Embracing the Co-Op Studio Model in Indie Games

[Music] hi I wasn't expecting feedback Thanks that's the talk everyone we're done okay welcome to embracing the coop studio model in indie games featuring us we have a different slide there you go today we're going to just talk about worker cooperatives show hands how many people know what a worker cooperative is that is way more than I thought so that's great at the start of this we're going to the format of this we're gonna give you a really very very very basic 101 on just what coops are and then we're going to each share our experiences of how our coops came to be how they're set up kind of the ups and downs of that and then we're gonna do some Q&A at the end but at the beginning of this we're just gonna dash through some really quick like the elevator pitch of what a co-op is so what does a worker cooperative there's a lot of different aspects to them but if you want to boil them way down to some very

like core shared ideas it's a business that owned operated and controlled democratically by its workers who share in the profits of their labor you can already see how that's very different than probably a lot of the places you've worked these are businesses where decisions all decisions are made democratically people discuss their salaries and work these things out together there is you sharing the profits of your labor meaning that there's not some like there's not someone like way over your head that's sucking up kind of all the surplus value left over from your labor you know after you get paid you know a lot of that money that you make goes up the chain and worker cooperatives everyone is sharing in that and discussing kind of democratically how that how that's working how those things are just distributed which leads to a lot of coops having very egalitarian pay structures and revenue share and that kind of thing there's a lot of ways of organizing worker cooperatives from very like

everyone just sits around a table and like talks some largely ones have more a structure where there are managers of certain you know as like boards of directors and stuff that are elected by the workers involved but it comes down to an idea of one person one vote so it's not like your art lead has five votes and someone working on like environment art has like one or something when it comes to like these like larger decisions so it's just kind of this democratic sort of set up and I think nothing's going to tell us a little bit about the history all right cooperative societies have always existed it's basically just you know group of folks working together to get through life but a worker coops as we recognize them started more during the industrial revolution it's mainly just started by workers who are trying to protect themselves either physically from like unsafe working conditions their actual

jobs there's skills craftsmen's that are just worried about the new machines coming in and them being replaced with unskilled laborers and you know just your livelihoods wages going down and you're not able to afford rent or basic necessities this was around the time when there is a you could start to see the vast inequality between the bosses and workers and all of that expectation that it was happening so you know they already just coming up with new techniques to try to get together and survive and yeah over the next couple centuries and they grew and expanded all over the world they kind of are just you know empower workers and democratically owned and run their own workplaces usually they have like a focus on serving their local communities because kind of what you know regular companies can or won't do oh yeah and then often during times of large-scale crises of

Labor and economics there is kind of another burst of coops that kind of come up and I think like today that's what we're currently witnessing like a growing wave of like work or organization unionization kind of more interest in starting coops and this panel is kind of part of that like we're kind of in a in a spot I should break it up on the microformats we're kind of in a spot right now just even the fact that this panel is happening there's kind of whisper even part of this moment right where there's more unionization there's more organization kind of happening because we're in a kind of a difficult time in a lot of ways so that's cool it's cool to like be here in this room and be like how we're in one of those one of those moments right now okay so I talked a little bit about I alluded a bit to how co-op structures are a little different than your your structures you may be used to in other kinds of businesses now I've created two slides and they're pretty complicated because business is complicated there so just bear with me

we're gonna get through there's a lot of moving parts of this okay okay so I know there's multiple circles on there so I'll try to walk you through it this is a very very very basic breakdown of how this will work now boss could be I hold two bosses it could be shareholders it's all these people up here who are making these decisions right and then there's workers kind of below and your company could be really cool you could be like oh yeah but like my boss we get together and talk things out and they take a lot of our opinions on board we like to think of ourselves as a family and a community and all that kind of stuff however at the end of the day your boss has that power right like there are people that are not you and not like you don't you don't have very much say and what your schedule is how much you're paid that kind of thing usually the expectations are not being set by the workers the expectations are being set by someone else and what

worker coops do is kind of upend that entire thing where there aren't bosses anymore or rather everyone's boss or everyone's not a boss that whole distinction kind of fades away there are still people who do things like in the administrative tasks that you would associate with someone who's kind of at the top of a company like there are tasks that still need to get done but they're getting done by every you know by your fellow worker as opposed to your boss you make decisions about hours deadlines salaries all kinds of just things and it does and we'll probably all talk about this a little bit in our own way it changes the dynamic of how you work together in a way beyond like is like I said a lot of companies particularly other companies in the games industry are like the were up just a big family here we also have so much passion and working together and that's great why not a structure that actually makes you you know so you know a community where you are working together and not just saying that in that in that sort of

way so why go worker cooperative if you're kind of starting a studio or you were already are one and you maybe want to migrate into doing that their shared control and ownership of the workplace and the products of your labor and that's the kind of a big thing you know there's not like one rock star like developer at the top of it no pun intended who is getting like a lot of the a lot of the credit for it necessarily you can actually as a group of people go like yeah we did this we all share in this success in a way that you just simply can't in a and kind of a more standard top-down structure there's greater accountability and participation there's greater accountability because you have to talk about stuff right like if you're making a decision in like a healthy co-op that's running you have to get together and talk and you have to vote we vote in a slack we each have like a little thumbs up button and stuff or we like you know over like you know Google chat or whatever like you have to

