About 18 months ago, I left a comfortable job to find something else, I was ready to leave the industry I spent years trying to get in, I didn’t understand why a job most people would call a dream job didn’t fur fill my creative needs, I had made it, worked for some of the biggest gaming companies in the world, so why did I feel so empty.
Why leave when everything looks fine from the outside?
AAA is a funny thing, from the outside it looks like the dream, big games, if you are lucky millions of people will actually play them, working alongside engineers and artists who are genuinely world-class, getting a steady salary with benefits while doing the thing you supposedly love, I’m not going to pretend it was great, it was.
But somewhere around year five or six, I noticed I’d stopped experimenting. Every technical decision had to be double or triple checked before it could be submitted. Every creative instinct would be ignored and replaced by something safe and familiar. I was creating the same systems I already made for my previous companies, just a different project and team.
But I always told my self “The salary is really good, this experience will look great on the CV, the pension and benefits are excellent. But inside my creativity was dying.”
That’s the thing nobody talks about when they romanticize studio life, it’s not bad, in fact it’s great, it’s comfortable enough to keep you from noticing that the ambition you had as a kid, has been quietly replaced by doing your day-to-day responsibilities.
Turns out the unknown is just as unknown as advertised.
When I left my last AAA job I didn’t really have any plans, I had a temporary contract to give me some time to find something else, but I never even thought about making a company, 1 contract turn into 2, and so on. I know I was really lucky to have savings, I didn’t need to get paid I could just save the money, when starting a company not having the constant pressure of having recurring revenue is amazing, about I also think having that pressure would have made me work harder.
Working on your own seems like a dream but many times you can feel at drift, I kept waking up at 7:30 am out of habit, sitting at my desk with a brew, and having absolutely nothing with a deadline attached to it. That sounds relaxing. It was briefly relaxing, and then it became quietly terrifying.
When you work for yourself anything you need, you need to do it, want a workstation build it, you could buy a pre-built, but the idea is to save as much money as possible, you need a server build it, you need accounting, in this case I do pay for it, but this is the great unknown, anything you need you will need to either do it or find someone who can do it.