Kylan Coats came up with a plan to start a studio before he even made a game, as a college student who spent summers as a QA tester between classes. In his mid-thirties, he seemed the age to make this switch. If everything went according to plan, he would have the experience to succeed, but if everything exploded, he could still return to an AAA career. Coats worked in the industry for 14 years, but it was only after an unforeseen layoff from Obsidian Entertainment that his husband reminded him of this belief. “He brought it up like, ‘Hey, you’ve been talking about starting your own studio for a long time, why not now?’” Coats says.
After a good year of contract work, more profitable than any year before, he started Crispy Creative. His first match was an idea he had been thinking about for a while. “Every developer always has some of their own game ideas,” he says. A long journey to an uncertain end is a queer narrative space opera, in Coats’s words. Players control a rogue spaceship that flees between colorful Mœbius-like planets; duties include transporting drag queens on big adventures. It’s not the kind of game a bigger studio would touch, he says. With Crispy, not only is he free to be creative, but his work environment is healthy too: the staff doesn’t have to commit suicide to meet a deadline, and he can nurture sanity and inclusivity. He had been critical of leadership in the past, so starting Crispy was the time to hold up or shut up, he says.
“It’s been over four years now that I’ve been independent. In about six months, this will be the longest job I’ve ever had, which is really scary,” he says. “But also very crazy, because I’m like, ‘Why didn’t I do this before?’ I make so much more money, I have so much more freedom, why did I get involved in politics with big studios. And now I’ve talked to other people doing the same.” Coats is a small part of two big movements in the game industry. One is striking. Last month, Microsoft bought Activision-Blizzard for $68 billion, its largest tech purchase ever. Eleven days later, Sony, whose shares plummeted after the deal with Microsoft, devoured Bungie, maker of Halo and supplier of Destination† It seems that the games industry is consolidating. But, less noticeably, the industry is also shattering. Developers say they feel like they’re part of a wave: Veterans, tired of the industry’s increasing privatization, are leaving the AAA world to go their own way.
What makes a studio “indie”?
Independent is a sticky word. “Indie” evokes an aesthetic: pixel art or lo-fi graphics; deep themes or demanding mechanics – as well as a state of property, an ambiguity that can blur the facts on the spot. Independent financing varies: developers tend to differentiate their status based on the size of the budget. Crispy, for example, is closer to what most people think of when they think of indie development: a “single I” in response to the AAA. We are small and scrappy; a balance between client work, free time and not a little hope to put together our first title,” says Coats.
The Gardens studio, founded by the artists responsible for trip† Dust powerand What’s left of Edith Finchcalls itself ‘triple I’, because, at least for a small team, it has received significant financial support. The founders of Gravity Well, former developers at Respawn Entertainment, who Apex Legends, explain that they are too big to consider themselves indie; but they are independent because they have creative control. †[We’re] be able to make potentially riskier creative decisions, prioritize the health of the team and provide significant profit sharing from our games to the team,” the team said via email.
Developers are artists, but making games is work. In fact, development, infamously exploitative and degradation-inducing, is exactly the kind of work that many of us are less likely to tolerate due to the pandemic. Few stories about r/anti-work, in which workers with broken limbs are reprimanded for overuse of a stool, with the Blizzard sexual harassment scandals, and the Great Resignation, Coats says, might as well be called the Great Reprioritisation. “When you’re faced with a potentially life-ending global pandemic, you wonder why you’re committing suicide for all of these things,” he says. “Because you could get sick next week and be intubated in the hospital.”
This kind of work is notorious: the crunch. Drew McCoy, game director at Gravity Well, describes himself as a “recovering workaholic.” Bosses have long taken advantage of the fact that games are a “passion industry,” he says. In his experience you are not forced to squat, but no one can stop you, a situation that does not work for people with children ; you end up with massive exhaustion as older developers leave.
In the run up to Apex Legends, McCoy worked 80-hour weeks. The burnout after that lasted more than a year. That he, a man who taught himself to code in Basic at age 9, considered leaving the industry, indicated something rotten at the core. “We are very open to everyone: if you need free time, we have an unlimited [paid time off] policy,” McCoy says. Crunch “defined my way of thinking about building a team and building company values and goals. Because it’s only harmful. You get worse work from people.”
Developers have had enough of other long-term hurdles, too. At Obsidian, Coats says, leadership was entrenched: he had to threaten to retire before he got “senior” in his title. Coats says there were few female leads and female developers left because they didn’t see a future for themselves. Sarah Sands, executive producer at Gardens, left the industry twice for similar reasons: As a woman in the gaming world, she was paid less than her male peers. She was persuaded to go back by promises of the opportunity to strive for a more diverse workforce, a commitment to mental health, a 35-hour work week, and solid benefits. Recently, in the middle of a sunny day, she went roller-skating and returned to work energetically.
