Why should you start your own game company?
The house always wins (and you now own the house)
Being an employee of a game development studio means you’ll always make X amount of money from the game you’re working on. The safety net there is that you get X amount even if the game sells a single copy. The downside is that X remains the same, even if the game tops every best-selling chart for the next couple of years.
The odds of an indie game doing that are smallish, but completely owning the long tail effects of your game aren’t just in the monetary gains. The game gets reconfigured down the line and becomes a cult streaming darling? You own the long tail effect of that. The game consistently sells in small numbers that add up over a decade? You own the long tail effect. The game can be packaged with your next project and upsold that way? You own it.
With monetization options evolving alongside technology, owning the game puts you in a position where your one-time development cycle in the past can work for you in the future.
Owners can remodel the house; renters only decorate.
An efficiently scoped game with a controllable scale gives you the option to remodel and tweak the game in almost real-time. This can fit either your own personal ambitions of what you want to create or serve the market reaction to what kind of sales you’re making. As an employee, all of those decisions are made for you and, in most cases, by people you’ll never get to meet or affect with your input personally.
Without office politics, HR limitations, and fiduciary responsibility to third parties, you’re free to mold your own creation according to your whims and needs. No pitching, negotiations, and pre-production cycles are needed. This doesn’t mean any fewer organizational skills are needed on your side, but it does cut out middlemen (and women) in various bureaucratic positions.
This can make your game feel more alive™ than corporate products both for you, the creator, and the audience seeing you tinkering with it, adding and removing things, improving the formula. You are serious about this being the best gaming experience, not just making a sale.
The odds of an indie game doing that are smallish, but completely owning the long tail effects of your game aren’t just in the monetary gains. The game gets reconfigured down the line and becomes a cult streaming darling? You own the long tail effect of that. The game consistently sells in small numbers that add up over a decade? You own the long tail effect. The game can be packaged with your next project and upsold that way? You own it.
With monetization options evolving alongside technology, owning the game puts you in a position where your one-time development cycle in the past can work for you in the future.
All the time and effort you put into work as an employee is Y.
This Y is permanently locked into the company that employs you. It might (not just capital M, but capitalized everything) lead to promotions and benefits in the future, but this is completely outside of your control. Your managers and their managers and their managers will maybe look at a spreadsheet where you are and run a formula where your Y might (!) get rewarded in some way. Or your line in the Excel sheet might get deleted if the formula says so.
With owning your own game company (or being a solo developer), all of your invested Y is permanently locked in with you, and nobody can take it away from you. This means that down the line, all of this accumulation of Y, X amounts you make, and all the remodeling you do can be gathered up and correctly apprized. No performance interviews, no office politics, no negotiation. You run your own Excel sheet, and it, without a doubt, shows what your complete worth is.
Being employed, your ultimate means of negotiation is quitting and going somewhere else. Owning your company, your ultimate means can be getting outside financing, selling your company, or quitting and going somewhere else. You have more options. More options mean more freedom.
Why would you deny yourself more freedom?
A house you own can be mortgaged or sold (editor's note: you’re running on fumes with house analogies).
Home is not a place, it's a feeling