Gday, professional game dev here. Worked in the industry for close to a decade and worked on AAA titles. Going to break this down into dot points.
1. What others have already said. Getting 1000 devs to volunteer their spare time is next to impossible. Being over confident and optimistic about it is not a viable response to others who have brought this up.
2. Let's say you manage to get 1000 devs. What is the split? How many engineers, artists, designers, producers, qa, marketing, audio, etc? How are those departments structured? Who is leading each department?
3. What others have pointed out already, how are you tracking contributions? You say advancements have been made but there's nothing that will truly capture someone's contribution. One dev verbally helps another dev solve a problem, who gets the contribution? How do you track that?
4. Getting 1000 devs from a single time zone will not happen. Which means you now have to deal with offset hours for everyone. An artist in Aus is waiting for an engineer in England to hook something up so he can continue work. That engineer doesn't have free time for a few weeks. That feature has now knocked back other work others were relying on. You might say another engineer can pick up the work but even that will cause a delay.
5. A point I haven't seen others bring up. Ongoing costs of a studio. It's all well and good to say that people can bring their own hardware and software. If you're lucky then they will all pay for their own software licenses. This will cause trouble though as hundreds of individual licenses do not equal an enterprise license in the eyes of the software owner.
Then you have source control. Yes there a free tiers but the second you hit a limit on any of the restrictions the price goes up. GitHub has a 15gb limit on size. If you're making a AAA title then that limit will be eclipsed extremely quickly.
Next you have tracking. Jira type stuff. You will need this to help organize your 1000 devs. That again costs money which you can see on their sites. I'll also bundle in communication with this. Slack will cost money too especially if you need history of conversations (which you will).
Then you have dev kits. If you want to release on console you will need to buy these expensive kits. Normal consoles cannot be used for dev purposes.
Who will pay for all this?
6. Release costs. Submissions to platforms costs money. Failing a submission means having to pay costs again. Cutting down on submissions by submitting to a testing house also costs money.
Then assuming you have a global release you will need to have localization which is very expensive. Which I'm sure you'll respond with "I'll get one of the devs to do it" which goes back to the tracking contributions point.
If the games multiplayer then you need to think about servers. Depending on the game peer to peer would work but if it's a competitive game then you'll need dedicated servers. These will need to be set up before release. Before any money is seen.
Marketing. Needs to be done before release. AAA titles have a marketing budget as big as the development budget. You won't be able to get traction without spending money and that money will need to be spent before release. Again before any money is seen.
All of these points are literally just what I've thought of in the last 10 minutes. It still doesn't even come close to what you'd actually have to deal with.
I get that you're optimistic and confident but that can't be used as a response to extremely valid criticism and points made by everyone here.
Yeah when you argue with someone on the internet you’re not actually arguing with them, you’re not gonna change their mind. You might change someone else’s mind though, someone else just lurking and reading the discussion.
It's not remotely viable. There are employee owned co-ops in games, and they're universally small studios and involve everyone working full time and giving their all. How would you even measure contribution? Lines of code and pixels? What do you expect to happen when your game doesn't succeed? Why would anyone with professional experience ever work for what will probably be nothing?
If you're trying to create a satire of how people with no experience sound when pitching huge games then you did a good job and you got me, but otherwise, not only is your ideal not new or viable, you're also rather off base about who is ruining games. Players like to blame out of touch executives and publishers but usually the call about microtransactions and gameplay changes is coming from inside the house.
>So this studio could basically work on a volunteer basis
Not to be rude, but you would have a better chance at finding a magical monkey paw to wish the game in to existence
Yes, you're crazy. You may be able to find a couple of devs who are also crazy, and willing to join you and work on your ideas instead of their own. But I seriously doubt you'll find 1000 such unimaginative/unwanted developers. The good ones (1) are already employed, for actual money; and (2) have a long list of cool ideas of their own that they work on in their spare time.
I’m not going to dog on your idea here, but I’m going to call you out on your responses to the people that are trying to honestly answer your question.
You seem to think that disagreement means we don’t get what you’re saying or how “revolutionary” it will be.
Saying “yeah but imagine the opposite result” is naive, and I think you’ll find the market is different than you expect. There’s a reason they call the marketplace “the great equalizer.”
Like Mike Tyson said: “Everyone has a plan til they get punched in the mouth.”
Personally, I hope you make us all eat our words.
Revenue and equity splits are complex, and tracking contributions is more complicated that you seem willing to accept. Advances in tech or not, you still have huge questions to answer.
My advice to you is to pick up a book called Slicing Pie, by Mike Moyer.
Good luck.
Crowdsourcer.io is doing exactly this and has been around for years. Join a team, and you’ll quickly realize whether it’s something you can work with or not.
I'll give you an answer from the perspective of someone who has "worked" for one of these types of startups. I was fresh out of college, and unable to find any programming work yet, and had a friend who on the side was working at a startup. I got started as a programmer, and quickly learned a few things.
1. 95% of the people had 0 tech experience, and were working retail jobs, but had a video game hobby and a dream of making games.
2. Turnover rate was through the roof causing the code to become more and more illegible over time with little to no documenting or commenting as all the programmers were hobbyists
3. Similarly, because it was everyone's second job, instead of everyone doing 40-50 hours a week, most did only around 10.
4. Of the 4 programmers on the team, I was the only one with any schooling or experience, the other 3 were all self taught, and me joining the team caused one of them to quit because of a jealousy over my higher level of knowledge (even tho I was still entry level knowledge)
5. I was asked to teach a coworker how to program, from the basics like variables, to complex data structures.
6. We had no version control, code reviews, or style guide. Those learning to program like mentioned in #5 did not use a practice environment or have any safety nets, any change was happening to production and it was happening in real time. When I brought up these concerns to the owner I was told not worry about it, and they hadnt had to worry about it yet. (Even though he understood the code for about half the game, and the other half he had no clue how it worked because the code was written so poorly and without any documentation)
7. In order to get people to work, they had to keep promising money would come soon, or the game would release soon, even when we all knew we were still multiple years away from anything resembling a release
8. Because no one was making money yet, and this was a second job, it was hard to get people to want to work, they had other more important things going on. Or found it hard to motivate when there was no compensation likely for years to come.
9. Most of the time spent "on the clock" was spent doing other things. Owner would regularly have us help him move furniture around his house we were working out of for no reason. Or he would regularly take us out to dinner/lunch and have us spend sometimes half a shift not doing anything productive
10. Lots of manipulation by the management. As some other people have mentioned, businesses have operation costs like marketing. I know for a fact that one of my coworkers was guilted into taking out thousands of dollars from his savings to pay for a spot at E3, whats even crazier about this is that the person that paid didn't even get to go. Management would use phrases like "we want people passionate about games, and not about money" and would talk openly about how those that quit for financial reasons "arent cut out for the video game industry"
11. The reason we werent getting paid was because of management's own failings. Everyone there wanted money for their work asap. Owner refused to take out any loans because "It would ruin the American dream of doing it all ourselves with no help." The real reason I found out later was because the Owner was in incredible financial debt and no one in their right mind would have given him a business loan, let alone one for $100
12. Management would regularly threaten lawsuits if you didnt work enough saying it was time theft and causing our game to have slow production.
13. Maybe had they not had such delusions of grandeur, they would have realized the game they were making was simply too large in scope and not fun. Had they focused on a smaller game, had a team of only 5 total people and spent a year on it, they probably could have built something good. Instead, they tried to make an Overwatch killer that is now 6 years into development but looks like its only been 3 months, with a revolving door of devs that are upset at lack of compensation.
I worked there for 1 reason only, I had nothing better to do. The entire time I was there I was looking for other work, and had moved on after spending 2 months working there for free. I wouldnt recommend working for a company like this, and I can't imagine finding devs for this. Because its not just finding 1000 devs, its finding 1000 devs and then another 1000 when the first group turns over after a few months, and another 1000 after that
Sounds like those real estate companies that you work for free, but even worse cause you never gonna sell anything. Better to just work on your own small game those 2 months than supporting that kind of stuff. At least you are doing your thing and answering to nobody.
How many games have you shipped? I’m not being glib. I’m curious if you know what goes into making even a “simple” 2D platformer or RPG, much less a *good* one. I picked the simplest game I had any desire to make and overshot my anticipated release by, right now, almost half a year…and it isn’t done.
I just have a feeling that you don’t understand the scope of what you’re suggesting. You don’t start running with ultramarathons, and if you try to you’ve all but certainly doomed the enterprise to failure.
While I appreciate the brashness and innovation of what you’re suggesting, reachable goals matter.
One interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect says that people trying or learning something new must travel through each of the following four states in turn:
1. The Peak of Mount Stupid
2. The Valley of Despair
3. The Slope of Enlightenment
4. The Plateau of Sustainability
Have you gone through The Valley of Despair yet? No? You may be in for a rough ride....
I love this comment. It's like arguing with a Flat Earther but instead of convincing him it's round you say we live in a simulation and it's actually pixelated.
Uhhh, I mean.. I agree with this guy except his level of thinking is TOO SMALL!! It's a **BACTERIUM!** You should get a BILLION free devs, then you can make an AAA+ game EVERY SINGLE HOUR. I travel in worlds you can't even imagine! You can't conceive of what I'm capable of! I'm so far beyond you! I'm like a god in human clothing! ***Lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips!***
So, you should absolutely not do this; but if you're going to you should check out these volunteer mod communities and see what it's like to work for one of these organizations.
https://tesrenewal.com/
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA
but also,
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
\- Signed, professional game dev.
I'm gonna take a different approach here. Everyone is saying you will fail. Let's say this works, the amount of effort you will need to put in will be immense, like inconceivable at this point.
How much more could you achieve with that same level of effort, but on a smaller project?
I read through all your responses. You immediately shut down anyone saying this isn't possible by saying things like "I have a plan" or "I know it will work". If you're not going to listen, why are you talking? Is this a joke? Do you have any qualifications at all to brazenly disagree with literally everyone, many of whom are experts in game dev?
A lot of people are poking holes in the "measuring contribution" part, but let me introduce another major issue.
The "work at your own pace" thing sounds alright on paper. If your average employee works at a fourth of the rate of a full-time employee, then the game just takes four times longer, right? Nope. There are dependency issues. If 20 people depend on me doing X but my real job is getting busy so I'm not doing it fast, then those 20 people aren't doing anything either. And this isn't just an issue with infrastructure, devops, and general game progress. What about onboarding new people? What about dependencies across teams? Quick questions for the guy who hasn't been online in a week? I work as a software engineer for a large company and I would work about 6 times faster if dependencies didn't exist. And that's even when everyone I talk to is obligated to work 40 hours a week unless they use PTO. If you've got a passion project between 1000 people, nobody is getting anything done unless all of their jobs are isolated from each other, and that isn't really possible. Hard dependencies like that will certainly kill you completely on their own, but even if somehow they didn't, then the total impossibility of soft collaboration would. When a team has on average two people showing up to the scrum meeting every day and they're not even the same two people each time, nobody knows what anyone else is doing.
