Hey friendos! January flew by for me. It feels like someone pressed the fast-forward button for a bit too long. Anyway, the year is well underway now and with that comes some apprehension regarding the game industry. Am I still on the right path? Today we’ll talk about doubt and breaking the mold. Content warning: Game Industry Layoffs.

How Am I Doing?

I’m doing good! Mentally and physically. I’m healthy and content. Professionally however, I’m beset by doubt. If you’re following game industry news at all, you will have encountered many announcements about mass layoffs. I’ve lost count by now (which is not a good sign) but we’re nearing astronomical numbers of layoffs globally within the span of a year.

In fact, if you’re reading this, it’s pretty likely you were one of the people affected by this. First off, my condolences. The situation is pretty bleak right now. However, I’m not in the business of peddling cynicism alone, so we’ll talk about potential in the future as well.

What Am I Doing?

When I started this newsletter, about 4 months ago now, I was in a similar situation. I’ve been living off my severance pay ever since. I decided to take this time to slow down my life. Work less and chill more, take care of my health, that sort of thing. I also decided I did not want to go back to a 9 to 5 (or 9 to 10+ in the case of AAA studios), because it’s contrary to the “work less” part of my intentions.

Since then, my creativity is soaring. I’m happy with the ebb and flow my life has right now. I can basically do what I want for a year, and maybe two if I stretch it enough. That’s a significant chunk of time. I can make games! I can write articles! I can do YouTube! However, I started all these things with the option of going back to a studio job in the back of my mind, in case everything goes south.

That security is lost now, I think. If there are still jobs available in my field, I’ll be competing with everyone who has just been laid off. By the time my money runs out, most of those positions will be filled, and big studios will think twice about massively expanding again. So, some of my priorities are shifting.

Clysmoids is a pretty big project. In its most basic form, it will still take me about a year. Am I willing to take that risk now? In a sense, I only started this project on a whim. I’m having fun with it, yes, and I do believe in the viability of it. But before I was laid off, I was all about making experimental narrative games with tiny development cycles. What happened to that?

I started doing YouTube on a whim too. Partially because of the small additional income stream and partially because I thought it would be easy. The hubris, I know. I mean: all my scripts are finished, I have all the hardware to make videos, and have pretty solid presentation skills. I intended for it to be low effort, but in the end it dominated my schedule. I’m also enjoying it less than I anticipated.

So, those are some doubts that cloud my mind. I have no clear answers now, and definitely won’t make any rash decisions. But know that doubt is normal. When nothing is stable, it’s hard to plan out into the future. What you can do is research options that give some wiggle room. So let’s talk about that!

Why Am I Doing? (this)

It’s about time I use this platform for something helpful. If you’re like me and live off of severance pay, you might feel stressed and try to find a new job right away. My biggest suggestion is to take a week of a breather. Re-evaluate your goals. Was the last place you worked at a healthy company? Would you be able to return to such an environment again? Would you be able to sustain that for a couple of years without destroying your health? If the answer to any of those is no, or even maybe, I suggest you consider these alternatives.

First, I’ve done some legwork regarding extending your severance runway. You can use this either to take more time off or to set up your own creative endeavors. Just a quick disclaimer, I understand a lot of these are different based on your locale, and not every option might be a solution for you personally. These are things I’ve researched for myself first and foremost, I’m sorry if I doesn’t actually help you in the end. It’s important to keep in mind that the goal here is not to make a full salary, but to extend your buffer for a while.

Unemployment benefits. A lot of people think this is a dirty word for some reason. Often countries have some sort of aid specifically for job seekers. It might be a hassle and not all that much money, but our goal is extending our runway, more than receiving a full salary. Many countries also have benefits for people wanting to start their own company, be it tax cuts or starter funds.

Part-time side job. It feels counterintuitive and maybe even a bit shameful to return to untrained work to make ends meet. I’ve been in this situation, but in fact, it’s kind of nice to keep your creative work for yourself. Having a job that you don’t take back home, or don’t have to do unpaid overtime for, gives an incredible amount of space for taking care of your mental health. Hopefully, your severance has provided a little buffer. If that’s the case you don’t have to work all that many hours to extend that buffer.

Freelance. Freelancing generally pays better than salary work, but with fewer benefits. You also have to put a significant amount of work into finding and keeping clients. Nonetheless, if you’re able to pad your savings a bit by doing part-time freelance work, it might be a nice solution for you. If you combine this with unemployment benefits for starting some form of enterprise, you can duck out of the ungodly amount of taxes you have to pay for a while. For me personally, doing part-time untrained work was the better option, because I didn’t want to waste my mental load on administration and looking for clients.

Open a shop. If you have some kind of assets that belong to you, be it music, art, tools, portfolio pieces or even code frameworks, you might as well put it on the internet for some pocket change. I found that some people need even the most basic stuff and they usually want to buy it from someone they know. Who knows, maybe you can buy yourself a pizza with it every month, like it did for me. The same goes for subscription models like Patreon or Ko-fi. In fact, sometimes you can just ask for donations, just because you need to pay rent. People can be kind like that.

Start a company/worker coop. Think about it: tons of people like yourself are looking for work. Many of them are fed up with corporate bullshit. If you pool your resources with your ex-colleagues/friends, you might be able to pull off an enterprise together. Keep in mind, that starting a company doesn’t have to be a full-time job. You can work on a game together in your spare time and combine it with freelance or something. Communication is very important here of course, because everyone needs to be on the same page. If you go this route, consider researching and founding a worker coop.

Creative Funds. If you decide to start a company, there are quite a few creative funds out there, local or global, that want to put money into your project. Often it’s not enough to fund an entire studio or game project, but like I said, the goal is to pad your runway for now. If you do the dance right, you might be able to combine multiple funds, severance, savings and unemployment for a pretty extensive runway. That’s what I’m currently trying to do.

Venture Capital. This is a whole ‘nother beast. I don’t recommend it because your main goal will be to make money for a bunch of suits. There’s a lot of teasing cash out of the pockets of weird personalities and nepobabies. As of writing, it’s really hard to get any funding for game startups anyway, but that might fluctuate in the near future because of the unstable economic landscape and changing industry.

Crypto. Just kidding, now is probably not the time to gamble anything on ephemeral speculative assets.

And if, in the end you do decide to work for a company again, please join a union. Workers’ rights are being shunned left and right and a small contribution can shield you from some of it. The games industry has a bunch of unions, so there’s really no excuse to not do it. They can also help you with all the stuff I just talked about. I wasn’t part of a union, but the STJV was still nice enough to help me through all the legal work.

Conclusion

Phew, OK that was a big one. I really, really hope that some of that was helpful for you. I think a lot of us in the game industry are used to hopping from company to company without ever taking the time to reflect if it is even the best choice for us. I knew all the stuff I wrote above, but never seriously considered it until I got laid off.

I hope that this wave of layoffs is a wake-up call for the industry as a whole. I sincerely hope to see many cool new coops pop up and make games outside of the AAA framework. That’s my goal at least. If anything, please do take the time to breathe, friend!

If you want to know more details about the stuff I mentioned above, or just need someone to talk to who’s been through the same shit, don’t hesitate to shoot me a message.