Thread by @glassbottommeg

This is mostly bad advice. No, getting a job in AAA won't help you do small-scale dev. It tends to teach methodologies and mindsets that fall apart when you go below about, eh, 10 people or so?

https://twitter.com/GIBiz/status/1047131104803577857

Can you go into AAA and extract valuable experience from that? Sure! But is it a good idea to say "everyone should start in AAA"? Absolutely not. Furthermore, is it a good idea to say that given the current realities of AAA mega-crunch burning people out of the industry? Hell no.

Hello, it me. The lady who started in AAA, and did pretty well there, and has now moved into indie, telling you to probably ignore that advice.

I spent my first few years struggling with the mindset change required when you aren't seeking massive investment for your projects.

The absolute worst bit of doing AAA->indie is it does not prepare you for the community building you HAVE to do, to succeed as an indie. Anyone who tells you AAA first is probably imagining you're going to break off in a team of 10 (incl a producer/market) and aim for mid-tier.

Which is, probably, the lens that that article was written from. It's on gamesindustry.biz - they mostly think "indie" means "oh you mean 10 heads instead of 400?", aka Big Indie.

Which is fine, but most who aim for that first? Fail. Start smaller. Maybe stay smaller.

I used to agree with the article. It's taken me, what, 6 years to come around to understanding that a lot of what kept undercutting my odds of success was bad AAA assumptions. I would have needed a lot more money to do that (which would have increased risk / odds of dead-end).

Rather than look at AAA for an idea of how to do indie gamedev, look at the music industry, or traditional artists, or authors. Look at how they carve out communities and niches and build those into something huge.

Also look at the success rates there. Yep. Sorry. Similar here.

More accurately, the AAA advice acts like a filter. Which is harsh. Maybe also their intent. If you can't hack it in AAA, you probably can't in indie either. So you'd wash out a lot of not-gonna-succeed folks pre-indie.

But that's... hazing, or a Great Filter, not career advice.

Oh and that article's obsession with poopoo'ing Generalists is hogswallop. Generalists are what make indie work. You absolutely have to be a generalist to pull off a small team endeavor. You don't have the budget for all the specialists you need. You have to get your hands dirty.

The idea of looking down on Generalists is, in fact, a uniquely AAA mindset.

Remember when I said that going AAA first tends to embed some bad assumptions? Heh.

Here's a novel idea: Fuck Marcus Phoenix, and shipping Marcus Phoenix is mostly just gonna burn you out.

If you want to learn to ship games and prime for indie, get a job at a mobile studio making Barbie's Horse Adventure and its twenty mobile spinoffs. I'm dead serious.

AAA has a massive blind spot when it comes to mobile/casual gaming. They like to imagine they're top of the pile, but they're a bit player vs mobile/F2P.

Guess what? Mobile and F2P also prize generalists. Not so much art/code, but code generalists? Art generalists? hell yeah.

I feel it important to note that I meant shipping as in producing and releasing a Marcus Phoenix game.

Shipping Marcus Phoenix, meanwhile, is a not-awful inroad to being an indie or mobile dev artist. Good way to build dem generalist skills on dat cute art.