This makes me celebrate even harder
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (62)
sorted by:
I haven't really thought about that before. Would game companies hire most of their developers, programmers, and other talent just for individual projects/games?
Almost never. That's why we still remember the name of so many game studios and specific game creators from the 80s and 90s. Putting together a team is an incredibly time consuming, expensive process. It costs far, far more money to hire a new employee than to retain existing employees.
The fact that there are so many fly by night studios who seem to exist entirely to sacrifice themselves for the Greater Good is some super blatant tax evasion shit. Same with "unreleased films". You want me to believe that they spent 100 million dollars creating a movie and simply decided not to release it? Pull the other one.
They're called ash can films. studios license the film rights to a property from the copyright holder, and usually, there's a contractual obligation to produce a film based on that property within a set number of years, or the film rights revert back to the owner. If a studio can't get their shit together within that period of time, they have to make something, so they'll make a half-assed version of the film and give it no more of a release than they're contractually obligated to make to retain the license, then either try to make something good in the time allotted or sit on the rights for another cycle.
Look at the fantastic four for example. there were three separate films that bore that name (not counting the one that actually managed a sequel), all ten years apart. there was the richard donner version in the nineties that was never intended to be released, the two movies in the two thousands, and then fanfourstic in the 2010s.
Look up Dick Tracy films for a few more.
Many, many industries are moving towards independent contractor based work because it allows them to provide considerably less benefits in the long term while still maintaining most of the productivity needed in short bursts.
The only reason why many didn't in the past was that the work was too specialized and all those extremely talented people had negotiation power to just take their talents elsewhere and be gobbled up.
Now the majority of game devs can barely scrape into companies on peanuts and are barely considered worth keeping between projects. The big names for sure get to be actual employees, but the rest are catch and release unless they impress one of those big names. And I'd wager a lot of them are contracted by the same company consistently, but kept as contractors just to cut costs on supporting them between releases.