participate and you have that accountability for that reason in a way that you simply don't in a more hierarchical top-down structure there's greater job security relative to top-down businesses you are still dealing with selling games trying to make it through like this doesn't obviate all those problems or anything however you are probably making decisions that are based on you all trying to not have to lay yourselves off basically since all the workers are coming together to make these decisions you're less likely to back okay well we're done with the game half of you leave now because you just kinda can't necessarily easily do that which has its own ups and downs but it's just different there's more equal share of profits because you are talking about that and negotiating that this kind of goes without saying so you show that there's an increased quality of life at work and people are kind of more invest in it because they feel like a sense of ownership they're not just working at a place they are part of a thing that they are building and maintaining and there's

a real sense of community and kind of emotional support and a lot of these things or like that's often the case because you are getting together and making these collective decisions and sharing responsibilities and sharing the ups and downs of that kind of a yourself and there's a and the last thing is you're not depending on the benevolence of an owner an employer for everything I just said right like you know you could have the coolest boss ever but like they could go and get like the rabies virus and 28 days later like over the weekend and then it doesn't matter how cool your boss is on Friday they're still your boss and you don't have to rely on just the the whims of one person or you know some people up here to to make all these decisions for how your work space will be and kind of what you put into it and take out of it and there's a lot of like I've said there's a lot of conversation right now about unionization work or organization all kinds of stuff and that's awesome and worker cooperatives fit into this in different ways we're

giving power and ownership directly to workers you know unions exist to bring workers together so that they can have a greater leverage versus the people versus the bosses right there's that kind of inherent like sort of dynamic there whereas in coops we're just kind of I guess skipping to just not having bosses to begin with we kind of point to horizons beyond what we're told to expect as workers I think a lot of people hear about you know all this you know unions everything but coops and they're like oh like coops aren't new but they're new to a lot of people so it's just oh this we can make new things there might be better ways of doing this a history hasn't ended and we can also stand in solidarity with other workers who are fighting for power we can like you know because we have an understanding of yeah we wanted to create less exploitative structures we can recognize and maybe he's like stand

in solidarity with other people who are trying to create less exploitative structures of their own in just and also like there are unionized coops there are calls to work with unions there's all kinds of interplays with how these things work together which is pretty cool this is all just really exciting and we're you know these things exist a lot elsewhere in the US this is like I guess saying this is like like lost knowledge almost just because it was suppressed but it's building right now and it's really exciting so we used to come to a worker cooperatives in very different ways we're all very different in how we're set up and with our different assumptions and how we run things and where we're from and because it's just like any other kind of business and I think we're all gonna share a little bit about that right now starting with Ted I didn't do the introductions for everyone I'm really sorry I'm Scott from glory society we we yeah that's me yeah hi I'm Ted I'm from a pixel pushers union 5-1 - yeah all

right now Ted all right so as I said I'm from a pixel pushers union 5-1 - and we are a worker owned game development team I'm the artist on the staff and we are currently working on a game called tonight we riot so if you've heard that that's I'm the one who made all the pretty pixels anyways so I've been doing I've been doing games for a long time I got hired real young into the industry and without you know naming names places that I've been I've been doing it almost 20 years so I've seen you know benefits go away I've seen paid internships go away I've seen crunch become something that was just kind of like it happens occasionally to something that's actually planned which just blows my mind and so with all that in mind after doing this for so long you

know I figure there's got to be a better way to do this you know instead of looking for jobs every two to three years and kind of like what Scott said being at the the whims of either shareholders or you know the top brass at any given studio you know it would be interesting to try something new and I've always been a big fan of history and so what Scott was talking about like the idea of a suppressed history in the United States I started looking into different ways of doing things and I ran across a group from roughly a hundred years ago how many people here are familiar with the IWW the Wobblies wow that's really cool and I saw so many hands go up well I was watching a documentary about the Wobblies and it just struck a nerve I was watching and I was like this is great the idea of workers owning you know the means of production the idea of working

collaboratively in a democratic way to you know achieve whatever your goals are and there was a line it was a quote that one of the workers said and they were confronted by a group of hastily deputized drunks where they called out they said who are your leaders and I said we're all leaders here and I've always taken that to heart so at pixel pushers we're all leaders and no one's in control of everything except for us and so when we vote on things you know even though I'm the one who kind of got the ball rolling I get voted I get outvoted you know pretty routinely which is great it's very liberating so with that in mind we that's kind of what we call a shop democracy so inside our shop we are democratic we vote on major things to do with the game and major things to do with the team so we even voted on me being here today and I'm here so obviously that worked out but it's also

good because even as a small team especially if you know if you guys are indie devs out there and you've got your small team it's kind of good to start with like best practices going forward and we started talking about like you know okay so if tonight we riot is successful and become self you know self propelled how do we want to handle things in the future should we grow and you know talking about democratic the idea of voting your managers into position as means to kind of separate the idea of salary and it management and the idea of separating management from workers would kind of go by the wayside because if you're just voting amongst yourselves in your department and there's no salary linking you to that management position you're probably going to be less concerned with holding on to that power than you are of being a good manager so if someone's not a good manager and they're not comfortable with it even it helps both sides so you know if someone wants to step down from management they totally can if they're not doing a good job the workers can vote them out easy peasy so anyways so

like I said you know we're working on tonight we write it and I'm a big believer in the idea that the personal is the political that everything about our lives cannot be separated from the context of the lives we live in the lives of other people around us so with that in mind I decided to make a game that was about workers liberation and really use that as a means to propel the ideas of our studio and it doesn't mean like every game we're ever gonna make is gonna be politically motivated but this one is kind of especially so but you know it's it's kind of like you know no matter what you're making you're gonna be making it based on the experiences you've had the upbringing you've had the place where you live and the culture and society you live in and so with that in mind we really wanted to push those ideas with our game and we also think