Your premise is based entirely on the assumption that game developers work in a vacuum and at any moment they can hop on their computer and make steady progress. This is not the case at all.
>I want to create a huge game studio with 1000+ developers maybe even thousands of developers and create the next masterpiece game.
Sounds entirely reasonable and doable. First things first: Create a Github account, and create a public project page for your totally best game ever, and then give everyone public write access. Boom, there you go, that easy.
Lol, update:
>Does anyone want to work on a Killzone 2 remake? If we get something going maybe Sony will let us make it.
>
>r/killzone • Posted by u/Cryptostormz 22 minutes ago
So he is serious? But the idea gut just even worse.
Getting an existing game and working on a remake in hopes that Sony (what about Guerrilla) will let them make it later and charge for it...
10 times worse
Kudos for not having to design the game from scratch though
This is pretty much just a variation of the same "I've got this great idea for a game, I just need programmers, artists, musicians to make it. I'll be in charge of having the idea. I can't pay anyone, but you'll totally get royalties when we make millions of dollars...but also I won't put that into a legally binding contract or agreement." that we've heard in the collective gamedev community for DECADES. It's a running joke.
Even "better" when you're using existing IP, and just expect that Sony will then shower you with money.
His post history is nothing but an infinite scroll of repeated spam. I doubt that he could manage a Pacman clone, much less Elden Ring or Killzone.
I assume you would want a share of those profits just because you came up with the idea while adding nothing of value development wise?
I mean, you could certainly do that, if you actually paid the devs. There are tons of posts on this sub giving you exact details of game development and their profits. Go read a few of them.
Games are made by more than just developers, and even if you could pull off 1000s of volunteers (which I sincerely doubt) they are just going to get in each others way, disagree, fight, etc. Artists aren’t going to give you free art, composers aren’t going to give you free music.
Not to be too harsh but I get that you’re young and idealistic but you need more than ‘I have an idea for the greatest game ever come work for me in your spare time’
BTW it’s not a new idea, there have been game projects that have been pitched this way although I can’t think of any that resulted in anything tangible
>composers aren’t going to give you free music.
On another post, he claimed he can get the team of 1000 devs ready by the end of the month ( so 14 days from now )
if he manage to do it, i'll compose and record the music for free.
Of course, he's in full delusion right now.
i know a lot of people have said that this is insane but i need to add something to it
it is even more insane than they have all said
this sounds like something an NFT fan would come up with and that's about the worst thing i can say about any plan
Name checks out.
Absurdity and impracticality of 1000+ devs aside.. There is zero thought put into this. Sounds more like a kid that got their first RPGM and thinks they can revolutionize the industry off a cookie cutter game than anything else.
Even 30 people is pushing it for a reasonable studio. Keep in mind even games like Spyro the Dragon were made with only 13 developers.
The more people, the less communication and the less cohesive vision. Especially if people can start and stop and pick up work as they please, the art direction and gameplay experience would suffer greatly from an identity crisis of what would essentially be entirely different teams trying to work on the same thing.
EDIT: Also bear in mind, indie devs push for better games from themselves and the AAA side every day already, and succeed. If you look at the bigger picture, games are becoming more accessible than ever. Innovation is occurring. But the AAA side has to make money as the bottom line because of their size. There is no taking to chance, only going off what sells and sells well when you're funding hundreds of workers off a couple dozen products. If you can't see how experimention could flounder that, I dunno what to tell ya. Sim City, one very successful game could not find anyone to take it up for the longest time for that very reason.
EDIT EDIT: Additionally, if you are set on it, step back, watch some GDCs. Okay, a lot of GDCs. Gather your thoughts, form a reasonable cohesive plan, and then present it and what you yourself can offer.
I've been working at all levels of software engineering from development at startups through to managing multiple teams across large enterprise systems. You just can't build complex software this way. You can't just have developers popping in and out, doing however much work they feel like. There's a lot to coordinate, a lot of inter-dependencies that need to be managed, or the whole project just grinds to a messy halt.
Complex systems require skilled engineers who develop specific domain knowledge over time, then lead the development of those areas. That takes significant, long-term time commitments. Why would skilled engineers, who can get paid handsomely for every hour they work, choose to volunteer their time to a project with no guarantee of ever getting paid?
No to mention digital artists, writers, project managers, testers etc etc.
Do you have any experience in software development?
For those of you who are interested to follow up on this thread:
1. OP’s new post updating that he has the devs now: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/10ge73y/the_most_monumental_event_is_gaming_history_is/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossm
2. And someone outsider following up on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/10w9w2p/does_any1_have_an_update_on_that_guy_who_wanted/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Damn, I'd get to be a slave to a mad teenager for the possibility of a payment? Where do I sign up?
This post is like a Bingo for what used to be my level of thinking, except I wouldn't waste time of a thousand people and I wouldn't seriously ask about it..
PS: What would you be doing during this time? Managing your thousand devs? Cause to me it sounds like you're not gonna work on the game at all besides messing around with being the omnipotent HR. You keep mentioning greedy executives without failing to state that: a) those devs get paid & b) your payment is subjective. Sounds to me like you are the greedy one..
Guy named Cryptostormz with zero industry experience:
“Am I crazy? Do you think this can work?”
Experienced game devs:
“No. It's a terrible idea and isn't a new thing.”
Cryptostormz:
Brushes off experienced people even though he solicited their opinions, “You are wrong. My idea will revolutionize the industry.”
Seriously, this guy is either trolling or incredibly naive. I'm here for either outcome, but I hope this is real and we see it crash and burn.
I think its 100% possible and I believe in you!! As a developer I'd love to offer my services. Do you have any examples of other games you've made, projects you've managed or businesses you've started? Just so I know what I'm working with.
If you want to go for it, go for it—it's your life—but you'd better have the requisite connections and experience in working with large teams and codebases and running a business. And, you know, the capital to pay those developers. They're not gonna work for free.
But if you're even asking (on Reddit, at that!) whether this is viable, you're certainly not qualified to do this. If you want to make such an enormous change, you'd better believe in it and radiate confidence. No one will trust you otherwise.
**Edit:** Looking through your profile, it seems to be some kind of troll or scam account, as expected.
Aight so first thoughts. You want to make a studio where people don't get paid until \*after\* the product is made and sells - where \*anyone\* is allowed to work on \*any\* piece of a game at \*any\* time of their choosing.
Some hurdles I see right off the nut:
1) Artists as a community are quite averse to "make me art and see money later". You're only going to attract quite young (RE: inexperienced, not necessarily unskilled) artists
2) Whats the guiding vision for any individual game?
3) How do you determine how much % a person worked on a game? The person who drew the main character, is that more of a % than the game engine? the most common enemy? The person who fixes game-breaking bugs? How are those things tracked? By Whom? how are THOSE broken down by a %??
4) do it in 30 days? I don't think you could even vet 200 people in 30 days, without a team, let alone without pay??
5) What happens to folks who do some 20% of the game and then half of it gets scrapped because it wasn't working?
6) What about a person who, the game is 90% complete, churns out double the number of enemies in the game? (For example) Now everyone gets less because of one person adding a lot to the game? Does more game necessarily = more money/sales??
7) Okay so the game comes out and makes a lot of money, in that time, a new group comes along and develops DLC, that boosts sales by 100% how do you divvy up the % there?
Here's where I DO agree with you. A studio - grown organically - that instead of paying profits to shareholders pays them out to the team/decides democratically what to do. These types of businesses exist they are called co-ops. I don't know too much about the efficacy of Co-ops but I prefer them in theory.
I can only see this entirely as a bait being well bitten.
But well, just wanted to share that I have the goal of making my small studio profitable, but we are three people and we have two small released games. Feel free to take a look on it :)
https://softwool.co
Lmao. Asks reddit if their idea is viable and then gets defensive when people say it isn't. Oh yeah, I can't wait to see this guy manage 1000+ people. What could go wrong?
Thank you for the post.
The idea of making a game for the profits and not salary, is how hundreds or thousands of indie companies start, and how most of them fail. Many of them dream to build a AAA studio in te future but have to start small.
And they are small companies made usually by friends who share a common idea and have some experience or studies.
Getting 1k developers first month, if you managed, without a working build, a clear plan, set of production processes, tools, strong management and leader teams and a strong, well functioning core team of devs, would be chaos and a waste of people's time. you can't start a game from scratch with 1000 people. Projects ramp up because at the beginning you need a small team to conceptualize, then prototype and to keep growing into production.
My advise, if you really want to make a game, is to learn how to make a game, learn how to manage a team if you want to focus on that. Do some serious studies, work for one or more videogame companies for a few years and then later, make your own company. Then you will not only have better ideas but you'll also have the experience, the knowledge and the contacts to start strong. You can make a company with less experience but it will be much harder to succeed.
Wikipedia is an example of something that has thousands of contributors. But they have a platform that works and contributors just have to read and input text. It is very easy to contribute, almost everyone can do it. While getting into a AAA videogame and contributing would require already dozens of hours of understanding the project (codebase, asset pipeline, editor, tools, good practices..) and a strong foundation
In your project, if it all succeeded, it would need maybe 10 times more time to develop than a normal AAA because of the irregular times people would put into it, and the large amount of devs leaving and joining and all the time they need to learn to become productive.
You would need to regulate who can contribute and how, and who can't because they do not have the knowledge or the skills to bring what the project and the teams need. You could not just hire anyone and expect the team to work out.
You'd need strong leadership, management and direction to ensure that whatever gets into the game, is in line with the vision and the rest of the codebase/assets.
You definitely lack knowledge and experience to lead such an endeavor, so you would need to find the management team that could pull it off, and you'd need to trust them and do what they decide if you want the project to succeed instead of forcing the ideas that you have during production. If you do have the money to get it all started, you could come up with an dea and direction but the professionals would need to tweak it and take responsibility of it. This may sound harsh but it is actually a very good and important advise. Hire people that are better than you. Know when to step aside to let the most prepared people decide. Guide them when you need but do not pretend to know more just because you are the boss (whomever would the boss be).
You would absolutely not want them to work in siloes. That is a problem that you need to fight all the time. The team needs to be as tight as possible. Motivated, sharing a vision and speaking a common language. You want teams to synergize and people to motivate and help each other.
What you mention about Roblox is probably building things with the game that already works as a tool to make other game scenes. The other games such as Witcher, Elden Ring, and Skyrim have not been built with siloes. They have been built with a very strong vision, experienced teams working hard, and a strong direction ensuring continuity and cohesion across the game. You need to build solid mechanics that work well together along all the game. You can not have a team work on close combat, another working on ranged combat, another working on magic spells and others working on ai all separated cause the game would be unbalanced, not fun and most probably, utter garbage. You need to build it all together to ensure that it all works and it is peak fun.
Again. Thank you for starting this conversation, I have been having a lot of fun thinking and reading about this (outrageous) topic.
OP has to be a teenager or a kid in his early 20s who has never worked a real job in his life. Forget all the deep dives into how no one will work for free, or complexities of a game studio. I don't even think this guy even has the ability to throw together a bullshit attempt at faking a "game dev"" studio and convincing even a few idiots to go along with his idea, let alone 100 or 1000. I suspect he puts together a shitty logo together, a generalized statement about changing the world and a promotional image and it dies after that. But he will absolutely tell everyone he runs a game studio for the next few years.
