Cage-free Developers

The corporate game industry imprisons its workers. It exploits the benefit of being an exciting and creative dream for generations of people to work by paying less than equivalent jobs in other industries. It routinely requires long hours for extended periods (crunch time). It makes people feel captive "because there are so many talented people who would love my job."

At many companies all of the creative decisions are made by executives or an ivory tower of individuals who determine what the game is. "Here are your orders, drone. Execute them perfectly and on time or crunch — but we'll crunch anyway because we're bad at planning and inflexible about schedule."

When the entire industry proved that remote work was not just viable but brought many benefits, corporate developers embraced it when it was required by the realities of a pandemic, promised it would always be this way, then reeled us all back in to regain full control and make middle managers and executives feel important again.

Games are exciting. Talking about games is exciting. Showing off your work is exciting. NDAs (Non Disclosure Agreements, aka don't talk about fight club) don't need to exist in this industry. Call of Duty 12 doesn't have any great secrets to keep quiet. Let the creator of the mud-on-boots shader talk about their technical accomplishments before you lay them off and keep using their tech. You can still have reasonable rules to help build your hype machine.

At a studio with cage-free developers, the creative forces are the team. When their exciting ideas get realized and become profitable, it's the creators who will benefit. We're a team because we want to be a team. We know that working together this way is not just fun, not just powerful, but proves to the world that the draconian example of corporate development only exists to enrich and empower executives and shareholders.