that it's a better way to develop we have a lot of efficiency and flexibility you know there's no real taboos there's no you know worrying about whether or not your manager is gonna handle being questioned or your boss is gonna deal with the idea of a subordinate you know raising a hand and a meeting everyone has a voice but also everyone has accountability too so there's no one who's you know kind of a sacred cow at the company that can't be questioned or you know that their word is law and also on top of that you know it's it's lower development costs now this changes from Studio to studio but with the way that we work our team we all start with the same base salary and then depending on the game that you're working on everybody gets an equal share of the profits from that game so no one's making a huge you know hand-over-fist amount over anybody else in the studio and you know that that works out quite well because you're not having to pay for a C suite of executives at the top of a company or making sure that a certain percentage of

the profits go to a group of shareholders it goes right back into the hands and pockets of the people who actually made the game so yeah that kind of covers the fair distribution of profits and oh and there we go and that's pretty much it so I'm gonna lead on over two motions woman with uh Steven here thanks all thank you that was cool so as I briefly mentioned earlier on on promotion twins we're based in France motion twins being around since 2001 functioning as a workers cooperative since then officially sort of legally set up as a workers cooperative a little bit after that and we made the game dead cells which hopefully some of you might have heard of so yeah our logo is a red star as you can see that's a little screenshot of our old website which was kind of stinking constructivism and and very much that of that mentality so just

a little bit of disclosure I'm gonna be the black sheep of this talk I wanted to talk about some of the complications of running a workers cooperative and some of the hard parts about being directly in confrontation or in discussion with your with your fellow man or woman at all times so you know emotional twins kind of like the the classic startup story you know but with communists so it was just a bunch of dudes making video games together and they were like man this is awesome we love making video games and they started making money from and they're like mmm okay well we're gonna have to pay taxes because you know the government exists so we need a legal structure to handle that so they set up a company and a standard corporation in France comes with a whole bunch of implications in terms of how actually distribute power someone has to be a management it actually has to be someone who's legally responsible in that person well they are their heads on the line and so that comes with all kinds of complications however in France there's something cool called the scope

associate a cooperative do for the public so basically a workers cooperative in French and that actually allows you to have an official recognized by the state legal structure that sort of perpetuates the existence of this workers cooperative and so we went down that path I'll be the one I said we not me I was probably like 12 when they did that but you know so it's managed to survive and I think there was a couple a couple of reasons for that I think one of the major strong points over scope is that it really pushes the bar in terms of what we do so because everyone has the right to have a say absolutely everything may be being like the marketing and business dude I can come and say to the game play programmer who's sitting around here somewhere but um what he just did sucks and then I think we should change it but that that can be a difficult in the sense that sometimes you can get okay if there's eight of us you can have seven different

opinions from every single one in the room also saying we think you should do this and you have to try and peek through all of that noise and come up with the consensus but it also definitely helps because no one feels illegitimate in saying hey I'm not happy about this aspect of the game can we do something about them so some of the some of the issues that we've sort of run into with the structure of the scope is that there are peculiar peculiarities to the legal structure of the of the call which means that once money goes into the coop it becomes the property of the coop and of the the National Union of coops so it doesn't technically belong to the workers in the coop it belongs to the workers in the coop and all the potential future workers in the code so that actually makes it very difficult to put money aside because once it goes in it stays in the company and if we take it out to spend it on a game it has to come back and if it doesn't come back and that can leave the workers in a little bit of a

sticky situation as to okay why did you spend all this money and it then not come back for the future workers of the core and if we keep making games that keep making money that's not a problem it's actually a cool thing because it perpetuates the structure but it does also make us cautious about having a huge amount of reserves so not all fun and games limits to organizational efficiency this I was on really on my egg game when I made that title so at motion tween is zero heart rushing and and and there's three sort of fundamental pillars that we talked about so it's equal equal pay equals say and equal work okay apart from that we're like I mean based on that we're all entirely equal what that means is that probably we're limited in terms of how much we can grow we will probably always stay small maybe seven you know it's kind of that happens on discussion about feeding a team off a pizza or something like that just because once you go past you know you go

past ten all of a sudden you need to have much more rigorous internal structures about internal communication making sure that everyone's talking to each other when there's eight of us you can just literally shoot someone you know if can say hey what do you think about this and what it means is that you have to have probably a lot more rules and a lot more systems than what you would have in a standard company or at least a lot more tools that allow everybody to to have that accountability and to know that everyone else is doing the right thing so time we track time quite carefully generally not because people are slacking when you're an owner and a participant in your own company there's lots of motivation to work the problem is that it goes too far and quite often you have people who were coming into the office on the weekends just because they're like man I'm so excited about my own company this is awesome and that starts the creative a little bit of a culture of crunch and so sometimes you have to be like dude take your step back go home hang out with your family play with your dog do whatever you go to do but don't be putting pressure on the rest of the

team by working in sales responsibilities that my famous quip is that when Xena well it's not mine really someone else said it but when it's a responsibility of everybody it's nobody's responsibility and you see that with the dishes for example the dishes never get done and when they do it's someone who grumpily goes in washes all the dishes then leaves an angry message don't slack like why don't you guys watch your dishes or something like that so you go to make sure that you have tools in place to take care of that for us it's a little sign that says wash your dishes now and us regularly looking and making sure that's okay someone leave the dishes here so that it doesn't pile up and that can be the dishes that can also be dealing with administrative tasks that no one wants to deal with like for example if we get audited by the tax man who has to go and see it with the taxman while he goes through three years worth of accounts not me crunch again when it's your company and you are responsible and you're also interested