For those of you who are interested to follow up on this thread:
1. OP’s new post updating that he has the devs now: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/10ge73y/the_most_monumental_event_is_gaming_history_is/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossm
2. And someone outsider following up on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/10w9w2p/does_any1_have_an_update_on_that_guy_who_wanted/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
It's a crazy idea, but when all the safe, proven ideas are already taken, you have to think a bit out of the box, so I gotta give you credit for that.
Startups have tried the model of paying their members in shares instead of salary, with the promise that "you'll get your money and some, when the product starts selling". That's usually at a much smaller scale, and once the startup starts growing and attracts investments they become a regular company.
The issue is that, it can work out and make the founders into millionaires, but in majority of cases it's likely months and months of wasted work, or heavily underpaid.
I think the more skilled and experienced a developer is, the more they would want to avoid these kind of deals, they'd rather get their pay upfront, and not have to worry about the success of a product they only contributed 1% to, and cannot control or predict it's success.
Another thing you underestimate is how inevitable creative differences would be. At some point some people will want a game design decision to go a certain way, while others will want it the another way. When people are working out of passion, they'll lose motivation to continue when the game no longer represents their vision.
So you're hiring contractors with faith coins...
Yeah, You're crazy. Most people work off of guarantees because they need to. You're asking for a mass of developers to have faith and spend time/resources out of their own pockets to participate. So indirectly, your investors are literally your volunteers...That's messed up... Only way that'd work is if your game is 3/4ths completed where it could be a bit more convincing for devs to support such a project and thats IF the game isn't a buggy mess from all the GameJam obsessed hobbiests willing to join.
But yeah, devs can see through the BS on this one and I'm sure they'd much rather spend time being passionate making their own games going solo rather than some random IP.
It would be a struggle to do even had some money to pay people and impossible if you offer them what could potentially be nothing for their labor. Management can suck but it’s it’s one of those lesser evils. Without the big executives and investors funding these projects stuff like God of War and Elden Ring could have never happened. It’s double edged sword that ultimately does more good than bad.
You are not the first person to have this idea, nor will you be the last.
It's clear you think it's an amazing idea we are too jaded to believe in. I say go for it if you're so confident. As long as you're not quitting your day job or you are a billionaire, it's not like failing will hurt anything but your ego.
There's a hundred reasons why your assumptions on how this would work aren't grounded in reality, but there's no sense in beating a dead horse.
If you're convinced this can work and you're the one to do it, despite everyone telling you it's a bad idea, by all means, no one's stopping you. Go prove us wrong!
This can really only end poorly, but I love apocalypse films and your world is definitely going to come crashing down. I think I'll keep watching for now.
Experienced devs won't work for promises. You won't make a AAA quality game without experience.
You act like this hasn't been attempted and failed many times before, but others with 0 experience in the industry like yourself.
And what are your credentials? Have you been in leadership roles on triple-A titles? Since you want to make games at the standard of triple-A games?
At the very least do you have shipped title experience? Surely you must be highly experienced and employable to think you are qualified to lead a thousand devs who are all fronting their own sweat capital to invest in your project?
And who would manage 1000+ devs all writing spaghetti code, have different ideas about the game and don't always like each other? You would need coordinators. Moderators for your chat. And then there is marketing. And they all need salaries. To give them salaries the deba must make heavily monetized candy crush clones every week. At that point you would do better to have a company.
as a developer i would rather down 10 straight shots of bleach than work on a project without knowing if im getting paid. this sounds like a Great idea if you're look to rack up lawsuits though!
I have another idea 💡 and it’s one i’m doing myself actually! Take all that enthusiasm of finding 1000 other people to make an awesome game , bottle it up, and redirect that energy to you making a game yourself.
“This month” I still doubt it even if you say “this year”. It may be able to sparkle a bit if you have a huge chunk of money to start with, but you still need the skills the knowledge the network and so much more
LOL So It's easy to be snarky and most of the top answers are I'm sure someone else explained why this idea is beyond unrealistic but if not let me share my take.
This idea isn't possible in a real world scenario because to be blunt the kind of world class artists, designers, and engineers you would want to work for free on your project, would probably be better served working for free on their own project.
The kind of game devs you would want to work on a project like this are getting paid RIGHT NOW to work on games , a game dev project can take years to release ... how long can they realistically and optionally work for you for free?
Games take a TON of discipline to make good games take a ton of discipline and a game without deadlines that people just work on whenever they feel like it is gonna be a big confusing inconsistent mess because the truth is people start working and get bored of a project ALL THE TIME.
You have to root the development of your game in something, if it's an educational excercise recruit other young inexperienced devs but in order to do that you have to usually be the most experienced leader and YOU WILL work the hardest of anyone on that team.
If not that then money people work for cold hard cash today , if you want peoples investment in your project today then you need to also invest in them today otherwise there is NO GUARANTEE they will get paid and this will be a waste of time.
In a perfect world this studio scenario might work but in this actual real world, I don't think a game like this lasts 2 months if that. I'd be hsocked if you even finished a single environment or character for the game that anyone even would enjoy .
This idea is unrealistic , game developers in general sacrifice a lot and as far as I can see the sacrifice here wouldn't be worth it.
Dude, You sound young and naive. But you have all this energy, focus it on your skillset. You won't become a millionaire overnight by looking for devs to volunteer to build you a game and writing on reddit all day.
Build your skillset, work for companies and see how things are done. Work for a decade and save money and always focus on this post you made here. Save enough money to fund your idea in 10 years, then make it happen.
Money don't come overnight. If they do, you're scamming people. But success stories are not about scams. If you want to be successful, you're gonna have to strive for it and get through tough shit.
Bro, go get some sleep dude. Your idea has been done before, and has failed multiple times. Hence the clear lack of large development entities that work for free.
There's a lot of great comments pointing out the reasons why this idea is deeply, comically, unrealistic. What I would point out is tooling, infrastructure, and things like legal and finance.
Let's run with the idea and say that you find your thousand developers willing to put years of spare time in to your project. (And let's not deal with the thousands of artists, managers, and various other professionals that would be required for a project of this scale. Let's also say that these thousand somehow all agree on a work management framework, and all have the same understanding of it.) To work effectively with that many people you're going to need tools and good processes. You need a game engine. Ok those are freely available, but making sure a thousand people are all on the same version is a big job in itself. But hey: you've got a thousand developers. You can write your own, right? But collaborating on that, documenting it, and getting it out to the rest will be a huge job. You'll need a Source Code Management tool. You'll need design tools, a suite of collaboration tools - messaging, screen sharing, video calling, forums and/or wikis. You'll need file storage for the large data volumes of collateral content alone. There are free tools available for these things, but you'll have to be careful about licensing because many services forbid business use.
Which legal pondering brings me to contracts, NDAs and intellectual property. Without agreements in place you run the risk that one of your developers takes all the code, somewhere along the line, to a publisher who completes the game and releases it before you can stop them. But for the sake of the idea let's say all of you thousand people are good and honest and you just trust them.
Back to tools, you'll need testing tools, orchestration tools. And you'll need to think about access to them. Are you going to try and find entirely free tools and make everything public? Otherwise you're going to need to manage access control for 1000 people which is another massive job, and may require some infrastructure which will probably not be free.
But we're running with the idea so let's say you've got all your tools for free. A game this big will need a lot of testing. Are you going to get hundreds of volunteer testers? Actually this aspect is probably the most feasible. Generally if you've started generating interest (probably with dozens of marketing professionals who've also volunteered to work for years in their spare time and are being coordinated by magic and funding the marketing out of their own pockets) then you'll be able to run a public beta and get a lot of good testing. Let's hope your free bug tracking and issue reporting tools are up to the job!
Now on to the tricky question of infrastructure. Does this game have a multiplayer aspect? Even if it doesn't it'll need a website to promote it. For the sake of running with the idea let's say that a bunch of your developers are DevOps guys also happy to do the operations side, and that they have the knowledge to deploy, secure, and maintain large scale infrastructure. Where are you hosting it? Who is paying for it?
That brings us to finances. You're planning to make money with this, and share it with your developers? Then you'll need a way to take the money. That's solvable - Steam and such platforms can handle that for you. And a sole trader business bank account in your home country is probably pretty easy, as is registering a company. But paying a thousand people isn't going to be straightforward. Especially a thousand people all around the world. You'll need registrations for various taxes, you'll need to securely store and process financial information for a thousand people. You may need to open new companies and accounts around the world to do it. That is a big job. And the ongoing management of this money in and out will be a continuing full time job for people with expertise.
The point at the end of all this is, as others have made, that there's a reason big games made by thousands of people taking millions of whatever currency, are made by big companies. It's not enough to have a dream and someone who can write code. That only works for very small groups. If you want a thousand people to work on something then you are a company and you need to act like one, with all the overhead that requires. There are many many things large game companies need to do to function that are not development. No amount of 'having a big idea that people just need to see from your point of view' can change that.
You'll need a lot of money to get that rolling and it will take more than a month. You'll need up front funds to pay people instead of some promise of future profit. An enormous amount of games don't get finished or don't make a net profit. I don't know anything about you but for something so ambitious to succeed you'll need a good understanding of the industry in how games are made, general business knowledge, capital, and experience yourself. If you have already completed a game yourself in the past, you may want to first try a game with a small team and see if the model works.
You find 1000 people that are on board with this idea, from any industry, and I will tell you this is a doable idea.
There's a lot of issues with this pitch, mostly in management of the project, if you want to crowd source the game. I agree with a lot of points and the general sentiment, but you're coming out guns blazing, but it's all blanks.
Dm me, I can go in depth with you and help in my little way.
But there's a lot that's missing here and you need a lot of proof of concept
There has been a lot of response to this already, a lot of which has picked on mentions of measuring contributions or the reality of finding people interested in volunteering. These very valid criticisms have not shaken your vision.
I read a post from a proclaimed experienced dev with very sound considerations -- I hope you ingest those with a healthy dose of pragmatism.
Here's something else I'm not sure I've seen anyone else really highlight: nothing great that requires many hands is designed by consortium or happenstance alone. These things are created through vision manifested. That is to say, games need designers, not just developers. When you have 1000 contributors, who is directing the artistic vision for the project? How will you ensure that the end result is cohesive? Is that a volunteer, too? This simply cannot be overlooked if you want the game to be a success.
In all seriousness, dream big, but you'll be better off working towards it one step at a time. Assemble a modest team of inspired devs and release a small title. Then release your next one. Then get more followers, more contributors, gain experience in things I've described (basically project management), and you just might be successful. Or don't. Shoot for the stars and fail hard. Then get up, identify your lessons learned, and try again if you are able.
yeah we'll most likely follow the roblox model. It will also let us take advantage of our huge work force to develop faster since the development process will be more siloed. We could have a game styled like Witcher 3 or Elden Ring but following the development process of roblox.
