make something people use. I always felt like that, but for the longest time I felt I was making a huge impact with games and could keep going. Seeing the games industry develop in Brazil was awesome, and growing my team and making new hire's dreams of working with games come true was also great. Sometimes making games is frustrating and feels like working in a vacuum, no one uses the product until it's launched. And working like that is super risky too, but that's how most of the industry works. We worked with a more lean and iterative model with our first game (and I loved it) but we could not monetize the product, so we ended up getting funding for a different project along the way. I would still want to try again with a new way of doing things, starting a new product with a leaner model and our current experience, but I've been feeling disappointed with the industry and started to look elsewhere (if any of you are game devs and would like to discuss the industry, I'd love to, I have a lot to be angry about).
Thanks for reading all of this! It would be great to hear more experienced people's thoughts. I'm thinking long and hard if I should keep investing my time in this business or not. I feel that if I motivate myself and the team, we could grow a lot next year. If not with actual game sales (Fastlane), then at least with B2B and also some platform deals, but that would still be a long grind until we can make bigger money. I could also start over with a smaller team and a leaner company structure and focus more on my individual values, and see if I can make things grow faster. I would love to hear your thoughts or experience on this!
I just joined the forum and recently finished reading UNSCRIPTED and wanted to introduce myself and share my story! Maybe you guys can give me some honest feedback. I found the book in a moment in my life where I am questioning everything, so a lot of things made me think and some left me in doubt. I'm looking to make up my mind and start going full-steam forward once again, I hate feeling like this!
I turned 30 years old this year and spent the last 6 years building a game studio here in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It has been a long and very rewarding challenge, starting a company in a very incipient industry, in a developing country. I learned SO MUCH and lived things I didn't expect to, which was amazing. I found an amazing team of people with like-minded goals and we hang on until now. But even though we found recognition and many forms of success, that did not translate to financial success. We started part-time and not paying ourselves, until we got some deals and funding, and nowadays we grew the team and are making enough to pay a small-to-average salary to everyone and have some runway in the bank for a few months ahead. We weathered a big storm this year as we almost ran out of money, and I made it my mission to find new clients and projects to keep us afloat and it worked. I believe we finally reached a point of near financial stability and we could start growing/scaling from here. The influx of new potential clients and opportunities has been steady, even if nothing big or special, but enough to pay the bills and maybe raise our pay if things keep going. That all sounds great, but at the same time, now I find myself tired, probably burnt out, and with lots of family problems messing with my head and time (parent with a degenerative disease) and I'm not sure of what path to take next, or what is the "Fastlane" way forward.
I am a digital designer and I always knew I wanted to work with everything digital and interactive. That could include games, or not. And for the first years of my professional life I worked with lots of different areas like web design, graphic design, animation, etc. I wanted my own business and tried a few things but nothing worked. Until I found a group of people making games and really working their asses off. And as I had a lot of the skills needed and a vision of what we could do, I joined them. In the past 6 years we launched a few games, got funding, deals, clients, and started making a name for ourselves in the industry.
We have been 6 founders since very early, and each of us has been very necessary for the business. Over time, I learned I can be a good leader and earned a respected leadership position. I'm CEO of the company and I handle B2B clients, publishers, deals and overall longterm strategy (and of course I also do a bit of everything, manage projects and still do some art or UX work). So I'm pretty happy with what I accomplished, but it's very very tiring to develop a business with 5 technical founders. I often feel dragged out, not because they don't agree with me (usually I can show my point and they do, and when they don't it's also healthy) but because they're not as involved with the business processes and I have to go through the work of explaining everything so it makes sense for the whole team. We're all horizontally equal in terms of shares and salary, and I believe we needed everything to be equal in the beginning, so people would have skin in the game and be motivated. But things changed, our business changed, and I got a lot of feedback over time telling me this is not the way to go and that I should have a higher share of the business. As the business develops, I see a bigger gap growing between me and them. I don't believe I'm more important than them or better, but that my work has a bigger direct impact on the business' lifeline and they're not really worrying about that so much as I am. That's something I'd like to change in the future as we scale, but I haven't found an answer for how.
Other than that, I feel kind of tired of game development. I think my business got much farther than many many game companies I know, but it's still not enough. This is a very competitive industry and a lot of great products are only selling a handful of copies right now. There are other avenues for making money with games and I've been targetting them, but after reading UNSCRIPTED , I was left thinking if this kind of business, together with this number of founders, would actually even allow me to free myself financially. I make the math and the amount of revenue we need so we can make the whole team financially free is so high, we might have to strike a hit. I also feel like we're building "jobs" for ourselves and not scaling a business. We created the game dev jobs we wanted, but with a lower salary. That's OK for a lot of people, but it's not what I want right now. I can make games by myself for fun in my free time and that could be enough for me.
That kind of thought has led me start a few side projects by myself in the past few months. I created a blog about a hobby of mine to learn how making money with a website works; I am finishing a simple game by myself with a different concept I never tried before and want to launch it to see what happens (would make probably nothing, but I'm learning); I have been reading a lot about blockchain and Web 3.0 and thinking about how I could build something with that (it could even be a game).
In the end, I think a lot of the root of my problem is that I kind of stopped caring about the work I do every day. I really want to have an impact on society and make something people use. I always felt like that, but for the longest time I felt I was making a huge impact with games and could keep going. Seeing the games industry develop in Brazil was awesome, and growing my team and making new hire's dreams of working with games come true was also great. Sometimes making games is frustrating and feels like working in a vacuum, no one uses the product until it's launched. And working like that is super risky too, but that's how most of the industry works. We worked with a more lean and iterative model with our first game (and I loved it) but we could not monetize the product, so we ended up getting funding for a different project along the way. I would still want to try again with a new way of doing things, starting a new product with a leaner model and our current experience, but I've been feeling disappointed with the industry and started to look elsewhere (if any of you are game devs and would like to discuss the industry, I'd love to, I have a lot to be angry about).
Thanks for reading all of this! It would be great to hear more experienced people's thoughts. I'm thinking long and hard if I should keep investing my time in this business or not. I feel that if I motivate myself and the team, we could grow a lot next year. If not with actual game sales (Fastlane), then at least with B2B and also some platform deals, but that would still be a long grind until we can make bigger money. I could also start over with a smaller team and a leaner company structure and focus more on my individual values, and see if I can make things grow faster. I would love to hear your thoughts or experience on this!
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