How do you go about hiring a game development team, if you have no experience with #gamedev?

I’ve seen MANY companies over the years, be scammed – sometimes out of *millions* of dollars, because they hired a development team that promised things that they weren’t equipped to deliver. And it’s not just game developers – on one project years ago, before I’d joined the team, they hired a team of “experienced Hollywood writers” to write the script for the game.

The work they turned in nine months later was a failure in so many different ways, it’s almost hard to know where to begin. The writing was awful, juvenile crap. It wasn’t suitable for the targeted rating of the game. It was full of racism, homophobia, and otherwise wildly inappropriate content. But it was also completely unsuitable for a game where the player-character *is the player* and doesn’t have a prescribed personality.

We had to scramble to rewrite as much as we could in the six months we had left. I ended up redoing three characters *from scratch* in that time, writing *all* their dialogue while ALSO implementing the script into game logic. It was bananas, and if we didn’t have a team of dedicated, excellent developers fixing the problems, that game would never have shipped.

But other projects? I’ve seen “devs for hire” claim experience they simply don’t have. They’d say one thing that was technically true-ish, but where the text implied something that was explicitly untrue.

And it sucks to see companies invest their valuable time and resources into a team that’s essentially scamming them.

But how do you keep that from happening, when you’re trying to hire for a discipline you *don’t understand*?

I think the best way to think of it is “How do you buy a house?” Sure, there are some folks who will buy a place with no inspection and no contingencies, and hope for the best. Some get lucky, some get very, very screwed.

But most people who have a finite amount of money and care about risk get inspections. And they have contingencies. So if you’re looking to hire a dev studio, you have to find someone with knowledge to vet that team.

I don’t know of anyone who provides that service.

But on a project a while back, I had questions about the dev team – the project wasn’t working, and the claims they were making were raising the rest of the team’s suspicions. So I did a deep dive just into their website and their LinkedIn profiles. At first blush, things looked okayish. A sort of B-grade team with experience.

As I looked closer, though, cracks started to appear. Yes, they worked on that game & have a credit on it, but as part of the IT staff. And yet that person is the “Creative Director” here. Is that fatal? No – not by any means. But as I went further, it turned out everyone’s titles and experience were … illusions. And once I realized this, it became clear what the right questions to ask were, and the whole house of cards came falling down…

Why didn’t the project work? Why were the dev team’s answers to the rest of the company’s questions so evasive? Why did things they said with certainty and confidence make no sense?

That ability to say things definitively had snowed the inexperienced entrepreneurs who’d hired them. They used a bunch of fripperous bullshit jargon to make arguments from authority to justify their awful decision-making, but those arguments fell apart the moment they encountered someone (me) with actual experience.

So, I guess my point is this, and when I started writing this post, I had no idea where it was going:

If you want a “house inspection” when you’re hiring a dev team, hire me to do it. It’ll cost you a thousand bucks, and I’ll spend a day looking into the team’s experience and bona fides. I’ve had 20 years in games, led and built multiple successful teams, and while my background is primarily in game design, I’ve worked with every stripe of game developer at every scale out there.

I’ll tell you whether the team is what they say they are, what experience they *actually* have to back it up, whether what they’re proposing makes sense, and whether you should actually work with them, or find other teams to interview.

The worst thing about this: I was thinking of two specific situations, and only later realized that two OTHER specific situations could be described exactly this way, but were even worse, I’d just blocked them from my mind at the time.

This happens a LOT. Seriously, if you need someone to validate a dev, I have even more experience than I think at finding bullshit artists, apparently.