in absolutely making a game success then there's kind of like a mentality that happens where it's like okay we're gonna we're gonna get this done let's get this finish we're about the ship and we don't you know there's nothing like the crunch that exists in the industry but it does happen into something we have to be very vigilant about because it can snowball and it can definitely lead to us all sort of feeling like at the end of a project like whoa we need to take some time off cool thing about being in workers cooperative is that you can just have a discussion where we say hey man you guys tired we tired let's all take two weeks off and we can do that that's great so fatigue as well fatigue is a big one because when you have seven other people coming to you and saying we're not happy with what you're doing or questioning your decisions particularly I felt that particularly strongly when I first arrived because I was the only non productive member on the business marketing doing the only person who sort of specialized in that subject and so I've got as many opinions coming from people who don't care about that stuff and aren't really specialized then to come and telling me worried but

you should be doing this you know okay and so you have to defend that you can't just say no no I'm in charge of this you have to defend your point of view and explain it rationally to everybody which takes a lot of time and can be can be tired so we covered washing up the other the other one that sucks is telling people that their fire or how you deal with what happens if something doesn't go right so so what does happen if it goes pear-shaped I put the little survivor icon if you've ever seen that that television show it's awful but it's a little bit like that because no one has the authority to fire anybody else so it's kind of like Game of Thrones makes me survivor you have to democratically say okay we decided the majority that you are not pulling your weight or no longer fit into the team and you're gonna be out and that I can tell you from experience is awful it stinks so some of the systems we put in place to

avoid that kind of situation hiring when we when we're hiring people it's kind of like getting married you know it's a super big commitment we generally have people do two six like consecutive six month temporary contracts so that gives us plenty of time to say okay this person fits in or this person doesn't fit in before we bring them in and you know most of the time you know in the first like the two months you like yet these guys are gonna be a great fit or sometimes you don't so we have to protect ourselves from that moment because getting rid of him is heart-wrenching so then questions about risk so for example dead cells when I joined the company I was brought on to help do a switch from web to mobile we hadn't had a successful web game in years we tried mobile and didn't like it wasn't really what we wanted to do we didn't have any successful mobile and so by the time dead cells came along it was kind of like a last ditch effort and when you're part of the coop you can do

all kinds of amazing things but some things that are kind of also insane and we bet the farm and basically said okay well we're gonna make dead cells we're gonna do something that we love doing and either will go out in a blaze of glory or it'll work and we want so fortunately it worked we're all still here which is cool but those kind of decisions managing risk can have a different sort of tality when everyone's like well you know we're even gonna do this or we're just gonna go do something else because this is what we love and if you're used to a traditional sort of business structure as I was when I came in that sort of seems like it's insane and then inequality like just individual difference and personal inequality some people are our leaders and loudmouths and want to get involved in everything and some people have direct confrontational styles for discussions that are gonna sort of crush out the more introverted people so how do you create space so that everyone who is a different type of person can express themselves how do you give how do you make sure that you can give responsibility to the people who won't put their hand right up and be like yeah I'm gonna do that you know you say okay

well you know we noticed that you haven't been asking for these kind of roles is there something going on and we try and sort of organize around that but that takes time and it's a management of the people that that you're working with and everyone is sort of doing that at all times so again none of this is a reason not to do it it's it's awesome fun but it does come with a whole bunch of different dynamics that you just don't have in a standard workplace so thank you hello I'm Ian I'm from tail spinners I'm based in the UK and was a bit surprised to be asked to this because I hadn't realized how little us seems to know about coops because we have really large-scale corpse-like international multinational corporations in the UK and across Europe who work in this way we are we are multinational national we have one guy in Toronto but

yeah so so we're coming at this from quite a different angle because we're not a development studio tail spinners are a writing studio in outsourced writing studio we help everybody from indie to triple-a but mostly kind of indie to mid-level with story for their game in whatever form that might be so we're a studio of people who all work together to do that but that's not really what we are or what we were because we we started as two freelancers who went well we seem to be visiting an awful lot of the same potential clients why don't we team up and we thought about all of the reasons why that was a good thing and we adopted a company name and a logo and we made a website and suddenly people started treating us differently and the conversations that we had radically changed as individual freelancers so they stopped asking us things like are you available because you're a company and clearly therefore you are always available and they stopped asking for things like writing tests in a lot of cases because we have a cool logo or something so you can do

the job so it was very strange and thatis thinking about how the whole thing holds together and about the gig economy and I'll talk about that in a little bit but it went very well and we expanded we always had we come up with a way to deal with the fact that we might have too much work because everybody thinks were available all the time by having other freelancers to help us now kind of on-call off of four specific if they had skills that we didn't have in the house and then we needed to grow and we thought about it and went well why did we get together in the first place well actually it was for mutual protection right so maybe we could talk to some of our freelancers we'll see if they want to join and be part of this and that won't happen so we've grown into a group of what are really freelancers but a group of freelancers will collaborate and cooperate and actually work together today this gave us a load of advantages some of which we thought about upfront some of which only really turned up later on so these were our original reasons and these were kind of a pitch also that we gave to to our prospective

