Managing a business?
I’ve noticed some vitriol in certain areas about people who share business thoughts and suggestions when it comes to games development.
I’ve also noticed that on the indie game developer forums, a large proportion of the questions are technical. What C compiler to use, OpenGL vs DirectX, what version of DirectX and so forth.
If you are in this business because you gave up your job, or a significant portion of your time to do this, and you have gone through the setup needed to register your business with your government, then you have to remember that you are running a business.
To many people seem to feel that becoming an indie developer means that they will get to program all of the cool stuff that they want to do, they can choose what to do when they want to do it.
When you are responsible for managing a business, you should be a good steward of that business. That means reading articles about business. That means not necessarily doing the game that sounds hte most technically fun, but looking at what your customers want.
If you want to focus on business, read sites that are about business. GameProducer.NET, Seth Godins blog, any other business sites you can read. You’re not just programming your game, you will be producing it, marketing it, selling it, and managing the development of it.
September 10th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
Very good point