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Great article. A team composed entirely of production people, with no “business guys,” may not fully comprehend the total costs involved in creating a ga
by rollypolly 14y ago
Great article.
A team composed entirely of production people, with no
“business guys,” may not fully comprehend the total costs
involved in creating a game.
Has any startup succeeded with nothing but engineers as founders?
- olliesaunders 14y agoYes of course. There are startups just started almost by accident with no money. Game development projects are nothing like that though.
- masklinn 14y ago> Game development projects are nothing like that though. Game dev was very much like that 30 years ago before budgets in the millions and teams of dozens. That's pretty much how Interplay was built. And Indie studios still usually start out that way. Playdead (Limbo) was started by a dev/des and a developer.
- AlecM 14y agoid Software also comes to mind, just four guys working out of their house.
- eaurouge 14y agoMuch of the business knowledge required to launch a successful startup can be acquired in a few months of dedicated studying. So it's no surprise teams of engineers have launched successful businesses, and do so routinely.
- Estragon 14y ago"Months" actually sounds pessimistic to me, but I am ignorant, and I'd welcome a pointer to a list of the necessary biz knowledge and how to acquire it.
- jiggy2011 14y agoI think this depends on your product. If you have something hot that everyone wants then you can be an idiot at business. All you need to do is keep your costs low enough that you can carry on. If on the otherhand you are trying to penetrate a saturated market , or sell something to big companies then business nous is going to be a hell of a lot more important.
- lifeformed 14y agoA lot of indie game studios start out this way.
- twohey 14y agoDropbox is the obvious example.
- ido 14y agoOf course. You learn the business stuff as you go along, ideally before you run out of money.
- jentulman 14y agoGoogle, if we're being picky about the listed founders. Although I guess you could argue Eric Schmidt was one in spirit if not paperwork.
- adambyrtek 14y agoEric was hired as a CEO much later (in 2001) in order to make VCs feel more confident knowing that the company has some "adult supervision". He wasn't there from the beginning.
- runako 14y agoMojang (creator of Minecraft)? 37 Signals (the Web design chops brought to the table by Jason Fried certainly make him an engineer by comparison to "business guys"). Microsoft. Apple. Google. VMWare.