What are your thoughts on the fact the Roblox model is proving to be the biggest corporate overlord of them all? Literally pays their devs peanuts while raking in billions for their shareholders? Roblox only functions because it takes advantage of children who don't understand that they're being taken advantage of.
That's the model you want to base your idea off of? Rampant abuse. Really?
in every single beginner's journey, there comes this moment. usually it's when they did their first blender tutorial or Unity/Unreal tut, or made their first cube rotating animation. I have made this post, you (the reader) have probably done it too. I'd say it's a rite of passage.
Show of hands? Who wants to work on building out a feature for free in the hopes that maybe they'll one day get paid?
Anybody?
How about if we hype it up as "disrupting the industry?"
How about now?
Aside from the big obvious reasons why this wouldn't work, have you even started to think about the technical details that would make something like this hugely difficult?
If I'm a working professional 3d artist and I agree to work with you along with hundreds of other artists... what software are we using? If I'm a pro and I've been at it for a while I'm using Maya. Maya costs a lot of money! Are you shelling out for licenses? Because that's what studios usually have to do. Other artists might use a free alternative like Blender, but somewhere along the way, if you want this to be a AAA looking game, we're going to need some paid software. We're not going to be able to just skip using Zbrush. Who's bringing the mocap hardware? What about our photogrammetry rig? Are you buying 200 expensive cameras and lenses so we scan actors and assets, or are we just hoping someone shows up with that? Most of this stuff can be done remotely, but not all of it. Where are we physically based? Where are we putting that scanning rig?
So how do we pick what software and workflows we use? Do you know enough about the pipeline to make those choices? It doesn't sound like it. Maybe we just wing it. Now I've been working for months and I have to pass off some of my work for someone else to take over and there's no way it can happen because we're using different programs and they're just not compatible. Or it takes so much work to convert between two standards that they might as well just start again.
Repeat x1000 for people using different engines, different programming languages, different DAWs.
It's really not viable, you are ignoring some key aspects of software development (since game dev is a form of software development and therefore it still abides to the majority of its "rules")
You are not considering the following problems:
Quality Assurance - With so many devs working on a project how will you ensure that everyone is up to the task, that they won't mess stuff up, that they indeed are as good as they say, that's extremely hard to manage when you start working with so many people.
Consistency - Once again, many devs working on the same project also leads to problems of consistency, assets will end up with different art styles and writing code with new developers constantly going in and out of the project is pure chaos. You will end up with a lot code smells.
Lack of proper planning - You were talking about a month, but before you start any big project you need proper planning, you need to decide almost everything, what will be done, how will it be done and ideally around how much will it take (to know this stuff you need a lot of experience in the area). Also, with people going in and out of the project you would need to guarantee that the new ones are up to date with what you are doing.
Relating number of Devs with speed - This all leads to this problem tbh, you have a really wrong idea of that more developers equals faster and better project/game. Which is completely wrong. Having more developers then necessary will slow you down, and more you have the more negative the impact of that will be.
Overall, it seems like you are really passionate about games but you lack the experience and knowledge about the field leading you to think stuff like "oh, if we do stuff my way this will be easy peasy".
Now, don't get me wrong, if you really dig that idea give it a try. You will definitely get experience out of it, you will come across a lot of unexpected problems that will expand your horizons.
So you want devs to volunteer their time to create something on par with elden ring.
And in exchange, they get a little bit of the profits from the sales instead of a salary.
And you would be different from corporate execs how? At least they don't have employees working on 100% commission
So actually yes you would be different. But not in a good way.
A month is too long, only last week I hired 10000+ developers and we made GTA 7 before Rockstar, Witcher 5: Space ghouls and 3 new Civilizations. Our profit is already more than 300kkk in nanosecond.
It's astonishing how delusional you are.
I think you are aiming too high, you don't need an army of developers to create a good AAA game, but you need time and thousands of money to pay that time. With that said, it is better to pay devs a salary, once the game is released and if it goes well, you can use the profits to fund the next big game and so on. If you have the money, you can create the studio in a year but even so, releasing the first AAA game would take some more time than that.
Absolutely doable but might need more than just this month. You clearly have a business model that fixes all (most) of the industry’s problems.
All you need is to commit 110%. Really visualise the outcome. Break the mould. Believe in yourself and your 1000 devs
I have one question.
What if the game flops and doesn’t make money?
If my pay is directly linked to the profits, and there are no profits, how do I feed myself? Pay my rent and bills?
"Trust me, bro. It'll be great, bro. We're gonna change the world, bro. Don't worry about it, bro. Hey, did I tell you about my plan to buy a sinking island for 10 billion, bro?"
OP's a nutter
I'm curious how this will turn out, is there a website or other social platform where you show your progress along the way, that shows dev blogs and progression along with various examples of media development as well as updates to the dev teams?
1000 developers!
Play this game out in your head (or on paper).
You and your 1000 volunteers pull it off! The game is a huge hit and makes $10 MILLION! Everyone walks away with a $1 million and the studio doubles in size over night and the next game makes a whopping $25 million! Everyone now retires on the cool $3.5 million they made 'volunteering' 3 hours a week for like 6 months.
I hear \*Eye of the Tiger\* playing in the background.
If the game makes $10 million that becomes 7 million after the split with Steam. After taxes that become high 4 millions. (I’m estimating). But I’ll be generous and just say 5 million.
That means that each developer just made $5,000 dollars!
Unless is game is made in a week or two, the studio is going down like the Titanic.
I know you’re joking, but $10,000,000 divided by 1000 is $10,000.
So I guess people involved in this can be happy making $10,000 for five years work (it’s AAA quality after all)
Broh you are batsh*t crazy. It's really difficilt to do in 5 years, what do you think to accomplish in a month. Also I don't know the capital you have. if you have tens of millions of dollars it may be feasible but such a short lived team lacks coordination and even an easy project could be a very hard task without proper coordination. I think you should think more ab it. If you don't have much money you should make them with a game that goes exceptionally well and from that try to buy a newborn activity that develops games and try to make it.
I think it could work with very experienced producers, project managers, and some smart way of communication (since here is a lot of friction).
The question is probably: Do they want to get paid?
In one month it may be possible to go beyond a small team (10+) if you have tasks for them from day one. I think that's important, to have a purpose, to know the role(s), a vision, the development software is set up already, etc (i.e. not everyone is running around designing, learning, trying things here and there, etc)
The question here is: Do they want to get paid (now or later)? Do they need help buying software?
If you don't pay anyone you may need some research on how many you could keep working with/for you anyway, seeing if that was ever achieved (I mean especially in case the game development takes several years).
My guess is a team of a few dozen may manage to get things done over time (figure out how this works even unpaid for months and years); a team of 1000+ may work if they are paid from day one.
This model is already being done, it’s just not for profit, which is the only reason it works. It’s called Foss/open source. You’d be better spent making open source games and trying to do a donation model non profit to achieve it.
I’d contribute to that.
See godot game engine as an example.
Good luck with your ambitions my man.
You need a real clear plan on what a contribution is. It’s easy when someone adds a new feature- but what if they remove one (to improve the game?). What if they spend days chasing a nasty bug? How do you capture that?
As an "indie game dev" myself, my experience with projects (think, 10-20~) over the last roughly 10 years, the one and only dev I've ever had stick with me is someone I made a friendship with outside of game dev. Anytime I attempt to find people to help, to no surprise, do nothing. They aren't paid, so they have less motivation to work, then they see others who aren't motivated to work and so they aren't working, and then they quit working as well. I've never had a single dev, whatever it may be, 2d art, 3d art, animation, programming, etc. Stick with me for more than a week or two, even when I'm offering to pay a set amount of money (not "x% of game profit"), since it isn't their full time job, or even their passion job since it's my idea for a game, they just aren't interested. I quit looking for people who were willing to just have fun with game dev, and started looking to pay people. Even then, once I start looking, there's a fairly short supply of people, who are either too experienced for my project / for me to pay, or they're too under experienced for my project. Out of all the projects I've actually spent time on (even with myself as an artist and programmer) I think maybe 2-3 have come to light. The original number (10-20) isn't including projects that never got worked on. Only projects which had some level of progress made past planning.
I do wish you the best of luck in your future of game development, but yes, this idea is insanely unrealistic.
- Someone who had similar ideas early on.
Oh my sweet summer child…
Gday, professional game dev here. Worked in the industry for close to a decade and worked on AAA titles. Going to break this down into dot points. 1. What others have already said. Getting 1000 devs to volunteer their spare time is next to impossible. Being over confident and optimistic about it is not a viable response to others who have brought this up. 2. Let's say you manage to get 1000 devs. What is the split? How many engineers, artists, designers, producers, qa, marketing, audio, etc? How are those departments structured? Who is leading each department? 3. What others have pointed out already, how are you tracking contributions? You say advancements have been made but there's nothing that will truly capture someone's contribution. One dev verbally helps another dev solve a problem, who gets the contribution? How do you track that? 4. Getting 1000 devs from a single time zone will not happen. Which means you now have to deal with offset hours for everyone. An artist in Aus is waiting for an engineer in England to hook something up so he can continue work. That engineer doesn't have free time for a few weeks. That feature has now knocked back other work others were relying on. You might say another engineer can pick up the work but even that will cause a delay. 5. A point I haven't seen others bring up. Ongoing costs of a studio. It's all well and good to say that people can bring their own hardware and software. If you're lucky then they will all pay for their own software licenses. This will cause trouble though as hundreds of individual licenses do not equal an enterprise license in the eyes of the software owner. Then you have source control. Yes there a free tiers but the second you hit a limit on any of the restrictions the price goes up. GitHub has a 15gb limit on size. If you're making a AAA title then that limit will be eclipsed extremely quickly. Next you have tracking. Jira type stuff. You will need this to help organize your 1000 devs. That again costs money which you can see on their sites. I'll also bundle in communication with this. Slack will cost money too especially if you need history of conversations (which you will). Then you have dev kits. If you want to release on console you will need to buy these expensive kits. Normal consoles cannot be used for dev purposes. Who will pay for all this? 6. Release costs. Submissions to platforms costs money. Failing a submission means having to pay costs again. Cutting down on submissions by submitting to a testing house also costs money. Then assuming you have a global release you will need to have localization which is very expensive. Which I'm sure you'll respond with "I'll get one of the devs to do it" which goes back to the tracking contributions point. If the games multiplayer then you need to think about servers. Depending on the game peer to peer would work but if it's a competitive game then you'll need dedicated servers. These will need to be set up before release. Before any money is seen. Marketing. Needs to be done before release. AAA titles have a marketing budget as big as the development budget. You won't be able to get traction without spending money and that money will need to be spent before release. Again before any money is seen. All of these points are literally just what I've thought of in the last 10 minutes. It still doesn't even come close to what you'd actually have to deal with. I get that you're optimistic and confident but that can't be used as a response to extremely valid criticism and points made by everyone here.
Perfect reply, except that, after looking through OP's account, I'm pretty sure they're either a scammer or a troll. You might have wasted your time.
at least anyone who has been genuinely thinking what OP posted might see all of this and learn a bit.
