Judging by the stories from this day's indie developers, most publishers didn't get any better or more honest. Thanks for the insight, Tim!

A partner and I are embarking on similarish journey into opening a game dev business and we're about a year in at this point. Honest, forthright videos like this are incredibly valuable and honestly make the journey a lot less isolating. Really can't thank you enough.

You are like the best university professor I never had, I made an habit of watching your videos very early in the morning, the most productive time of day for me, and make an active effort to learn everything in every aspect, thank you for sharing all your wisdom, experience and skills.

Urgh, what horror stories with the lousy employees. I was stuck with a $1000 phone bill once, too. The guy skipped off to Norway, no way to reach him, the phone company didn't care and just wanted the money. Trust betrayed is a bitter experience.

Tim, if it makes you feel any better, this is exactly the same issue i had running my own contracting business. Yes, i made more money building for my company than building for someone else's, but the mental fatigue, the constant diversions, managing conflicts between employees and dealing with vendors and customers made me miserable. The biggest issue was feeling like someone is constantly trying to get over on you. It made me cynical in a way i hadn't previously been. As soon as my wife finished school and became an APRN I closed the business and got a job as a foreman for someone else's company. And never looked back. We make 30 percent less than we did but are 400 percent happier as a result.

A timeless example, same thing happens in the building trades. Guys go into business for themselves because they are good at building stuff, and immediately find out at most half of their time is spent building stuff, the other half is all the business stuff. If your really lucky and really successful, you end reaching the point where exactly 0% of the time you are building stuff.

Yes, people... You captured the essence of why I'm doing solo development. People are... difficult. Glad you are on the same boat now, it's much more fun like this. Please post updates on your solo indie projects. Let's go! 💪

Good morning Tim. Appreciate you sharing your experiences with us.

Oof it sounds rough. I hope that knowing some of the greatest RPG games of our times were made during this far from ideal period lessens the negative experience from dealing with the company stuff. Thank you for Troika Tim! It was a great studio!

This is why I'd never try to head up a game dev team. My dayjob is pretty corporate. I'm a marketing director, so my 9-5 is complete politcis, 6+ hours of meetings, always drama to sort out (60 people on my team, there is always a crisis). Game dev for me is downtime when I finally get off work at 9. What I find so peaceful about it is it's all solo work. I can just sit here and churn out my own work, no need for buy-in, no need for projet documents, no budget management, no 'playing the room', no HR. I don't have to speak a single work of Cuntlish ("I feel we really need to align our objectives with the Q3 promotions so we can look forward to channel synergies as we close H2"). Working on my game feels like actual WORK, I've not felt that for 5 years in my 'real' job. My actualy job is just speaking, game dev feels like I'm actually creating something. I'd never want to ruin that by getting everything ugly about worklife involved in gamedev. Limits my profits from gaming by a LOT, but it is what it is.

This hits hard. Running a company is a lot more like herding cats than it is about doing what you love. If I were to ever do it again the first thing I would do is hire an office manager. Admin is the thief of creation.

Tim I just wanted to say I really enjoy your videos and the fact they are basically daily. Always enjoyable to watch and listen to you. Take care-

First, I'm glad you guys tried because we got Arcanum out of your hardship. It's a shame you 3 couldn't get it to work or find a 4th to handle all that. It sounds like Troika would have been an awesome place to work. You know, you could have named the bad publishers, I'm sure I'm not the only one that wants to bully them.

"Even if you win, you don't really win." Is a big factor of legal battles that I see a lot of people underestimate. They think everyone will stick to the contract and that if they don't they can just take them to court without any consideration for how expensive, effort intensive, and cost intensive a legal battle can be versus what they can actually recoup.

Wow. That was a sobering Q&A. Thanks for sharing, Tim!

Thanks for sharing this with us, Tim! :)

Fascinating story, thank you Tim

Thanks for another great video Tim

TLDR: Because running a company sucks.

Tim, while I am admittedly just learning who you are, I find so much value in your talks and your character. You are truly inspiring! I have always wanted to do game design as a kid but I didn't follow through with it because I was too scared to make the sacrifice of leaving my home and family to do so. I am still a young adult now, 28 however I am committing time to learning development so that one day I can accomplish at least one game that was a soulful project I can be proud of. I do work a different 9-5 job and I have built a life and family of my own. I am happy for all of this but I don't want my children to be burdened by the same fear that I had of leaving my home. Humbly I ask for your advice just as food for thought so I can encourage my children to aspire to do whatever the envision themselves doing without feeling constrained. Thank you for your time and genuineness.

