Our mocap rig is in our art directors garage at his request :) We saved thousands and get better work out of it :)
Also @Calelari I am the audio director on our game and our sound studio is in my garage. if I need specialized audio work I hire a top studio and pay them for the day. Much higher quality, and much cheaper. of course you have to swallow bills for tens of thousands of dollars for a few days work, but thats what top talent costs and we can afford it because we dont spend money on our internal facilities we would use a few weeks a year.
I agree you can make money out of subleasing offices. It can be a nice side earner , it just doesnt help make or sell games.
For the Digital Extremes example, I gather from their developer streams and the content updates they deliver an in-house studio might be more cost-effective.
Running stuff like that out of homes seems like it could be a hassle for the company if there’s any appreciable employee turn-over though?
Possibly better about it than them breaking their lease, which was probably signed before COVID started, and having to pay for the space anyway and yet not even have it.
Yeah you are 100% right on all points. We were designed this way from the ground up and our game supports it (we dont need people running around doing combat poses etc).
Also absolutely all the hardware costs are essentially sunk and its a huge hassle to ask a colleague to return them if they leave.
When its my money I just gift it to leaving colleagues. The new person will probably want something different anyway and my attitude to hardware is its the cheapest thing you can buy to improve a colleagues work satisfaction level so I spend on it freely.
But when its a big ticket item on the company money we pick it up or pay for shipping or even pay for a moving company to pick it up, pack it and ship it to the new colleagues place.
Not all studios are created equal, nor all games. Genre and budget really impact the need for moment-to-moment coordination during certain production phases.
Put a team of mostly juniors working remotely on a real time action game of mid to high budget (something that requires intense coordination between multi-man teams) and you could have a disaster in the making.
Now take a team of mostly seniors/leads working on a strategy game (or something where finely tuning the feel frame by frame is not important) and it becomes very doable.
The fact that offices are mostly empty has been a good oppurtunity to do long-delayed refurbishments and office moves for a lot of places.
And there are real advantages to being co-located. We’re certainly in the position of being much more open to wfh than we were beforehand (we’ve just hired someone who is going to stay in Germany) but at the same time we still value having some time together in the office for the people who are local once we can go back. I know some people struggle to explain what they are doing and stay aligned with the team remotely.
Of course we’re based in a major tech center so it makes a lot more sense. People ar epretty keen to move here anyway. If you’re in the back of beyond or very cost-sensitive I can see the appeal of ditching the office and going full remote.
Blizzard built a few recording booths in one set of offices. Did not repeat for the next office. It was cheaper to go up to LA - where the voice talent was located anyway - and rent by the day.
Oh great, now Square Enix is rumored to be up for sale.
If it’s Sony that might explain them spinning down most of Japan Studio. Tencent is always an option. I hope it’s not Microsoft, that would start to feel a bit too much like old evil Microsoft practices “we can’t beat them so give the product away for free/buy all the content makers.”
FWIW, they’ve officially denied it. Personally, I’d love to see them get sold. Squenix has always seemed like a place with a lot of creativity but a terrible corporate culture - not so much working conditions, can’t speak to that, but the sorts of business decisions they make around games. I’d love to see that change.