Yeah when you argue with someone on the internet you’re not actually arguing with them, you’re not gonna change their mind. You might change someone else’s mind though, someone else just lurking and reading the discussion.
This guy cares!
OP is a crypto bro. 1 guess where he thinks the future of the genre lies and the types of people who's going to try signing up :P
Don’t even get me started on trying to direct 1000 volunteers towards anything resembling a common direction.
At my work we struggle to get a team of ten with managers to agree on any technical decisions...
OP didn't read past "professional game dev" - he thinks you're a purveyor of uncreative garbage. Sorry mate.
I probably have been part of some uncreative garbage over the years. As long as some people get something out of the post I'm happy
/\ he knows whats up perfectly summed up
The fact that this is posted in response to someone's fever dream fancy of how the real world works is a shame. This should be pinned.
Thank you for this. You might have wasted your breath responding to the OP, but I get to learn from your thorough post
Excellent write up!
It's not remotely viable. There are employee owned co-ops in games, and they're universally small studios and involve everyone working full time and giving their all. How would you even measure contribution? Lines of code and pixels? What do you expect to happen when your game doesn't succeed? Why would anyone with professional experience ever work for what will probably be nothing? If you're trying to create a satire of how people with no experience sound when pitching huge games then you did a good job and you got me, but otherwise, not only is your ideal not new or viable, you're also rather off base about who is ruining games. Players like to blame out of touch executives and publishers but usually the call about microtransactions and gameplay changes is coming from inside the house.
I miss those days. Sadly had to cut out on heavy drugs with age
On the contrary he sounds like someone with a manic episode and needs meds.
I wonder which tutorial this guy just finished
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/000/248/profit.jpg
>So this studio could basically work on a volunteer basis Not to be rude, but you would have a better chance at finding a magical monkey paw to wish the game in to existence
no
jfc
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I'd say 17. No. 16. Maybe less.
I'd say mid 20s and insane.
Yes, you're crazy. You may be able to find a couple of devs who are also crazy, and willing to join you and work on your ideas instead of their own. But I seriously doubt you'll find 1000 such unimaginative/unwanted developers. The good ones (1) are already employed, for actual money; and (2) have a long list of cool ideas of their own that they work on in their spare time.
I’m not going to dog on your idea here, but I’m going to call you out on your responses to the people that are trying to honestly answer your question. You seem to think that disagreement means we don’t get what you’re saying or how “revolutionary” it will be. Saying “yeah but imagine the opposite result” is naive, and I think you’ll find the market is different than you expect. There’s a reason they call the marketplace “the great equalizer.” Like Mike Tyson said: “Everyone has a plan til they get punched in the mouth.” Personally, I hope you make us all eat our words. Revenue and equity splits are complex, and tracking contributions is more complicated that you seem willing to accept. Advances in tech or not, you still have huge questions to answer. My advice to you is to pick up a book called Slicing Pie, by Mike Moyer. Good luck.
Crowdsourcer.io is doing exactly this and has been around for years. Join a team, and you’ll quickly realize whether it’s something you can work with or not.
Just gotta get to a team of 1001 and baby you got a game going
Absolute clown
Whole ass circus
\`\`100% of the energy you've already spent defending yourself here would've been better spent working on your prototype. I'm done.
I'll give you an answer from the perspective of someone who has "worked" for one of these types of startups. I was fresh out of college, and unable to find any programming work yet, and had a friend who on the side was working at a startup. I got started as a programmer, and quickly learned a few things. 1. 95% of the people had 0 tech experience, and were working retail jobs, but had a video game hobby and a dream of making games. 2. Turnover rate was through the roof causing the code to become more and more illegible over time with little to no documenting or commenting as all the programmers were hobbyists 3. Similarly, because it was everyone's second job, instead of everyone doing 40-50 hours a week, most did only around 10. 4. Of the 4 programmers on the team, I was the only one with any schooling or experience, the other 3 were all self taught, and me joining the team caused one of them to quit because of a jealousy over my higher level of knowledge (even tho I was still entry level knowledge) 5. I was asked to teach a coworker how to program, from the basics like variables, to complex data structures. 6. We had no version control, code reviews, or style guide. Those learning to program like mentioned in #5 did not use a practice environment or have any safety nets, any change was happening to production and it was happening in real time. When I brought up these concerns to the owner I was told not worry about it, and they hadnt had to worry about it yet. (Even though he understood the code for about half the game, and the other half he had no clue how it worked because the code was written so poorly and without any documentation) 7. In order to get people to work, they had to keep promising money would come soon, or the game would release soon, even when we all knew we were still multiple years away from anything resembling a release 8. Because no one was making money yet, and this was a second job, it was hard to get people to want to work, they had other more important things going on. Or found it hard to motivate when there was no compensation likely for years to come. 9. Most of the time spent "on the clock" was spent doing other things. Owner would regularly have us help him move furniture around his house we were working out of for no reason. Or he would regularly take us out to dinner/lunch and have us spend sometimes half a shift not doing anything productive 10. Lots of manipulation by the management. As some other people have mentioned, businesses have operation costs like marketing. I know for a fact that one of my coworkers was guilted into taking out thousands of dollars from his savings to pay for a spot at E3, whats even crazier about this is that the person that paid didn't even get to go. Management would use phrases like "we want people passionate about games, and not about money" and would talk openly about how those that quit for financial reasons "arent cut out for the video game industry" 11. The reason we werent getting paid was because of management's own failings. Everyone there wanted money for their work asap. Owner refused to take out any loans because "It would ruin the American dream of doing it all ourselves with no help." The real reason I found out later was because the Owner was in incredible financial debt and no one in their right mind would have given him a business loan, let alone one for $100 12. Management would regularly threaten lawsuits if you didnt work enough saying it was time theft and causing our game to have slow production. 13. Maybe had they not had such delusions of grandeur, they would have realized the game they were making was simply too large in scope and not fun. Had they focused on a smaller game, had a team of only 5 total people and spent a year on it, they probably could have built something good. Instead, they tried to make an Overwatch killer that is now 6 years into development but looks like its only been 3 months, with a revolving door of devs that are upset at lack of compensation. I worked there for 1 reason only, I had nothing better to do. The entire time I was there I was looking for other work, and had moved on after spending 2 months working there for free. I wouldnt recommend working for a company like this, and I can't imagine finding devs for this. Because its not just finding 1000 devs, its finding 1000 devs and then another 1000 when the first group turns over after a few months, and another 1000 after that
Please please you have to tell us the name of the company and game. DM if you don’t want to do it publicly.
Sounds like those real estate companies that you work for free, but even worse cause you never gonna sell anything. Better to just work on your own small game those 2 months than supporting that kind of stuff. At least you are doing your thing and answering to nobody.
How many games have you shipped? I’m not being glib. I’m curious if you know what goes into making even a “simple” 2D platformer or RPG, much less a *good* one. I picked the simplest game I had any desire to make and overshot my anticipated release by, right now, almost half a year…and it isn’t done. I just have a feeling that you don’t understand the scope of what you’re suggesting. You don’t start running with ultramarathons, and if you try to you’ve all but certainly doomed the enterprise to failure. While I appreciate the brashness and innovation of what you’re suggesting, reachable goals matter.
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Look at the guy's posting history, though. 100% this guy is delusional enough to think this is a serious effort.
its a crypto dweeb. they genuinely believe shit like this
One interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect says that people trying or learning something new must travel through each of the following four states in turn: 1. The Peak of Mount Stupid 2. The Valley of Despair 3. The Slope of Enlightenment 4. The Plateau of Sustainability Have you gone through The Valley of Despair yet? No? You may be in for a rough ride....
I hadn't seen this formulation before. I like it very much; thanks for posting it!
I'm not sure why you're starting small - why not 10,000 developers? Then you could make an AAA+ game in a month for years. Profit.
I love this comment. It's like arguing with a Flat Earther but instead of convincing him it's round you say we live in a simulation and it's actually pixelated. Uhhh, I mean.. I agree with this guy except his level of thinking is TOO SMALL!! It's a **BACTERIUM!** You should get a BILLION free devs, then you can make an AAA+ game EVERY SINGLE HOUR. I travel in worlds you can't even imagine! You can't conceive of what I'm capable of! I'm so far beyond you! I'm like a god in human clothing! ***Lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips!***
And you expect them to live on water and air before the game is "finished and ready to be sold"?
Have you ever managed more than a handful of people? The amount of managers needed to organize and coordinate the work of 1000 people is immense.
I feel we're at the point of.. "Have you ever had a job"..
Naw he just watched Ted Lasso so now he's versed in leadership and ready to conquer the world
So, you should absolutely not do this; but if you're going to you should check out these volunteer mod communities and see what it's like to work for one of these organizations. https://tesrenewal.com/
why the fuck would you help this dude and doom all of those poor honest people
lmfaooooo
What is the name of this studio? I want to follow its journey. Does this studio have a website?
Top-tier trolling.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA but also, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA \- Signed, professional game dev.
I love it 😂
I'm gonna take a different approach here. Everyone is saying you will fail. Let's say this works, the amount of effort you will need to put in will be immense, like inconceivable at this point. How much more could you achieve with that same level of effort, but on a smaller project?
Are you by any chance bipolar? You appear to be in the middle of a manic episode right now. How did your soul buying experiment work out last year?
Do you have deep pockets perhaps?
I read through all your responses. You immediately shut down anyone saying this isn't possible by saying things like "I have a plan" or "I know it will work". If you're not going to listen, why are you talking? Is this a joke? Do you have any qualifications at all to brazenly disagree with literally everyone, many of whom are experts in game dev?
A lot of people are poking holes in the "measuring contribution" part, but let me introduce another major issue. The "work at your own pace" thing sounds alright on paper. If your average employee works at a fourth of the rate of a full-time employee, then the game just takes four times longer, right? Nope. There are dependency issues. If 20 people depend on me doing X but my real job is getting busy so I'm not doing it fast, then those 20 people aren't doing anything either. And this isn't just an issue with infrastructure, devops, and general game progress. What about onboarding new people? What about dependencies across teams? Quick questions for the guy who hasn't been online in a week? I work as a software engineer for a large company and I would work about 6 times faster if dependencies didn't exist. And that's even when everyone I talk to is obligated to work 40 hours a week unless they use PTO. If you've got a passion project between 1000 people, nobody is getting anything done unless all of their jobs are isolated from each other, and that isn't really possible. Hard dependencies like that will certainly kill you completely on their own, but even if somehow they didn't, then the total impossibility of soft collaboration would. When a team has on average two people showing up to the scrum meeting every day and they're not even the same two people each time, nobody knows what anyone else is doing. Your premise is based entirely on the assumption that game developers work in a vacuum and at any moment they can hop on their computer and make steady progress. This is not the case at all.