freelancers to say why don't you why don't you join us creative support is a big one so if I'm writing something I'm writing a bunch of dialogue and I could immediately then send that to the client and say hey here's the dialogue what do you think but they haven't been trained in dialogue in any way the ability to pass it over to another of us internally and say can you just have a look at this am i doing something insane here have I got it all wrong in some way do you think the client will like it you know is it story wise you're trained in story does it hold up and they can do that for you and the brilliant thing is because we've signed an NDA as a company we can talk to anybody else in our company who has a particular set of skills or whatever it is about to that piece of work so if one of us is much stronger in design and we've got a design issue and that the person who's writing it is stronger and dialogue they can just pass it over if I'm banging my head against a brick wall with a story problem I can call up anybody else in the company and say hey hey here's my problem can I explain this to you and as normally happens when you start doing that you come up with the solution yourself but because they're under the same a da at least you can talk to them about that so creative support is a huge thing emotional and social support and I can't

stress strongly enough how important the emotional side of it is as an individual freelancer you are on your own against the world you have nobody to help you possibly you know your partner at home or something like that but it's a very lonely existence and you're dealing potentially with a string of clients and you might see them for a few months that's the that's the social bit right and we're dealing with different people every day and you have no kind of ongoing conversations even about what what movie did you see last night any of that sort of stuff and being able to be in a group with people who can emotionally support you whether it's I'm really struggling with this client can somebody help me out whether it's I'm writing a knee-jerk response to this client can somebody shut me down before I press send or any of those kinds of things it's so valuable to have other people just around you and feel as we've talked about family here before and feel like that that family from an external point of view there are huge advantages to being a company I've talked about the kind of just the feel of having something like a logo in a website and all the rest of it just that professionalism but it also brings a lot of weight with

it what you don't have as an individual freelancer so if you're struggling with a client who isn't paying their bills for some reason as an individual freelancer you have not a lot of weight with that you can threaten legal action or something like that in an email but there is as much to think well you're a tiny company you're one person on their own how are you going to afford a lawyer whereas if we look like we've got more weight from that as being an organization being a company and actually we might have engaged a lawyer I'll talk about that later but an email and properly headed paper that looks like it's come from you know a proper company makes a huge difference internally being a company is useful for economies of scale so we need an accountants if each individual freelancer had to organize an accountant and pay them accountancy fees and a deal with accounting systems that that cost that you know not only does it cost money but it costs time for each individual freelancer but we only have to do that you know once for all of us same from the legal stuff saying from websites saying for PR same for for example being here at GDC there are two of us here at GDC if we wanted to do

that before as are a group of individual freelancers all of us might have had to pay our own way to come across here to all who are our kind of business dealing and actually be fighting each other for different deals and clients and that's just pointless and it means that we can afford to stand here at GDC as a group between us which works brilliantly practical support if I'm ill or something and I need somebody else to answer an email or I'm busy here at GDC then we've got people within the company who can do that we've got people who can cover each other we've got people who can you know oh god I forgot something somebody emailed me something from that thing back from the UK or whatever it happens to be so just the practical support of having other people around you is great and and just strength in numbers and and if you think about it from a freelancer point of view you've got a list of contacts but if we've got four six eight of us that list of conflict new contacts is magnified hugely and we have all of those different relationships and if we as a company get a contact from our

particular possible clients we can go around everybody else to say yeah does anybody dealings with this company before is there any connection is really linked we can make here and offer them there is and you just magnifies that the best thing numbers so we've done that for a while it's worked very well and we've discovered some other things and thought about it a bit which which yeah are really good so the safety net isn't a really important thing so how it works is we do a job for a client we get some money in a small percentage of that goes into the company coffers to pay for things like accountants and that sort of thing and the rest goes on to the the people who actually did to work now we put slightly more in the coffers than perhaps we might need to just as a sort of fighting funder and we came up with a use for it which we hadn't expected at all and we should have but we hadn't expected which is when a client didn't pay and suddenly an individual freelancer who was supposed to be paid by that job didn't have any money coming in that month which is every freelancers nightmare really but we have this safety net we have this fighting fund and while we couldn't pay the whole of that fee we could pay some

of that feat tide them over until we distort out the invoicing and got the client to pay up and that we did it once for the first time and suddenly went well this is a thing that we should just do we should put it in place and you could do that as an individual freelancer you could save but it never really works out like that does it and we've got everybody putting money into the pot so the pot is commensurately bigger so it just gives us that that kind of fallback in that safety which is something which is really valuable in in this gig economy skill development is something we didn't occur didn't occur to us but of course we are all different people with different skills areas of expertise and we are we have the ability to cross train each other invert as freelancers if I'm doing a voice Direction session with somebody wonderful the other people involved can be listening in sitting in the background on skype or however we do in the voice direction and they can pick up those skills if we're doing a story workshop we can have two or three of us in there to learn how to do story workshops and so we're we're cross-training each other all the time and something I should have said last slide I guess is that the strength in

numbers thing applies to the skills as well right so I might be really good to dialogue we have matt who's who's excellent at archaeology and and that sort of thing alongside what he does and we have somebody else who's very much into narrative design and those skills will all feed off each other and improve each other and it means that if we go to a client we have a much better offering right so we can't just say well yeah I can I can do the dialogue but you'll need somebody else to do them a narrative design we don't have to do that we can do the whole thing the gig economy so this was the big revelation really because we kicked this off at about the time it was becoming obvious that the games industry was changing particularly amongst Indies and mid level which is it's much more like the film industry now which is a small creative team comes up with an idea they maybe get some funding for that idea they hire a bunch of people on temporarily and they get rid of them towards the end of the project and that's happening in big studios it's happening at very small studios that's the life we're in and that's difficult to unionize it's it's I wouldn't say it's easy to you know it's big companies but you can see how it might work you can see how all they are all the workers at a particularly large company can go

