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Free Agency: Opening Up the Game Developer Market
 This Is Not Outsourcing
It's important to point out that Free Agency is distinct from "outsourcing". While outsourcing has clear economic advantages, studios are rarely engaging outsourcing partners in order to gain specific expertise. Indeed most of the time, the studio is not even certain which individuals the outsourcing company will assign to their task.
Free Agency by contrast is a studio seeking highly specific talent, and talent that is probably very well paid. Where the point of outsourcing is to get cheap work. The point of free agency is to get the right work, at the right time.
So while outsourcing is rightly criticized by talent as being a 'race to the bottom', free agency is just the opposite - a 'race for the top' for the best talent in the industry.
It's Really About Developers
Make no mistake, I am taking sides here, and I have taken the side of talent. And the wealth of remarkable talent flowing into the creation of games makes me optimistic that free agency will take hold.
In the open marketplace of free agency, yes studios get to shop around for talent, and that's great. But developers get to window shop for the best opportunities as well. That's a much more meaningful shift, and it's a shift that restores the balance in our industry between business and invention, a balance that's shifted way too far in the direction of the bottom line over the past several years.
A Quick Checklist For Talent
There are many factors that make working as a Free Agent challenging, and even frightening, but primary among them is simply the will of developers to stand up and make a change.
Though there is far more to the process of free agency than I can discuss in this column, here are a few things that talent can do starting today to begin affecting this change.
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Stop thinking like an employee. You’re a creator, not an employee. It is your studio's responsibility to put you in a position to create, and if it's failing, or if it's going a direction you don't agree with, then you have no obligation to stay.
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Be honest with your studio. Planning on moving on? Tell your producer. The sooner the better, even if your planned date of departure is months away. You put them on the hook in #1; now it's your turn to be accountable.
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Demand credit. The IGDA has a crediting standard; insist that your studio and publisher follow it. Developers make games, developers deserve credit for the specific work they do.
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Don't sign non-compete agreements. Blanket non-compete agreements have no place in our field. Your employer has every justification to require that you use none of its tools or assets outside of the workplace… but your ideas formulated outside of your work for that employer are your own. Don't sign that away.
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Stay tuned for future developments. There are a great many changes needed to create a true free agent marketplace, including a growing and evolving group of agents, a possible change in the health care system, and possibly even a trade union. All of these are important and are underway.
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Try out free agency! Consider being a free agent, even if it's just between gigs. See if you feel any differently toward the work that you do. Free agency is scary, unfamiliar, and definitely not for everyone. But you just might find it changes the way you think about making games.
See you at GDC!
(Michael John will be presenting a talk Cutting the Apron Strings: Developer Freedom Through Free Agency at 4pm on Friday at GDC)
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