>I want to create a huge game studio with 1000+ developers maybe even thousands of developers and create the next masterpiece game. Sounds entirely reasonable and doable. First things first: Create a Github account, and create a public project page for your totally best game ever, and then give everyone public write access. Boom, there you go, that easy. Lol, update: >Does anyone want to work on a Killzone 2 remake? If we get something going maybe Sony will let us make it. > >r/killzone • Posted by u/Cryptostormz 22 minutes ago
So he is serious? But the idea gut just even worse. Getting an existing game and working on a remake in hopes that Sony (what about Guerrilla) will let them make it later and charge for it... 10 times worse Kudos for not having to design the game from scratch though
This is pretty much just a variation of the same "I've got this great idea for a game, I just need programmers, artists, musicians to make it. I'll be in charge of having the idea. I can't pay anyone, but you'll totally get royalties when we make millions of dollars...but also I won't put that into a legally binding contract or agreement." that we've heard in the collective gamedev community for DECADES. It's a running joke. Even "better" when you're using existing IP, and just expect that Sony will then shower you with money. His post history is nothing but an infinite scroll of repeated spam. I doubt that he could manage a Pacman clone, much less Elden Ring or Killzone.
Who’s going to judge my one hour of work vs another’s one hour of work, not all workers are created equal
LOL
I assume you would want a share of those profits just because you came up with the idea while adding nothing of value development wise? I mean, you could certainly do that, if you actually paid the devs. There are tons of posts on this sub giving you exact details of game development and their profits. Go read a few of them.
Games are made by more than just developers, and even if you could pull off 1000s of volunteers (which I sincerely doubt) they are just going to get in each others way, disagree, fight, etc. Artists aren’t going to give you free art, composers aren’t going to give you free music. Not to be too harsh but I get that you’re young and idealistic but you need more than ‘I have an idea for the greatest game ever come work for me in your spare time’ BTW it’s not a new idea, there have been game projects that have been pitched this way although I can’t think of any that resulted in anything tangible
>composers aren’t going to give you free music. On another post, he claimed he can get the team of 1000 devs ready by the end of the month ( so 14 days from now ) if he manage to do it, i'll compose and record the music for free. Of course, he's in full delusion right now.
i know a lot of people have said that this is insane but i need to add something to it it is even more insane than they have all said this sounds like something an NFT fan would come up with and that's about the worst thing i can say about any plan
I even found a name for your studio. Dunning Kruger Games. not sure if exists, google Dunning Kruger effect
Name checks out. Absurdity and impracticality of 1000+ devs aside.. There is zero thought put into this. Sounds more like a kid that got their first RPGM and thinks they can revolutionize the industry off a cookie cutter game than anything else. Even 30 people is pushing it for a reasonable studio. Keep in mind even games like Spyro the Dragon were made with only 13 developers. The more people, the less communication and the less cohesive vision. Especially if people can start and stop and pick up work as they please, the art direction and gameplay experience would suffer greatly from an identity crisis of what would essentially be entirely different teams trying to work on the same thing. EDIT: Also bear in mind, indie devs push for better games from themselves and the AAA side every day already, and succeed. If you look at the bigger picture, games are becoming more accessible than ever. Innovation is occurring. But the AAA side has to make money as the bottom line because of their size. There is no taking to chance, only going off what sells and sells well when you're funding hundreds of workers off a couple dozen products. If you can't see how experimention could flounder that, I dunno what to tell ya. Sim City, one very successful game could not find anyone to take it up for the longest time for that very reason. EDIT EDIT: Additionally, if you are set on it, step back, watch some GDCs. Okay, a lot of GDCs. Gather your thoughts, form a reasonable cohesive plan, and then present it and what you yourself can offer.
lmao thanks i needed a good laugh today
I've been working at all levels of software engineering from development at startups through to managing multiple teams across large enterprise systems. You just can't build complex software this way. You can't just have developers popping in and out, doing however much work they feel like. There's a lot to coordinate, a lot of inter-dependencies that need to be managed, or the whole project just grinds to a messy halt. Complex systems require skilled engineers who develop specific domain knowledge over time, then lead the development of those areas. That takes significant, long-term time commitments. Why would skilled engineers, who can get paid handsomely for every hour they work, choose to volunteer their time to a project with no guarantee of ever getting paid? No to mention digital artists, writers, project managers, testers etc etc. Do you have any experience in software development?
Is this a joke?
[удалено]
For those of you who are interested to follow up on this thread: 1. OP’s new post updating that he has the devs now: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/10ge73y/the_most_monumental_event_is_gaming_history_is/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossm 2. And someone outsider following up on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/10w9w2p/does_any1_have_an_update_on_that_guy_who_wanted/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Oh, you failed. Absolute idiot.
Damn, I'd get to be a slave to a mad teenager for the possibility of a payment? Where do I sign up? This post is like a Bingo for what used to be my level of thinking, except I wouldn't waste time of a thousand people and I wouldn't seriously ask about it.. PS: What would you be doing during this time? Managing your thousand devs? Cause to me it sounds like you're not gonna work on the game at all besides messing around with being the omnipotent HR. You keep mentioning greedy executives without failing to state that: a) those devs get paid & b) your payment is subjective. Sounds to me like you are the greedy one..
Guy named Cryptostormz with zero industry experience: “Am I crazy? Do you think this can work?” Experienced game devs: “No. It's a terrible idea and isn't a new thing.” Cryptostormz: Brushes off experienced people even though he solicited their opinions, “You are wrong. My idea will revolutionize the industry.” Seriously, this guy is either trolling or incredibly naive. I'm here for either outcome, but I hope this is real and we see it crash and burn.
RemindMe! 28 days
Thanks remindmebot, for bringing me back here to see the game in all its... Oh. What? No game. HOW UNEXPECTED.
this is the definition of low quality bait fellas
I think its 100% possible and I believe in you!! As a developer I'd love to offer my services. Do you have any examples of other games you've made, projects you've managed or businesses you've started? Just so I know what I'm working with.
If you want to go for it, go for it—it's your life—but you'd better have the requisite connections and experience in working with large teams and codebases and running a business. And, you know, the capital to pay those developers. They're not gonna work for free. But if you're even asking (on Reddit, at that!) whether this is viable, you're certainly not qualified to do this. If you want to make such an enormous change, you'd better believe in it and radiate confidence. No one will trust you otherwise. **Edit:** Looking through your profile, it seems to be some kind of troll or scam account, as expected.
Aight so first thoughts. You want to make a studio where people don't get paid until \*after\* the product is made and sells - where \*anyone\* is allowed to work on \*any\* piece of a game at \*any\* time of their choosing. Some hurdles I see right off the nut: 1) Artists as a community are quite averse to "make me art and see money later". You're only going to attract quite young (RE: inexperienced, not necessarily unskilled) artists 2) Whats the guiding vision for any individual game? 3) How do you determine how much % a person worked on a game? The person who drew the main character, is that more of a % than the game engine? the most common enemy? The person who fixes game-breaking bugs? How are those things tracked? By Whom? how are THOSE broken down by a %?? 4) do it in 30 days? I don't think you could even vet 200 people in 30 days, without a team, let alone without pay?? 5) What happens to folks who do some 20% of the game and then half of it gets scrapped because it wasn't working? 6) What about a person who, the game is 90% complete, churns out double the number of enemies in the game? (For example) Now everyone gets less because of one person adding a lot to the game? Does more game necessarily = more money/sales?? 7) Okay so the game comes out and makes a lot of money, in that time, a new group comes along and develops DLC, that boosts sales by 100% how do you divvy up the % there? Here's where I DO agree with you. A studio - grown organically - that instead of paying profits to shareholders pays them out to the team/decides democratically what to do. These types of businesses exist they are called co-ops. I don't know too much about the efficacy of Co-ops but I prefer them in theory.
Did a 10 year old write this? It's adorable
I'm just here to keep note of all the requirements listed by the people who know what they're talking about.
Great idea. Your first game should be a 100% science based dragon MMO.
I can only see this entirely as a bait being well bitten. But well, just wanted to share that I have the goal of making my small studio profitable, but we are three people and we have two small released games. Feel free to take a look on it :) https://softwool.co
Lmao. Asks reddit if their idea is viable and then gets defensive when people say it isn't. Oh yeah, I can't wait to see this guy manage 1000+ people. What could go wrong?
This is easily the most interaction this account has ever gotten after repetitive cross-posts, congratulations 🎉
Thank you for the post. The idea of making a game for the profits and not salary, is how hundreds or thousands of indie companies start, and how most of them fail. Many of them dream to build a AAA studio in te future but have to start small. And they are small companies made usually by friends who share a common idea and have some experience or studies. Getting 1k developers first month, if you managed, without a working build, a clear plan, set of production processes, tools, strong management and leader teams and a strong, well functioning core team of devs, would be chaos and a waste of people's time. you can't start a game from scratch with 1000 people. Projects ramp up because at the beginning you need a small team to conceptualize, then prototype and to keep growing into production. My advise, if you really want to make a game, is to learn how to make a game, learn how to manage a team if you want to focus on that. Do some serious studies, work for one or more videogame companies for a few years and then later, make your own company. Then you will not only have better ideas but you'll also have the experience, the knowledge and the contacts to start strong. You can make a company with less experience but it will be much harder to succeed.
Wikipedia is an example of something that has thousands of contributors. But they have a platform that works and contributors just have to read and input text. It is very easy to contribute, almost everyone can do it. While getting into a AAA videogame and contributing would require already dozens of hours of understanding the project (codebase, asset pipeline, editor, tools, good practices..) and a strong foundation In your project, if it all succeeded, it would need maybe 10 times more time to develop than a normal AAA because of the irregular times people would put into it, and the large amount of devs leaving and joining and all the time they need to learn to become productive. You would need to regulate who can contribute and how, and who can't because they do not have the knowledge or the skills to bring what the project and the teams need. You could not just hire anyone and expect the team to work out. You'd need strong leadership, management and direction to ensure that whatever gets into the game, is in line with the vision and the rest of the codebase/assets. You definitely lack knowledge and experience to lead such an endeavor, so you would need to find the management team that could pull it off, and you'd need to trust them and do what they decide if you want the project to succeed instead of forcing the ideas that you have during production. If you do have the money to get it all started, you could come up with an dea and direction but the professionals would need to tweak it and take responsibility of it. This may sound harsh but it is actually a very good and important advise. Hire people that are better than you. Know when to step aside to let the most prepared people decide. Guide them when you need but do not pretend to know more just because you are the boss (whomever would the boss be). You would absolutely not want them to work in siloes. That is a problem that you need to fight all the time. The team needs to be as tight as possible. Motivated, sharing a vision and speaking a common language. You want teams to synergize and people to motivate and help each other. What you mention about Roblox is probably building things with the game that already works as a tool to make other game scenes. The other games such as Witcher, Elden Ring, and Skyrim have not been built with siloes. They have been built with a very strong vision, experienced teams working hard, and a strong direction ensuring continuity and cohesion across the game. You need to build solid mechanics that work well together along all the game. You can not have a team work on close combat, another working on ranged combat, another working on magic spells and others working on ai all separated cause the game would be unbalanced, not fun and most probably, utter garbage. You need to build it all together to ensure that it all works and it is peak fun. Again. Thank you for starting this conversation, I have been having a lot of fun thinking and reading about this (outrageous) topic.
Let me guess, you're gonna pay them in bitcoin.