It's like you pulled my thoughts out of my brain and said them with your experiences. Sorry man, that sucks. You made some legendary stuff and I wish quality meant fiscal success

Tim, I'm so sorry to hear about your grueling experience with running a company. Thank you for going through all of that and giving us some amazing games despite the hardships! There are so many amazing people in the industry that would have given a ton to work with you. Yet the dishonorable ones were taking their spot. It's heartbreaking.

Honestly I can feel the despair in your voice when you talk about this story particularly. Honestly dude I'm just glad you're okay ❤

People who have never run a business have no idea what it takes to own and run a business. I've been in business since 2009, and even though financially it's doing fine, I've feeling burned out. Respect from a current owner to a former one.

Cool story. Thanks, Tim!

Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not a cat herder!

Hi, Tim. I'm not even a game developer but i love hearing you talk about games, your videos are just so entertaining, thank you for making them. I just wanted to ask if you've ever tried to make a full game completely independently without the help of a team or the support of a company. Have a good day!

Sadly, this seems to be most of my friend's experience in regards to the ones who've worked in the biz. I've been friends with a number of former Runic Games devs for a while now and of the ones still in the business (more than a few left after that studio got shut down), they primarily have stuck with it out of sheer tenacity. Some of them left due to finding better or different/more personally challenging/interesting jobs but more than a few left because of how grueling the industry is. To all those looking to get into it or looking to start their own company in ANY business good luck. You're going to need it.

I have always shied away from ever considering running a business and after hearing this video I feel vindicated in doing so haha.

Thanks for sharing, Tim

I don't worry much about people. It angers me if they try to manipulate me, or someone I know, sure. But this is where your friends usually can help. What angers me more is people gathering up together to make an effect on someone. How bad must that person feel if multiple people set up against them, more or less obviously. Yea, I think I understand you Mr. Cain. So many wrong things and wrong people get in between you and your job, and all you want is to do your job. I'll just carry on for now, hoping for a better tomorrow.

The worst of it is those companies that didn't follow the contract gets away with it because they know it costs more to sue than you'd recover.

Hey Tim. I totally get your point. There is a game I am very eager to make and been developing it solo for the last 2 years, trying to make a vertical slice. I have a question concerning today topic of running a studio. Since I don’t want to run one myself, because of the same reasons you have mentioned. How would you approach a situation, when you have a game concept and a demo and want to find someone that can take you in and help finish the project with you?

To clarify before it begin, I’ve been both an abused employee and a business owner. It’s amazing to hear someone speaking out on how many bad people business owners have to deal with as well. I know anti-work is popular because the majority of people are employees. Business owners are a minority so their perspectives are often muted but I think are just as important as abused employees. Just like shitty bosses, there are shitty employees that will make your life hell no matter how good you treat them. I once had an employee acting absolutely unprofessional in front of customers and our manager asked the employee to stop in a nice way. The employee proceeded to get on their knees and suck their thumb while they yelled at our manager. Anyways, I was asked by our manager to step in because I always try to work with people in a respectful, not yelling but constructive way (we prioritize being a good environment to work in). I pulled the employee aside and I politely told the employee that they can’t speak to our manager like that. The employee stood and looked at me and said “omg my back” with a smirk on his face. That employee tried to file a claim against our company. Of course this was a garbage claim and our other employees backed us on it. I found out after that we were not the first employer that this employee tried to scam. And before you say why didn’t you call references before hiring them? The reality is no employee is going to list a reference that will say bad things.

Seems like a vicious cycle. Employers get scummier to employees, employees get scummier to employers, and by the end the company either dies the hero or lives long enough to see themselves become the villain.

thank you for sharing!

If I'm being honest, I was avoiding this video a bit. I'm getting ready to run my own studio and I was expecting this to pull back the curtain and reveal that I'm ignoring obvious pitfalls and pretending things will be easier than they really are. But after seeing this, I actually feel like I have a fairly good perspective about what's required. Thank you.

Yep people are scum, imagine that. Have seen a lot since I started working at 16 (am 29 now) and that's only 13 years. Can't even imagine the shit I'll have seen by the time I'm 50.

When talking about the ways employees sort of take advantage of their employers and do shady things mentioned in this video, and specifically the "I don't want to do this anymore. Let someone else do it." Made me think.. I'd really, really love to see a video on how other bosses/people in that position handle and rationalize that. Do they just do a better job of not letting it get to them somehow? Was it just a particularly bad luck? I wouldn't think so, especially if running a company for years or even decades. I don't know. Just seems like a really fascinating topic to me. Both hearing about the kinda "horror stories", things I literally never even thought about or knew existed prior to watching this video admittedly, and the other side of it I think would be interesting, is hearing how it's managed and dealt with. Not necessarily strictly on a business level, but even like mentally/emotionally.

