You get screwed every which way, and not in a good way. Sometimes you get to hear about or from people playing the games, which is usually nice, but most of the time you’re living on a knife-edge no matter the quality of your work and the effort that goes into it, even when your client is the government.
Being a properly independent game creator might be better, assuming people buy our games. We’ll see. At least we’d be free to test our own theories about design and marketing, and any mistakes would be our own. I’d much rather fail myself than because of someone else’s ineptness.
The funny thing is that I’ve had a few conversations over the last few months with the people I work with, along the lines of “well what else could we do?” I agree with the sentiment that it would be difficult to work for another company (especially a big one) but speaking personally, I think I can do anything I put my mind to. I’m just not terribly good at putting my mind to things – I’m too easily distracted by new ideas.