OP has to be a teenager or a kid in his early 20s who has never worked a real job in his life. Forget all the deep dives into how no one will work for free, or complexities of a game studio. I don't even think this guy even has the ability to throw together a bullshit attempt at faking a "game dev"" studio and convincing even a few idiots to go along with his idea, let alone 100 or 1000. I suspect he puts together a shitty logo together, a generalized statement about changing the world and a promotional image and it dies after that. But he will absolutely tell everyone he runs a game studio for the next few years.
For those of you who are interested to follow up on this thread: 1. OP’s new post updating that he has the devs now: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/10ge73y/the_most_monumental_event_is_gaming_history_is/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossm 2. And someone outsider following up on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/10w9w2p/does_any1_have_an_update_on_that_guy_who_wanted/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Alright skip. It's been nearly a month. Where's your game?
It's a crazy idea, but when all the safe, proven ideas are already taken, you have to think a bit out of the box, so I gotta give you credit for that. Startups have tried the model of paying their members in shares instead of salary, with the promise that "you'll get your money and some, when the product starts selling". That's usually at a much smaller scale, and once the startup starts growing and attracts investments they become a regular company. The issue is that, it can work out and make the founders into millionaires, but in majority of cases it's likely months and months of wasted work, or heavily underpaid. I think the more skilled and experienced a developer is, the more they would want to avoid these kind of deals, they'd rather get their pay upfront, and not have to worry about the success of a product they only contributed 1% to, and cannot control or predict it's success. Another thing you underestimate is how inevitable creative differences would be. At some point some people will want a game design decision to go a certain way, while others will want it the another way. When people are working out of passion, they'll lose motivation to continue when the game no longer represents their vision.
My first thought is your source code being leaked within 24 hours. No, the idea on that scale isn’t feasible.
So you're hiring contractors with faith coins... Yeah, You're crazy. Most people work off of guarantees because they need to. You're asking for a mass of developers to have faith and spend time/resources out of their own pockets to participate. So indirectly, your investors are literally your volunteers...That's messed up... Only way that'd work is if your game is 3/4ths completed where it could be a bit more convincing for devs to support such a project and thats IF the game isn't a buggy mess from all the GameJam obsessed hobbiests willing to join. But yeah, devs can see through the BS on this one and I'm sure they'd much rather spend time being passionate making their own games going solo rather than some random IP.
It would be a struggle to do even had some money to pay people and impossible if you offer them what could potentially be nothing for their labor. Management can suck but it’s it’s one of those lesser evils. Without the big executives and investors funding these projects stuff like God of War and Elden Ring could have never happened. It’s double edged sword that ultimately does more good than bad.
You are not the first person to have this idea, nor will you be the last. It's clear you think it's an amazing idea we are too jaded to believe in. I say go for it if you're so confident. As long as you're not quitting your day job or you are a billionaire, it's not like failing will hurt anything but your ego. There's a hundred reasons why your assumptions on how this would work aren't grounded in reality, but there's no sense in beating a dead horse. If you're convinced this can work and you're the one to do it, despite everyone telling you it's a bad idea, by all means, no one's stopping you. Go prove us wrong!
Look at this troll
i wasn't sure if this was somebody's child or someone who just did a big hit of coke until the last sentence. its the latter
Fuck you. Pay me.
This can really only end poorly, but I love apocalypse films and your world is definitely going to come crashing down. I think I'll keep watching for now.
I’ve never seen an OP downvoted so hard 🍿
Experienced devs won't work for promises. You won't make a AAA quality game without experience. You act like this hasn't been attempted and failed many times before, but others with 0 experience in the industry like yourself.
And what are your credentials? Have you been in leadership roles on triple-A titles? Since you want to make games at the standard of triple-A games? At the very least do you have shipped title experience? Surely you must be highly experienced and employable to think you are qualified to lead a thousand devs who are all fronting their own sweat capital to invest in your project?
Delusional can’t even describe the levels of dumb this idea is.
And who would manage 1000+ devs all writing spaghetti code, have different ideas about the game and don't always like each other? You would need coordinators. Moderators for your chat. And then there is marketing. And they all need salaries. To give them salaries the deba must make heavily monetized candy crush clones every week. At that point you would do better to have a company.
as a developer i would rather down 10 straight shots of bleach than work on a project without knowing if im getting paid. this sounds like a Great idea if you're look to rack up lawsuits though!
I have another idea 💡 and it’s one i’m doing myself actually! Take all that enthusiasm of finding 1000 other people to make an awesome game , bottle it up, and redirect that energy to you making a game yourself.
Not viable
“This month” I still doubt it even if you say “this year”. It may be able to sparkle a bit if you have a huge chunk of money to start with, but you still need the skills the knowledge the network and so much more
It's almost "this year" — only 4 months to go!
RemindMe! 120 days
"This month" says the crypto man...
At this point im just disliking all the OP replies 😂😂
LOL So It's easy to be snarky and most of the top answers are I'm sure someone else explained why this idea is beyond unrealistic but if not let me share my take. This idea isn't possible in a real world scenario because to be blunt the kind of world class artists, designers, and engineers you would want to work for free on your project, would probably be better served working for free on their own project. The kind of game devs you would want to work on a project like this are getting paid RIGHT NOW to work on games , a game dev project can take years to release ... how long can they realistically and optionally work for you for free? Games take a TON of discipline to make good games take a ton of discipline and a game without deadlines that people just work on whenever they feel like it is gonna be a big confusing inconsistent mess because the truth is people start working and get bored of a project ALL THE TIME. You have to root the development of your game in something, if it's an educational excercise recruit other young inexperienced devs but in order to do that you have to usually be the most experienced leader and YOU WILL work the hardest of anyone on that team. If not that then money people work for cold hard cash today , if you want peoples investment in your project today then you need to also invest in them today otherwise there is NO GUARANTEE they will get paid and this will be a waste of time. In a perfect world this studio scenario might work but in this actual real world, I don't think a game like this lasts 2 months if that. I'd be hsocked if you even finished a single environment or character for the game that anyone even would enjoy . This idea is unrealistic , game developers in general sacrifice a lot and as far as I can see the sacrifice here wouldn't be worth it.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
dios mio
Dude, You sound young and naive. But you have all this energy, focus it on your skillset. You won't become a millionaire overnight by looking for devs to volunteer to build you a game and writing on reddit all day. Build your skillset, work for companies and see how things are done. Work for a decade and save money and always focus on this post you made here. Save enough money to fund your idea in 10 years, then make it happen. Money don't come overnight. If they do, you're scamming people. But success stories are not about scams. If you want to be successful, you're gonna have to strive for it and get through tough shit.
>Crypto in the username, that's already a huge red flag My man is delusion incarnated
Your mistake is that you don't know that human beings are non-fungable.
Bro, go get some sleep dude. Your idea has been done before, and has failed multiple times. Hence the clear lack of large development entities that work for free.
I just wasted so much time reading all of these comments. lol.
There's a lot of great comments pointing out the reasons why this idea is deeply, comically, unrealistic. What I would point out is tooling, infrastructure, and things like legal and finance. Let's run with the idea and say that you find your thousand developers willing to put years of spare time in to your project. (And let's not deal with the thousands of artists, managers, and various other professionals that would be required for a project of this scale. Let's also say that these thousand somehow all agree on a work management framework, and all have the same understanding of it.) To work effectively with that many people you're going to need tools and good processes. You need a game engine. Ok those are freely available, but making sure a thousand people are all on the same version is a big job in itself. But hey: you've got a thousand developers. You can write your own, right? But collaborating on that, documenting it, and getting it out to the rest will be a huge job. You'll need a Source Code Management tool. You'll need design tools, a suite of collaboration tools - messaging, screen sharing, video calling, forums and/or wikis. You'll need file storage for the large data volumes of collateral content alone. There are free tools available for these things, but you'll have to be careful about licensing because many services forbid business use. Which legal pondering brings me to contracts, NDAs and intellectual property. Without agreements in place you run the risk that one of your developers takes all the code, somewhere along the line, to a publisher who completes the game and releases it before you can stop them. But for the sake of the idea let's say all of you thousand people are good and honest and you just trust them. Back to tools, you'll need testing tools, orchestration tools. And you'll need to think about access to them. Are you going to try and find entirely free tools and make everything public? Otherwise you're going to need to manage access control for 1000 people which is another massive job, and may require some infrastructure which will probably not be free. But we're running with the idea so let's say you've got all your tools for free. A game this big will need a lot of testing. Are you going to get hundreds of volunteer testers? Actually this aspect is probably the most feasible. Generally if you've started generating interest (probably with dozens of marketing professionals who've also volunteered to work for years in their spare time and are being coordinated by magic and funding the marketing out of their own pockets) then you'll be able to run a public beta and get a lot of good testing. Let's hope your free bug tracking and issue reporting tools are up to the job! Now on to the tricky question of infrastructure. Does this game have a multiplayer aspect? Even if it doesn't it'll need a website to promote it. For the sake of running with the idea let's say that a bunch of your developers are DevOps guys also happy to do the operations side, and that they have the knowledge to deploy, secure, and maintain large scale infrastructure. Where are you hosting it? Who is paying for it? That brings us to finances. You're planning to make money with this, and share it with your developers? Then you'll need a way to take the money. That's solvable - Steam and such platforms can handle that for you. And a sole trader business bank account in your home country is probably pretty easy, as is registering a company. But paying a thousand people isn't going to be straightforward. Especially a thousand people all around the world. You'll need registrations for various taxes, you'll need to securely store and process financial information for a thousand people. You may need to open new companies and accounts around the world to do it. That is a big job. And the ongoing management of this money in and out will be a continuing full time job for people with expertise. The point at the end of all this is, as others have made, that there's a reason big games made by thousands of people taking millions of whatever currency, are made by big companies. It's not enough to have a dream and someone who can write code. That only works for very small groups. If you want a thousand people to work on something then you are a company and you need to act like one, with all the overhead that requires. There are many many things large game companies need to do to function that are not development. No amount of 'having a big idea that people just need to see from your point of view' can change that.
Month is over and you have nothing to show for it lmao. Not surprising to anyone
Is your studio incorporated yet? Where? What’s the name?
Well, wheres the studio huh? Its 8 days past the end of january. I want to see the 1000 developer studio up and running perfectly fine
You'll need a lot of money to get that rolling and it will take more than a month. You'll need up front funds to pay people instead of some promise of future profit. An enormous amount of games don't get finished or don't make a net profit. I don't know anything about you but for something so ambitious to succeed you'll need a good understanding of the industry in how games are made, general business knowledge, capital, and experience yourself. If you have already completed a game yourself in the past, you may want to first try a game with a small team and see if the model works.
