I consider Rhis something of a partner in spirit but if you mean legally speaking, then yes, I’m the “sole big cheese”. I’ve avoided giving out actual ownership shares because there are various legal and tax implications and I like simplicity of it. Other long-time team members are a bigger part of the company than just being employees as well. So far though, I’m stuck handling all the operational type stuff, much to my chagrin. At the same time, I’ve worked at other studios that ended up in paralysis for periods because multiple owners couldn’t reach agreement on things. So, I listen to people careful and always questions my own position but, ultimately, I have the final say, if it comes to that, although it very rarely does.
To answer your other question about us become a bloated mega-corp - probably not anytime soon haha. The other benefit of being a single-owner company is that I’m pretty happy with how things are and I don’t feel like I need anymore money, beyond us just continuing to make profits like we are.
So there isn’t much attraction to “blowing up big” for me. I feel like the detraction of having to manage a larger company would greatly outweigh any benefit of moar money at this point.
We’ve gotten inquiries by potential investors looking to dump some money on us for some bigger project but that just seems like a headache to me, dealing with investors and suddenly having to schedule milestones and report what we’re doing, convince outside people to let us do this or that… no thanks!
That said, I wouldn’t mind growing a bit more, as I do have an interest in working on different games and it’s fun to see things progressing and taking shape - ideally at a somewhat faster rate than often is the case with us haha. Currently we have just enough people to work on our “new game” plus a GD expansion. I think we’ll be stretched thin if we start another totally new project. We’re actually in a weird spot currently where it would be great to hire another artist to wrap up FG but after that is finished, there would then be a lull before we get the next thing rolling, where we might not have enough work to go around… so it’s better to just try to grind through with the team we have for now, then hire later, once future things are in production.
As to the question someone asked about the “new project” - well, part of why we haven’t shown much of it is due to team size restraints. When you announce / begin to show a game, you want to have some marketing art, a website or whatever set up so people interested can start following the game after that initial buzz… We have none of that yet. So far it’s just seemed too painful try to take someone off development to put in the time for that peripheral stuff - yet, until we do that, it doesn’t really make sense to announce / show the game.
We do need to get to it pretty soon though as it’s nigh time we announced it.
In terms of early community involvement / showing development, there is also some hesitation since, now that we’re more known as a company and more eyes are watching, there is some fear that if we show early, really rough-looking stuff like we did in the past, the wider audience may not get it. Early on with GD, it was a pretty small group of mostly TQ fans, so I think people were more accepting of where things were at, although we did get shit on to an increasing degree as word got out, until after the KS, when the current artists managed to redo a lot of the cruder early art.
The new project is looking pretty good now though imo - so currently it’s just about getting our act together with the marketing side.
Omg the damn story… it’s going to drive me insane. Basically, I thought when GD released, I’d somehow have all this time because the pressure would be off and I could sit back and write the story for a while.
Of course, that’s never happened - while we’re not under as much pressure to get a game out and financially things are good, I now have to keep a team of people busy, I’ve still got my own development work that other people need me to finish so they can do their stuff, etc. Plus I have to handle the surprising amount of BS tasks that come up just in maintaining the business and employees. It’s insane all the stuff you have to do to be a “legit” business and comply with various state and gov reporting regulations, not to mention keeping up with taxes. There’s always some new thing every week.
So that said, I’ve been chipping away at it. I keep saying I’m going to just sit down and finish it and I worked on it for a day or two but inevitably things come up and it gets put on hold again. Then of course, more time goes by, so there’s more interesting things I feel like I should include…
Suffice to say, I really need to wrap it up.