What about indie self publishing? With your name, experience and reputation, you can do a side scroller and still get quite lot of people backing you up on various crowdsourcing platforms. Imagine, total control, pre-payed work, and a ton of fun developing whatever you want.

great insight thankyou

Thank you for sharing the dark side of running a business. From my experience the examples of misconduct that you've shared can be kind of preobserved from simple bad mouthing. If you notice that a colleague tends to badmouth other people even not related to work, it's a solid indicator of decency failure.

Happy birthday!

just played Flink on the sega-cd and its amazing what 3 people can do without all the extra baggage of running a large company comes with.

What sucks is that people confuse huge corporations and small businesses. Small business owners are usually not sitting on a big mountain of wealth like CEOs of big corporations.

Thank you for all of your insight into running a company. I want to ask you a few questions about starting a company from scratch. I've heard a lot of people talk about building a good demo and showing it to publishers to get the financing you need to make the game. This is fine advice, but what if you don't really have a team yet and you want to start a studio so that people aren't working for free for several months. I'm curious to hear what your approach would be.

I wish this story about publishing was told more. I wonder how self publishing has transformed this picture?

That was an interesting video but one thing that was in my mind for most of it was, couldn't you hire someone to do the business side of the company so you could focus on making games? I remember reading Masters of Doom (most of which is about id Software's history during the 90s) and IIRC their first (or second) hire was Jay Wilbur whose entire job (business manager) was to run the company so that the others can focus on developing the games. Couldn't you hire someone like that? I can't imagine Carmack doing HR, accounting or basically spending any time away from his compiler :-).

When it comes to crunch, I have the feeling we need to differentiate between companies. When Troika splits the royalites EVENLY between everybody and provides office lunch while financially struggling to survive, morally that is soooo much different from what EA does to its employees. I would work my ass off for something I believe in when I see the C-level sacrificing so much (financially and personally) to keep the business running. Especially if I know we will all be rewarded, not just management. But when I see Andrew Wilson earning 20 mil or more a year while EA lays off staff and overworks the rest.. well, that's a different story.

I have no doubt that these stories will help tremendously to any listener who ends up with their own company. Can only pray that the overall economic system as a whole is somehow magically better by then 🙃

Running a business is its own skill, and not everyone is cut out for it.

People spend so much energy thinking about how bad companies are or how bad people higher up in the structure are that they forget to check themselves.

It's amazing how much of this I can relate to Tim. My family runs a business that we have all worked in at various points and the amount of stress it causes my parents is awful and it often affects our home life. Incompetent or dishonest employees meant that often we had to work more to compensate for it. Running the business follows you home, you don't get to just clock in and clock out mentally. Disgruntled customers/employees don't care that it's the weekend or Sunday, they will call you regardless. Quite a few employees literally earn more than my parents who are the directors and work 50-60 hours a week compared to the employees working 30-40 and this was the only way to keep the company afloat since the recession. It really pisses me off how much work the more shitty/lazy employees just dump on my mother and expect her to deal with it when she already fills 3 roles in the business and works more than them already without the added workload. Think we can fire the worst employees? Nope, workers rights in Ireland make it extremely costly (often too much for any small business owner to afford) to fire any employee unless they steal or intentionally destroy company property or something along those lines. I never ever want to start my own business because I've witnessed first hand how soul sucking it is and the mental anguish it can inflict on your home life. Thanks for sharing as always. Love listening to you speak!