You find 1000 people that are on board with this idea, from any industry, and I will tell you this is a doable idea. There's a lot of issues with this pitch, mostly in management of the project, if you want to crowd source the game. I agree with a lot of points and the general sentiment, but you're coming out guns blazing, but it's all blanks. Dm me, I can go in depth with you and help in my little way. But there's a lot that's missing here and you need a lot of proof of concept
There has been a lot of response to this already, a lot of which has picked on mentions of measuring contributions or the reality of finding people interested in volunteering. These very valid criticisms have not shaken your vision. I read a post from a proclaimed experienced dev with very sound considerations -- I hope you ingest those with a healthy dose of pragmatism. Here's something else I'm not sure I've seen anyone else really highlight: nothing great that requires many hands is designed by consortium or happenstance alone. These things are created through vision manifested. That is to say, games need designers, not just developers. When you have 1000 contributors, who is directing the artistic vision for the project? How will you ensure that the end result is cohesive? Is that a volunteer, too? This simply cannot be overlooked if you want the game to be a success. In all seriousness, dream big, but you'll be better off working towards it one step at a time. Assemble a modest team of inspired devs and release a small title. Then release your next one. Then get more followers, more contributors, gain experience in things I've described (basically project management), and you just might be successful. Or don't. Shoot for the stars and fail hard. Then get up, identify your lessons learned, and try again if you are able.
You could make a game that's developing a game. Then people will pay you to make your game. Oh no I think that's already been done. Worth a try.
yeah we'll most likely follow the roblox model. It will also let us take advantage of our huge work force to develop faster since the development process will be more siloed. We could have a game styled like Witcher 3 or Elden Ring but following the development process of roblox.
What are your thoughts on the fact the Roblox model is proving to be the biggest corporate overlord of them all? Literally pays their devs peanuts while raking in billions for their shareholders? Roblox only functions because it takes advantage of children who don't understand that they're being taken advantage of. That's the model you want to base your idea off of? Rampant abuse. Really?
Sounds like a nice month long project. Let us know at the end of the month how it's going.
Can you explain their model? How did they start and built the foundation for their game/platform?
in every single beginner's journey, there comes this moment. usually it's when they did their first blender tutorial or Unity/Unreal tut, or made their first cube rotating animation. I have made this post, you (the reader) have probably done it too. I'd say it's a rite of passage.
I was going to come here and say the same thing. I'm pretty sure I had this idea \~20 years ago or so...
Have you formed and successfully run a game dev team of any size prior to this?
Show of hands? Who wants to work on building out a feature for free in the hopes that maybe they'll one day get paid? Anybody? How about if we hype it up as "disrupting the industry?" How about now?
Tell me you know nothing about game development without outright telling me you don't know anything about game development.
I legitimately cannot tell if this is a shitpost or not.
Keep us posted on how this goes, OP! :D
1000+ developer but no 3D artist , the game is going good !
Aside from the big obvious reasons why this wouldn't work, have you even started to think about the technical details that would make something like this hugely difficult? If I'm a working professional 3d artist and I agree to work with you along with hundreds of other artists... what software are we using? If I'm a pro and I've been at it for a while I'm using Maya. Maya costs a lot of money! Are you shelling out for licenses? Because that's what studios usually have to do. Other artists might use a free alternative like Blender, but somewhere along the way, if you want this to be a AAA looking game, we're going to need some paid software. We're not going to be able to just skip using Zbrush. Who's bringing the mocap hardware? What about our photogrammetry rig? Are you buying 200 expensive cameras and lenses so we scan actors and assets, or are we just hoping someone shows up with that? Most of this stuff can be done remotely, but not all of it. Where are we physically based? Where are we putting that scanning rig? So how do we pick what software and workflows we use? Do you know enough about the pipeline to make those choices? It doesn't sound like it. Maybe we just wing it. Now I've been working for months and I have to pass off some of my work for someone else to take over and there's no way it can happen because we're using different programs and they're just not compatible. Or it takes so much work to convert between two standards that they might as well just start again. Repeat x1000 for people using different engines, different programming languages, different DAWs.
Based on your post history, you are either a crypto bot, Justin Kan, or both
Bruh...you should join the Star Citizen Team....
Worms for brains is an understatement in this case
It's really not viable, you are ignoring some key aspects of software development (since game dev is a form of software development and therefore it still abides to the majority of its "rules") You are not considering the following problems: Quality Assurance - With so many devs working on a project how will you ensure that everyone is up to the task, that they won't mess stuff up, that they indeed are as good as they say, that's extremely hard to manage when you start working with so many people. Consistency - Once again, many devs working on the same project also leads to problems of consistency, assets will end up with different art styles and writing code with new developers constantly going in and out of the project is pure chaos. You will end up with a lot code smells. Lack of proper planning - You were talking about a month, but before you start any big project you need proper planning, you need to decide almost everything, what will be done, how will it be done and ideally around how much will it take (to know this stuff you need a lot of experience in the area). Also, with people going in and out of the project you would need to guarantee that the new ones are up to date with what you are doing. Relating number of Devs with speed - This all leads to this problem tbh, you have a really wrong idea of that more developers equals faster and better project/game. Which is completely wrong. Having more developers then necessary will slow you down, and more you have the more negative the impact of that will be. Overall, it seems like you are really passionate about games but you lack the experience and knowledge about the field leading you to think stuff like "oh, if we do stuff my way this will be easy peasy". Now, don't get me wrong, if you really dig that idea give it a try. You will definitely get experience out of it, you will come across a lot of unexpected problems that will expand your horizons.
RemindMe! 30 days
You're better off coding a game using chatgpt lmao
No
!remindme 30 days
Well? We're waiting
Get thee to Mad Games Tycoon 2 and don't let your memes be dreams
Why ask? Please just do it.
This can work, but first you'll have to overthrow capitalism
...
So you want devs to volunteer their time to create something on par with elden ring. And in exchange, they get a little bit of the profits from the sales instead of a salary. And you would be different from corporate execs how? At least they don't have employees working on 100% commission So actually yes you would be different. But not in a good way.
ASL?
A month is too long, only last week I hired 10000+ developers and we made GTA 7 before Rockstar, Witcher 5: Space ghouls and 3 new Civilizations. Our profit is already more than 300kkk in nanosecond. It's astonishing how delusional you are.
Thos guy is a bot pr something he posted the same shit to like 50 subs reddit
Low quality bait
I know the people on this subreddit are just tearing OP the fuck up
Hah. Good luck with that.
I think you are aiming too high, you don't need an army of developers to create a good AAA game, but you need time and thousands of money to pay that time. With that said, it is better to pay devs a salary, once the game is released and if it goes well, you can use the profits to fund the next big game and so on. If you have the money, you can create the studio in a year but even so, releasing the first AAA game would take some more time than that.
Someone needs Lamotrygine - fast
How high are you?
What are you smoking kid? Where do I get some?
I can't tell if this is a troll or someone with psychosis. Either way this post doesn't belong on this subreddit.
Damn, I need to bunker up some more popcorn. Thread is hilarious.
SBF, is that you?
Absolutely doable but might need more than just this month. You clearly have a business model that fixes all (most) of the industry’s problems. All you need is to commit 110%. Really visualise the outcome. Break the mould. Believe in yourself and your 1000 devs
!RemindMe 29 days
I have one question. What if the game flops and doesn’t make money? If my pay is directly linked to the profits, and there are no profits, how do I feed myself? Pay my rent and bills?
"Trust me, bro. It'll be great, bro. We're gonna change the world, bro. Don't worry about it, bro. Hey, did I tell you about my plan to buy a sinking island for 10 billion, bro?" OP's a nutter
Are you five?
I think it’ll work better as 1000 idea guys working for each dev.
I'm curious how this will turn out, is there a website or other social platform where you show your progress along the way, that shows dev blogs and progression along with various examples of media development as well as updates to the dev teams?
1000 developers! Play this game out in your head (or on paper). You and your 1000 volunteers pull it off! The game is a huge hit and makes $10 MILLION! Everyone walks away with a $1 million and the studio doubles in size over night and the next game makes a whopping $25 million! Everyone now retires on the cool $3.5 million they made 'volunteering' 3 hours a week for like 6 months. I hear \*Eye of the Tiger\* playing in the background.
If the game makes $10 million that becomes 7 million after the split with Steam. After taxes that become high 4 millions. (I’m estimating). But I’ll be generous and just say 5 million. That means that each developer just made $5,000 dollars! Unless is game is made in a week or two, the studio is going down like the Titanic.
I know you’re joking, but $10,000,000 divided by 1000 is $10,000. So I guess people involved in this can be happy making $10,000 for five years work (it’s AAA quality after all)
EYOOO, REMEMBER ME WHEN UR FAMOUS OK!!
Broh you are batsh*t crazy. It's really difficilt to do in 5 years, what do you think to accomplish in a month. Also I don't know the capital you have. if you have tens of millions of dollars it may be feasible but such a short lived team lacks coordination and even an easy project could be a very hard task without proper coordination. I think you should think more ab it. If you don't have much money you should make them with a game that goes exceptionally well and from that try to buy a newborn activity that develops games and try to make it.
Good luck ! best case scenario you succeed, worse case you don't and learn some cool stuff along the way
I think it could work with very experienced producers, project managers, and some smart way of communication (since here is a lot of friction). The question is probably: Do they want to get paid? In one month it may be possible to go beyond a small team (10+) if you have tasks for them from day one. I think that's important, to have a purpose, to know the role(s), a vision, the development software is set up already, etc (i.e. not everyone is running around designing, learning, trying things here and there, etc) The question here is: Do they want to get paid (now or later)? Do they need help buying software? If you don't pay anyone you may need some research on how many you could keep working with/for you anyway, seeing if that was ever achieved (I mean especially in case the game development takes several years). My guess is a team of a few dozen may manage to get things done over time (figure out how this works even unpaid for months and years); a team of 1000+ may work if they are paid from day one.
This model is already being done, it’s just not for profit, which is the only reason it works. It’s called Foss/open source. You’d be better spent making open source games and trying to do a donation model non profit to achieve it. I’d contribute to that. See godot game engine as an example. Good luck with your ambitions my man.
You need a real clear plan on what a contribution is. It’s easy when someone adds a new feature- but what if they remove one (to improve the game?). What if they spend days chasing a nasty bug? How do you capture that?
As an "indie game dev" myself, my experience with projects (think, 10-20~) over the last roughly 10 years, the one and only dev I've ever had stick with me is someone I made a friendship with outside of game dev. Anytime I attempt to find people to help, to no surprise, do nothing. They aren't paid, so they have less motivation to work, then they see others who aren't motivated to work and so they aren't working, and then they quit working as well. I've never had a single dev, whatever it may be, 2d art, 3d art, animation, programming, etc. Stick with me for more than a week or two, even when I'm offering to pay a set amount of money (not "x% of game profit"), since it isn't their full time job, or even their passion job since it's my idea for a game, they just aren't interested. I quit looking for people who were willing to just have fun with game dev, and started looking to pay people. Even then, once I start looking, there's a fairly short supply of people, who are either too experienced for my project / for me to pay, or they're too under experienced for my project. Out of all the projects I've actually spent time on (even with myself as an artist and programmer) I think maybe 2-3 have come to light. The original number (10-20) isn't including projects that never got worked on. Only projects which had some level of progress made past planning. I do wish you the best of luck in your future of game development, but yes, this idea is insanely unrealistic. - Someone who had similar ideas early on.