no we're not having any of that we're gonna walk out if I walk out as an individual freelance writer of a project they go goodbye and hire somebody else so we're sort of micro unioning unionizing by by being in this co-op together because of all of the benefits I've already talked about I mean things like I need my contract checked well we have a lawyer as part of the company things like the safety net all of those and things like just having that logo and that weight with the client so I don't know how many other freelancers around in here in this room today but I strongly strongly recommend you think about teaming up with other people if only for the key thing to me is that emotional safety news is not being on your own and not feeling alone and that's terribly terribly valuable and I'll hand that over back to Scott I already talked to bunch so I need a drink

alright I thanks everyone for talking that was cool alright so we just launched this like a week and a half ago publicly which is funny because it took like forever to get going which we'll talk about in a second but um Bethany and I are two-thirds of the Coty of two thirds of the core team that made a game called night in the woods and we afterwards we're working with a really fantastic artist named Ren Faire and she's not here but we we needed to form a team after night in the woods for our next game we had a bit of money coming in from night in the woods so we're like okay what's get this going not what you're supposed to do is one of a couple things you hire on some people it's like Bethany and are like we started this and then they do like magazine stories or whatever about us there's something and then we also brought on this artist and it was super cool or something or or

more likely it's just Bethany and I working we bring on a bunch of freelancers and contractors for like short term things here and there and you know staff up and then staff down at the end of it and so we were getting into that but it just kind of seemed like wrong right and like Bethany and I we've worked a bunch of jobs a lot of service industry and also just being kind of struggling artists for a while until we kind of fell through the side door into making video games so we've had like a lot of like bosses over the years we've been very aware of that dynamic between being an employee and kind of being the person in charge and it just didn't feel right something just felt like about it we're like you know we like run a lot why would we want to be Ren's boss right her voice is as valuable as ours is so I acted about it pretty hard for a few months because I just didn't know what to do right I was like we need to make this thing that I don't know how to die just doesn't feel right and then I heard

about this whole worker cooperative thing and was just immediately like wow this great yeah this before we got into all the complicated part of actually doing it and everything but if at least at first I was like this is fantastic and it took us a really long time because I've said a couple times like in the u.s. like there aren't a lot of worker cooperatives there's like they're in the hundreds they're growing now but it is like I've been saying it's like lost knowledge it's like when you have to like read the item descriptions and darksouls to get the story it was like that that's what it felt like sometimes just getting a little bits here and there of how to do this in the US so it took a lot of legwork and research and a lot of googling a lot of like trying to find like local like people who were involved in cooperative like Pro like cooperative building organizations and all that kind of stuff talking to Ted here talking to my friends Saleem up at co-op in Montreal a bunch of other people and just getting kind of ideas

and so we began acting basically as a worker cooperative in 2018 and then we took us a while to get our legal entity because the government shut down for awhile and we couldn't get our paperwork through and all that but we then we quietly publicly legally launched it just last month so why do we do this we there was a history of projects that the Bethenny and I had been in I co-founded an international indie animation collective called eight Network Club a few years ago night in the woods was very egalitarian like we did vote we knew there wasn't a hierarchy in that but it was all informal and so the idea of like formalizing that making that an actual like structure that we were really a part of and not just oh we like to keep it pretty horizontal around here type of thing that sounded dirty anyway there was also I think experience also with IWW knowing some IWW folks were in

DSA Democratic socialists of America labor organizers there and game workers unite which is the worker unionization worker organization advocacy organization in the games industry that a few of us are a part of and also just a lot of years of bosses it kind of made us not want to want to do this right like I've had good bosses and bad bosses but they're still bosses and the good bosses I would have liked them a lot better if they weren't my boss you know and so yeah tired his bosses and employees but wait I messed up this thing was supposed to stay wired tired bosses employees wild worker owners right it's not like it's gonna get rid of all your problems like as you know si was talking about there are complications that come with this but it's not like being involved in the more in a more hierarchical like boss worker we're gonna say like you know thing gets rid of problems that you're gonna have other reasons why we did this there's

creative benefits to working like this I've worked in a lot of creative you know scenarios where there was like here's their project lead and then there's like the boss or whatever and you're kind of just coming in every day going alright what are we doing today or like oh no the scope expanded over the weekend like oh my god I left on Friday and it was one thing and I came back on Monday it was another and now I have to do all this work and someone set a deadline and I have to there's just a lot that we can talk and planned out it so it's way harder for me to walk in and go okay everybody we're doing this or something we talked about it there's creative benefits to that um that we found we have kind of like you know it's not as though like we all get together and like when Ren draws something all of us get together and vote what the cat looks like or something you know there's a term that I heard a while ago actually in a documentary about a like construction co-op that's a horizontal organization and vertical deployment meaning that we all come together and talk and make these decisions but at the

end of the day we also have our lanes that we operate in and so while we can talk about things and vote on things and discuss things that we also trust each other to be able to do what we do best it's not like you can't have creative direction like I'm kind of operating again voted on by the team as kind of a creative director kind of nudging us along in a certain direction so you can it's not like it's a giant free-for-all you know there's still higher there's still like not hierarchy but there's still organization and how you do stuff and these creative benefits of that because people feel empowered to talk you know to speak up because you have to get some consensus you have to build consensus with each other you do have to look out for like personalities that just do dominate those spaces that's something you really have to look out for but it tends towards there being more kind of creative collaboration because as multiple people have said you do have to talk about this stuff there's the material and organizational benefits which I've kind of gone over like material is you know we talk about