Hello Mr Tim Cain God Of The Role Playing Games , Fallout 1,2 are my all time favorite games ( Since Fallout 2 might not to be your work but it's obvious that the infrastructure of this game based on your thoughts , your ideas and your achivements soo we may say maybe Fallout 2 is like your adopted child :) ) , i love those games soo much and also i like Arcanum game also , when i was 10 years old i just asked my parents that is it possible to add fallout game wallpaper picture on my birthday cake and got laughed by that :) . Thanks for everything you gave us a amazing pure role playing experience ! My biggest dream all time is meeting you as a person and also meet the amazing people whose made these amazing games comes through , that’s no : 1 dream , if i would have chance to pick 100 billions of dollars or meeting with my role playing gods , the people may disapproves to me but i would pick always to meet you and the members whose worked on Fallout 1 project . Soo for the question , did you sir played Baldur’s Gate 3 , i just like that game it’s a really good pure rpg game ! But there is one crucial thing missing that since after your games none of the game studios wouldn’t care to implement into their games , which is in game civilizations , in game socities , in game purposes to the npc's like they are not just meant to wait you to getting survived but live in their environment as community , right now all rpg games like there is like huge event happening all the in game world is in chaos , there is no such as social life , that the games right now give such that experience of us . All the cities or the settlements which the people in it always is in chaos and they like waiting to be get rescued by someone . I really missed your games because of this unique experience , even in Fallout 1 people were in litterally living in chaos but they manage to built their society and you can actually can get that experience from it . Soo my biggest question is , like Ron Gilbert ( creator of the original Monkey Island games ) decided to come back one more time to make one last amazing Monkey Island game , is it possible that in near future the legends like yourself , leonard boyarsky , feargus urquhart , Scott Campbell , Chris Taylor and other original first 2 fallout deveopers work all together and make again the greatest pure role playing game all time , it doesn’t have to be a new fallout or arcanum game or wasteland game , Outer Worlds ( Btw i really like Outer Worlds , but it seems to me that , it's my personal opinion , making a game in first person and with 3d modelling with it , gives you soo much hard time that you may not implement the things you actually would like to . ) you may choose your own idea and make it happen . I know that if some kind of things like that happens , majority of the rpg game players can experience pure role playing experience , can experience your works and finally people knows that who is The Tim Cain is and why he and others like the best rpg game developers of all time . Thank you sir again for your wonderfull games , i wish you to happy and peaceful life ( But don't get comfortable soo much , we as your fans need you :) )

DAAAAAAAAAAUMN! I've wanted to form my own game studio for literally 24 years and this 14 minute video may have just destroyed my 24 year dream. lol

What are your thoughts on emergent narrative in games? I think it's severely underappreciated and I wish more people talked about it. Some of my favourite gaming memories are the emergent things that would happen unique to my experience.

Hi tim, it's me, part of everyone.

Hey Tim, in regards to you experience when you started your career and how game development is now Did you notice any significant changes in the career aspect? In regards to quality of employers, salaries, work life balance etc Also I wonder how do you feel about the area in the future?

Dealing with publishers sounds like the "sold your soul" background.

If there were to be a fallout book/movie what would you like to see within it. What game in the fallout series would you like it to take most inspiration from?

regarding the rules and bad employees. sometimes the people in the meeting when the rules are discussed had those experiences in the past and just want to stop it from happening again. the sheer amount of shit people try and get away with, always boggles my mind and I thought I was bad

Hey Tim, great video but also a little bit sad. What about the following scenario: make another company, but this time give all the bussiness side to a few trustworthy person to handle, and you stick only to the game development aspect. Would that work?

Question: When did you have the most fun designing games, and what factors contributed to creating an environment that made you feel that way? I am a solo dev and I'm thinking about starting a studio with another solo dev. None of these business stories sound fun and I want to avoid it.

11:42 - I mean, I'm all for knowing your worth and negotiating, but that's some serious sociopathic shit! It's kind of like a bit I heard by a comedian years ago - humanity is doomed to move at the speed of its dumbest and most inconsiderate members, because the moment you give people some slack, there's always that ONE GUY who decides to abuse the system :/

Tim!! Please tell me where you got that spinning globe on your shelf ❤❤ I must have one. :) ,, hope you are doing well 🌻

Hey Timothy , really nice video! I was wondering if I could help you edit your videos and also make a highly engaging Thumbnail which will help your video to reach to a wider audience .

In response to closing Troika, is there any reason you didn't try to just sell and rid yourself of it that way? Or did you try and it wasn't worth it for some reason?

Mr. Tim, what's your opinion on books and other readable objects in games? Would you include more readables in Fallout 1? I remember it didn't have many holodiscs, but I guess Bethesda kind of made it fun to be able to play holodiscs, not just read them. I'm just curious what do you think about it, also from the point of game experience and building lore. Thanks in advance.

Hey Tim, big fan of your work and your channel. I graduated from high school with high marks but was unmotivated to go to college. I am really interested in the fields of programming and game development, but have no idea where to start. Is there a certain class/book/program that I should use to dip my toes in to the field and see if it is really for me or if I am just seeing things through rose-colored glasses? I don't expect a response but if you do, thank you in advance!

I agree with the people who say that you need to be a sociopath to enjoy running a company.

Thanks for good questions, people with numbers in their usernames.

That's really unfortunate that you had those business experiences. Would you ever do solo development? Or is that what your contracting gigs are like?

People can be great... but sometimes they're so bad you'd be fine with seeing them tossed into boiling oil.

