Recently in production Category

The immediate future will bring me out on the road. First I will be going to the US with the Nordic Game Jam organizer group for GDC in San Francisco, where I am a speaker. During April, May and June I will be living in or close to St. Catharines in Ontario. My girlfriend is being stationed there for a short while, so I will simply be working on my own stuff for Kotori while there. 

The reason I am telling you this, is that this life on the road ties in very good with how I would like to work in the future. The reasons for choosing the project-based virtual company are numerous:

I am often travelling; visiting my gf who doesn't live in Denmark, visit conferences, give talks, etc

Finding the right business partners can be difficult as you need to find people with precisely the set of skills you need, who have the right experience, who are passionate about what you are passionate about the project and who are ready to take some of the same risks as you are. There is a much bigger chance of finding the right people, if I expand my horizon a bit instead of just looking in my own neighbourhood.

I like the idea of people who are passionate about a specific project, coming together to work and collaborate on that project. After the project is done, some of the people may find other projects they are passionate about, some may go their own way and yet some may choose to collaborate on a new project. The age of the freelancer and of project based cooperation are coming to the games industry! By building up your projects like this, you make sure that people are much more passionate and vested in what they are doing, and probably that they have they right skills from the beginning as well.

Having mostly project-related business partners and nearly no employees, means that costs are kept flexible ad the downtime between projects doesn't hurt as much as it does for the regular location based company.

Lastly, I come from Denmark where the standard of living is high, meaning also we have high taxes in order to pay for the welfare. This is all good, but the flipside of the coin is that salaries and cost of living is also quite high, making it difficult to compete with developers in lower-wage countries. This means that the project-based virtual company model offers some interesting options. Just as I am writing this article, a related piece on Gamasutra describing the hardships of Nordic developers appeared (which are partly due to high costs)

There are a lot of virtual companies success stories these days. One such example of a near-virtual company is Slightly Mad Studios which developed the latest iteration of Need for Speed; showing that the virtual company model can also work for AAA sized projects. Another example of a virtual game company is Boomzap Entertainment.

Here is a couple of links describing either the advantages of the virtual office or how to best setup and work in one