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| 03.04.2007Re: Free Agency
Michael John gives an interesting pitch for the adoption of the Hollywood-style "studio" model -- where all developers would effectively be free agents, and studios would hire talent on a per-project basis.
While I agree that there would be many benefits in adopting this paradigm, one of the biggest issues would simply be the issue of locality. The movie industry centralizes the vast majority of its production around Los Angeles. We don't have a similar hub. Thus, developers would be forced to constantly travel to wherever their next studio (and paycheck) would be coming from. Even in cities which have a fair amount of game studios, the amount of work "in town" may be sparse enough that they're essentially forced to take whatever project is available -- at which point they might as well just be an employee. One benefit of the studio approach is that they often will pay you during the "down time" between projects, whereas contractors are left out in the cold.
Conversely, to allow contract developers to work remotely would involve major issues: virtualizing meetings, giving them access to internal networks, figuring out how to allow them to use physical devkits under NDA, et cetera. Certain types of remote work are feasible -- concept art, audio production, things which require limited access and communication with the core development team.
There are other issues as well: the inherent problem of trying to avoid big employment gaps, the problem of contractors always getting "lower-level" jobs (compared to full-time employees), and the difficulty of getting the right personality mix when a significant portion of your staff has never worked together before.-Andrew Sega
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Letters to the Editor