where the money's going what money we're putting into it like how we're paying well who's getting paid that kind of thing oh we need to bring someone on okay let's all talk about this because this isn't just like oh they hired someone and I walked in and there was someone there and now the company's like yeah we gotta lay people off cuz it no we talk about that stuff before we make those decisions there's an interpersonal benefits of a mirror talking to Ren when we were first talking about this and she had just left a mobile studio that was particularly crunchy and I kind of like okay so we want to do this worker cooperative thing blah blah and she was like after I kind of explained it she's like why aren't every company right isn't every company working this way because it's one of those things where you suddenly realize like oh like once you get rid of the boss-employee distinction so many things change right like like overtime stuff okay we need to talk about that like crunch okay we need to talk oh do we need a deadline to me to sprint through the next week to hit like an e3 demo or something cool let's

take a week and a half after that we can just talk about that that changes how you interact with each other there's friction there's all kinds of other stuff as you come to a an agreement or you come to consensus on something but there's not one person just telling someone else what to do and that it has all these implications that you don't even realize when you put them into place like it trickles down into all these things there's this toxic nature that you this is toxic dynamic that you get with a more hierarchical system that just kind of doesn't apply as much when you're working cooperatively and it's just really personally fulfilling everyone feels like they own what they're doing because they do legally own what they're doing you know we have there are three co-owners that are in our company will be staffing up to probably five by the end of it and as we kind of built to a fuller team but we all owned this like we're all on paper you know so it's not just like I said at

the beginning it's not just like oh we like to think of ourselves as a family and we all own it it's like no we legally do that's different and we went from like this dread to this excitement about how we structure like our labor and our relationships together as workers because like I said it's not like it solves every problem it's not like everything is some of these guys forever but like it's exciting to be able to do this it's exciting to own what you're making it's decide it's exciting to not just you know all I work here and part of this team too is like no I work together and we constitute what this is all of us there isn't one person doing it and then we all just work for them it's like no we all work for ourselves and for each other and that's just really different and so the yeah that was that's pretty cool I think that's why we like it so much and so what we're going to do now is opening it up to some QA there's a microphone there I can't see it because there's lights I think we have a few minutes left to do yet we got about ten minutes left

so if you want to come up say your name where you're from and just speak your question is the microphone that is a long line already you can ask this general questions or if there's anything specific from anyone hello i'm gabriela from argentina i wanted to ask you if you know about big corporations and if you have any idea of how to apply to value your gaining enterpriser whatever you talk about corporations in the u.s. know it's like big corporations I don't know how its said like properly in English is impressive BAE it's like an organization that certifies you that you're a

corporation that both helps like okay big carps yeah it helps both not well both in monetary but also helps the society and and maybe amending the environment so it's not like you own a corporation and you make donations to to fulfill some things or avoid taxes it's it must be on your on your I know statement yeah reason to exist is yeah yeah so it's like the next step for like

the future of enterprises it's that so but it's most use it in physical things so maybe you buy stuff that is [Music] I know I knew but in in a in products that are not physical I don't know how I can apply it so well if you don't know it's okay yellow you can like I don't know of any off the top of my head like any game companies who have a like as part of their reason to exist changing the world for the positive but I I can see how it could happen I mean you could start a game company that has a purpose of creating educational content with the

idea of of changing actually in there guy in the panel doing something like that you're making a game that is the political statement so maybe ideas to yeah to influence political discourse yeah that I mean that's kind of we're trying to do with our game as we realized it really wasn't a game like that with the message that it had that was unabashedly positive that there wasn't like you know kind of a last minute real and I've liked both sides sort of kissed is bad and you know so the other thing we have in the UK things called CICS Community Interest companies and there are certainly games adjacent companies in there there's things like special effect which is trying to give people with with disabilities access to ways to play games in different different ways and they're sort of nonprofit Community Interest Company similarly we have a company local to us who has set up a retro arcade and co-op working space for developers to work in and that's done as a Community Interest

Company and it actually opens up a lot more things like government grants because the thing if they're giving money to you to help you improve the community so it's actually a really interesting structure and I've not seen it from the point of view of of game developers directly there you go thank you very much hi my name is Jamie an innovative developer based in Phoenix my question for y'all is how do you go from already having a small studio or a small LLC to actually like biting the bullet to make this change that it seems like there's a

lot of interpersonal lifting and convincing that has to happen and as a studio that's primarily engineers we're not terribly good at talking to each other apart so do you have any suggestions or tips or strategies for how to drive that conversation and actually become a co-op yeah there's a lot of what we mentioned that's pretty nuts and bolts right you know a lot of us have some like you know political ideals that go into this but you kind of don't need those you can just go here's how this would benefit all of us you know there's a pretty like this will be there is an efficiency aspect to it there's an aspect of transparency with each other accountability where you like you know we have to hash this out you know even if there is kind of that solitary life of the engine here you can get together and say okay well we all want to have some control over this space and what we're doing with our with our company so you know you can just you know like the math checks out for lack of better words I think that you don't

necessarily have to be all like super high-minded about it like it's pretty mundane like it's this just is just a system that can work better and can avoid a lot of problems that we'd hit down the line so it's not just job security it's just like things can make more sense because you're talking about them and discussing them and working them out together and listening I think the most practical thing today where we we didn't approach you really from political point of view wasn't a practical thing and the most practical thing we did is simply write it down it's just list if we changed into this structure what would change how what are the benefits what are the dangers what are the costs and make sure that everybody in the company understands that and if you can for us we really clearly saw the benefits for that of that and if the same is true for you then that's the thing to do and if it isn't true for some reason then maybe don't do it well that like kind of what you were talking about if like getting people to talk to each other and stuff I mean it's all about everybody's schedules and stuff and you don't want to get in the way of other people's work of course and

