My game has reached the point now where I need to hire an artist, and two new programmers are starting full-time, for a total of 4 programmers, not including myself. Additionally, I need to get a full-time artist on board. So I’m finally at the point of serious risk, where I should either fully commit to the project or drop it.
Any point before now and all I would lose is a little bit of money. After this point, I stand to lose a lot of money since my monthly expenditures are so high. So when evaluating risk factors, there’s really three points of failure right now.
The first is that the game doesn’t scale, which is similar the risk that I release too soon. If too many people see the game before it is fully tested and just really polished, those are permanently lost customers. And as I said in a previous post, you never have a better time than release to take off. If you botch the release, you will either never recover or it will take a very long time. The way to avoid this risk is through extended alpha and beta testing, but that is expensive, so there’s definitely a balance to be kept.
The second is that I make a bad hire for the artist. I’m only going to hire one artist, and whoever I hire needs to be basically one of the best in the world. Fast, intelligent, able to do any kind of work, AAA quality, self-motivated, experienced, knowledgeable, and communicates. I’m talking director-level quality – someone who likely has their own company already. The reason for this is that I’m not an artist myself, so there is no recourse if the person I hire does not know how to do something, or does it incorrectly. In all probability I won’t even know what is done wrong, or at a poor level of quality, until it’s too late. The risk here is that since I’m hiring one of the best in the world, I am planning to pay an according amount of money, and that means if I mess up and pay the wrong guy even for one month it’s going to be a huge risk to the entire project. I don’t have a good solution to this right now. All I can really think of is to hire someone with a ton of real experience, and to check references.
The third is billing. If customers try to pay and cannot, or credit card numbers are exposed, or anything else goes wrong related to money it will likely take down the project with it, especially if it results in chargebacks. This is probably the least risky, because I know someone good who I think can do it, but it’s one of those things you never can plan for.