"Oh...People." -- well said :D

I'm gonna safely bet you're a fan of the Silicon Valley TV show from HBO.

Running a business is a completely diferent beast than developing games. The best thing you can do is hire someone to take care of the business aspects of it, if you want to develop. Otherwise its better to just run the business and no develop at all.

Hey Tim is there anything that Bethesda did that contrasted the original intentions or beliefs of the original fallout series

Still sad about Troika closing down

Pet peeve when people interview or ask questions: don’t answer the question in the question. Just let the person answer it, you don’t need to give them multiple choice.

People are just the worst :(

Would you re-open Troika if you weren't the manager? You would only work on the games and not managing the company. Thank you for your previous reply, Tim

Do you play many mainstream games like Call of Duty, Halo, BioShock, etc.?

Hey everyone, it's him, Tim.

I asked a dumb question in another video. I never got into game development but one day i will be

I am looking for a mystery to be solved. What are the command line arguments for Arcanum? What do they do? What is the correct syntax? Feel free to be as technical as you want. Deep dive into source code, highly appreciated.

I remember in a previous video you spoke about how some juniors code poorly and don't focus on optimizations that seem clear as day. As a self taught developer I wonder what you think is the solution to this? I feel the solution might be "Join a big studio, get mentorship as a junior" as that's the role they play for a junior, but with 200+ juniors applying to every position, it's natural they are more discriminatory and prefer people who have experience on shipped games who are desperate to work rather than fighting for what they're worth. In games today, is it still possible for juniors to get junior jobs? And does the industry still honor it's position of training the next generation of juniors?

Not everyone has good luck on these ventures :/ But that shouldn't people from trying at least!

I don't think it's in bad faith if people take a counter offer to get a new better offer. Companies treat employees awful idc how much soda and children snacks they supply if they are paying them a lesser amount they deserve what they get.

You never get justice in a court room. Even when you win. Justice to the highest bidder unfortunately

I've been a gamer for 30+ years. I've got some great ideas for games. Games I think would create a new genre and be really rewarding to players. I've got 2 games pretty well thought and planned out. Idk how to program graphical games. So I code text-based games. Idk how to do that either but I'm doing it, and its going well. Wanna play my MUD sometime? No? Okay.

I'm probably not going to get this answered, but how much less work is being a freelancer than having a large scale company? I get the impression from colleagues who are or who have been freelancers that it is a lot of extra work

I'm sorry, not trying to be mean if I come across this way, but I don't really see the point in either changing the names of the users who ask these questions or attributing these names to the questions you yourself wanted to answer to discuss a certain topic. In all of these videos where you answer questions, all of the people have nicknames with a number in the end. Judging by how most people tend to call themselves on the internet and seeing how it is in actuality by just scrolling the comment section below one of your videos, most don't have such nicknames. Why change them? Why not just skip the name entirely? Just gives off a weird feeling like you're trying to hide something. Some streamers, for example, just generalize the people in chat with "chat member" or "viewer" because some names are weird and probably not TOS-proof. Either way, thank you for the thoughtful answers and insightful stories. Really enjoy your perspectives.

Do you ever play your games you made? Do you enjoy playing the games you made? I hear some devs love playing their games and others are so sick of their games they don't even watch reviews.

One time I worked on a dev contract for 3 months and got totally stiffed after delivering 90% of the code. Never saw a dime. Other biz people try to get you to give them advice or work for free. Too many manipulators out there. Software has been ruined, for the most part.

What was the origin for Troyka's name?

😉 never say never Tim

isn't it in the us the same where the loser in court has to pay everything? cause in that case they could drag it out as long as they wanted since they themselves had to pay for it anyway.

I don't think asking for counter offers to counter offers is dishonorable at all. Not in the slightest. When corporations are disloyal to employees, they tell us "It's just business." It doesn't matter that layoffs are right before Christmas. It's just business. It doesn't matter the good healthcare plan was downgraded to the useless plan. It's just business. It doesn't matter there are no raises due to perpetual austerity budgets despite record setting profits and executive bonuses. It's just business. Turnabout is fair play. Employees have the right (if not a duty to their families) to negotiate for the best offer their skills and experience can fetch. In fact, employees ought to keep negotiating -- indefinitely. If a better offer can be had elsewhere and it can't or won't be met by the employer, then stop what you're doing, put down the La Croix, and leave right now. After all, it's just business.

6:28 makes me angry just hearing that sentence.

I'm a CPA, I'll take care of your company if it would allow you to create a new company. That's what Linus at LTT just did. (LTT's current problems are unrelated to that decision)