you got to trust people in their departments to do what they're supposed to be doing because that's a big part of you know least my beliefs for worker coops is you know trust your workers and trust yourself but you know if you if you need to you know one thing is it you know we've done is you know every I think it's like pretty much every month we kind of just tap each other on the sole shoulder and say thank you hey what do you what are you working on you have any concerns like you know let's talk about the months ahead and kind of keep it succinct too so it doesn't just ramble on and then everybody goes back to working on what they're working on yeah at the risk of rambling on we haven't really thought about communication in huge depth here but communication is vital to any of these things but it is to any company right if you're doing a company right it should be all about communication yeah like one of the big things that we continuously talking about is how we do that do we do like a structured standup you know every day like you know agile development all that or do we do like a once a week thing like how do we keep in contact and

it is you can't get around the human side of talking division unfortunately all right that's just what the DOS hi I'm tabby I'm an independent developer from Toronto and I was just wondering especially I'm a studio owner that would like to transition to having a co-op and game-making is a really multidisciplinary activity so if you're starting this with just a few people and you do need to bring on people eventually who are doing a job that is not something you can do or not something that's sort of in your core skill set how do you deal with subcontracting do you do that or you do you staff up or what's the process for bringing on more people especially if you're starting with a low budget so one of the things that we did was we kind of just discussed amongst ourselves like what are the things we're gonna need intermittently and do the people we're talking to do they have other skills that they can bring to

the table because with a small team like ours a lot of us wear different hats so you know I'll handle a lot of like the business side of things and talk to the publisher and you know arrange travel and stuff like that even though I'm artists on the team yeah but when it comes to stuff like needing concept art or animation or stuff like that we'll contract out but we kind of have it in our best practices that we always make sure that you know no one works for free you know we pay all of our contractors and if we can't if like someone comes to us and they're you know fees are outside of our budget we're honest about it we're like you know say hey we think you're great we love the stuff that you're doing but it's outside of our budget and we're not gonna make you you know lower your prices just because you think we're fun folks to work with so we want to make sure everyone comes out of this feeling good and feeling like their labor was worth it I think for us like the way I think about that kind of stuff because this is as someone who was a contractor for a long time I think about this and it's like if we're a co-op

right and like all of us together open a pizza place we're always gonna make pizzas what we do is make pizzas right we get we all put in our money and we get a shop in an oven and we're making this stuff but like we're gonna have to hire someone to paint our sign or like design our menus like we don't do all that stuff or like design our furniture once we get big enough to have a nice dining room and all that so at least with us there's an idea of like yeah what is like what are these core skills that we that we bring to it we don't want to end up in a situation where we have like someone who's basically just a contractor the kind but they just don't have a vote and then on the team yeah I was gonna say how do you avoid the coop becoming the bosses of the subcontractors that you're working with I think that part of that is like there are certain situations where there are like yet when you like pull something like when you contract someone in there is like a task and you do talk to them there's all kinds of ways that you can actually make that a non terrible process which I think anyone who's been

a contra who's been a contractor can list out really quickly the things used to do crediting prominently pay having very liked and talking to them like you would talk with anybody else the people who actually get to vote in the coop of the people who were in the coop when people are kind of on boarded like like see was saying there's kind of like a probational period so that you can decide if you actually like each other enough to kind of enter into this kind of thing but with contractors you just do the best that you can and don't end up in a situation where you were relying on them to be the workforce for your co-op and yeah and stuff so it's one of those things you have to keep yourself accountable on Thanks last question all right sorry everyone else in line are I think some of us might hang out afterwards they like Jim said all right well well keep this quick then I'm MJ I'm from Salt Lake City I am a graduate student in games in production what advice do you have for somebody who is a leftist who wants to enter the industry and wants to work

under co-op to get your foot in the door in this area that's more exclusive well as Scott said there aren't that many places that are doing it yet but that's somebody getting in the industry I mean from family it would be kind of following what I've been saying which is find other people to team up with I mean if you have a set of skills and you're entering as as a freelancer the vendor doing what we did and see if you can find other other people with those skills who are equally looking and you've got double the power to to do that that's one way to approach it I'm just jumping in to be part of a cooperative I guess it's a find a cooperative yeah I think also like it is very now is the time to get these things started um you don't have to like all of us came to these like differently right like there's free lunches and gig economy workers there's people whose Studios transitioned into that there is you know Bethenny and I we had enough money to get the studio going and so we decided to go with that thing but often found like a lot of coops they don't start with everyone working full-time together all the time right like you can

start something like this while you're all doing contract work or working with something like that and build it up like that's kind of what we did with pixel pushers yeah yeah that's what we did is well yeah so it's not just always like a off the write off the blocks we founded a co-op and we're like running and stuff because there's a there's difficulties there's like you have to build up resources you have to see if you work together as a team you know you have to work out your like bylaws and all kinds of stuff and actually go to the co-op resource URL up there for all kinds of information on this kind of stuff so I guess it would be kind of like just be flexible with it and you know maybe start something with some like like-minded folks and kind of build it up into being the thing that you want it to be because it doesn't have to be your full-time job immediately which is good because there's not many of them and if you're just starting something it might take a while to to get it to the point where it's you know your life and stuff so

that would be I think it's a big smattering of advice okay cool thank you okay I think that's it I think [Applause]