Ownership is the whole ballgame

I invested 20 years into game dev. You know what I can do with the fruits of that labor today? Jack shit.

Most of the games I worked on have been rendered obsolete along with the hardware platforms they were built for, or by the servers they rely on being decommissioned. I have no ownership over any of it; virtually all work in the games industry is “work for hire”, for lack of a strong union, which means all that labor is just water under the bridge, as if it never happened at all.

I was recently checking some old backups, and I came across a bunch of notes and journals I’d done in 2013 when I took my first (ill-fated) stab at leaving games and becoming an author. (Yes, I’ve attempted this before.) Those notes are filled with plans and ideas and values that still match up exactly with what I went on sabbatical last summer to accomplish. Imagine if I’d stuck to my plan back then, instead of slipping back into games to escape the discomfort of the unknown: today, I’d have over a decade of published work, and maybe it’d be good and maybe it wouldn’t be, but it would be mine, and now—as I confront the question of how to keep my household and family solvent today—I could do something with all of that: continue or spin off from a popular series, issue 10th anniversary special editions, pursue cross-media rights licensing deals, whatever.

But I didn’t write those stories back then, so I don’t have them now. I went back to games and spent another decade doing work-for-hire on other people’s IP, owning nothing.

We live under capitalism: ownership is the whole ballgame. If you have even an inkling of creating something you can own, start making it today. You don’t have to know how you’re going to sell it—that can come later—you just have to make it, so that you have it, so that you have options.