I completely agree, really no path is easy or easier, I think our disagreement is maybe only about what the goal is. If my goal is "make awesome self-directed games", working in AAA isn't going to help me achieve this goal at all -- in fact quite the opposite. So gamedev-as-hobby would be easier. - ThreadSky

raiganburns.bsky.social • 11 days ago

I completely agree, really no path is easy or easier, I think our disagreement is maybe only about what the goal is.

If my goal is "make awesome self-directed games", working in AAA isn't going to help me achieve this goal at all -- in fact quite the opposite. So gamedev-as-hobby would be easier.

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impossible.bsky.social•11 days ago

I do 100% agree that doing small stuff as a hobby is going to be better for a lot of people than working in AAA. Even if you are a studio creative director you won't get awesome self-directed games because corporate and market forces. Also you're doing mostly management not creation at that scale

lazerwalker.com•11 days ago

I think that’s very situational for making games (“work in AAA to build up skills, and then be able to fund-raise for your new studio by virtue of being ex-[known studio]” is a well-trod path for successful indies, but also not the only path), but I also think games media is a very different beast

raiganburns.bsky.social•11 days ago

(also yeah, I have very little knowledge/understanding of games media beyond some friends and colleagues who have worked in that space in the past)

lazerwalker.com•11 days ago

I consciously chose to not go into games media as a career, but in high school and college I wrote for a small now-defunct outlet you’ve never heard of, and the exposure was *huge*. Getting press access to e.g. E3 was a major career lift compared to just self-publishing.

lazerwalker.com•11 days ago

(And of course the media landscape is very different now from 10-20 years ago, but I imagine it’s also *extremely* hard to make an indie name for yourself as a critic now when so many established names are running their own paid newsletters/patreons/subscriptions)

raiganburns.bsky.social•11 days ago

good point! tbh I hadn't considered that you could *gain* skills in AAA that you couldn't on your own, in fact I sort of assumed that AAA work (silo'd, narrow) wouldn't necessarily translate to the more multi-disciplinary DIY context of indie dev. I do think my mental model of indie dev is stale :/

raiganburns.bsky.social•11 days ago

(I think of ex-AAA indies as very rare (World of Goo, Spy Party), but I'm biased to only consider the earlier generation; I recognize that there are a now huge number of "indie" teams from AAA now.. it's just that they're not generally making games that strike me as particularly indie/DIY in spirit)

impossible.bsky.social•11 days ago

A ton of indie devs have AAA experience.

Molasses Flood, NuChallenger, Terrible Posture Games, Number None, Campo Santo, Temple Gate games all come to mind as companies founded by people that are friends or coworkers of mine that worked in AAA before indie.

impossible.bsky.social•11 days ago

There are also a non-trivial amount indie devs that go back to AAA. It is not uncommon for indies to be acquired by larger game studios or big tech companies (Nightschool, Molasses Flood, Campo Santo, Beat Games, Mojang)

raiganburns.bsky.social•11 days ago

Yeah... again, I guess I'm just horribly biased because my immediate peer group (Toronto-based people) are almost entirely non-AAA (because there wasn't any AAA in Toronto).

(And also because my model for indie games is directly based on indie rock/indie hiphop, where you don't see much crossover)

lazerwalker.com•11 days ago

I think a classic example of this would be Gone Home coming from a team of mostly ex-Bioshock folks, while at the same time other contemporaneous early walking sim devs (e.g. Chinese Room) came from mod communities

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