Lessons from KO_OP: Surviving on the Fringes

[Music] thanks everyone for coming out to my talk it's called lessons from coop surviving on the fringes and just a little bit about me real quick I'm the co-founder and studio director of coop my background is in cultural analysis and Media Studies that's what I went to school for and I worked as an organizer an administrator for research lab in video games so I have a lot of experience kind of like with organizations and run how to run them smoothly I was also a community organizer in Montreal where I helped organize a Mount Royal game Society which was one of the biggest indie groups before we shut it down just this past month and basically I'm self-taught and I'm just figuring things out like the rest of us so I don't have any formal education or background making games or running businesses or whatever so why this talk I think that there's not really a lot of advice when it comes to how to structure a studio and how to

run a game development team there's a lot of advice on how to make video games but I think that luck plays such an important part in in making things that I there's so many things that you can't account for but one thing that you can't account for is your studio structure and how you run your project and that's actually something you have a practical hands-on thing that you can change and so this is for people who are interested specifically in starting a company and starting a studio that to make games commercially and sustainably and while I think you know unionization is an incredibly important goal there are other things that can augment that goal and help us reach that point and one of them is in learning about coops and starting coops also there are other forms of making games and other structures that are more loose and fluid that some of these things that I'm talking about might not be super relevant for so just keep that in mind so a couple caveats one of them is survivorship bias something to keep in

mind whenever you're hearing a talk by anybody and anyone's giving you advice is that they're giving you a talk from a perspective of surviving and success maybe and that might not be like it might not be the whole story also there's a whole lot of privilege and money that goes into starting any sort of venture like this like having a studio and we were really lucky we had a lot of privilege and we also had money saved up from previous jobs or were able to borrow money from friends and family and things like that and I think that that goes a really really long way to becoming sustainable and it's not really talked about a lot and also experience level like I mentioned a lot of like myself personally and a lot of people at coop didn't make games before we started the studio which means that the kind of advice I'm talking about the sort of strategies that we've learned are coming from that perspective so if you have a more formal training or experience or background your mileage may vary so coop is a company that we founded in 2012 and just a little bit about it we've made a couple games we most

recently released nog on PlayStation and iOS that's what it looks like we also worked with Square Enix Montreal on an expansion for Lara Croft Go called the mirror of spirits where we made an all new chapter for that game and we had a full creative freedom did all new art music and design and it was a really fun project and this is a lesser-known game of ours called please don't space dog where you pilot a truck with a space truck with your dog and it was made for the original doc ock ulis developer kit and this game actually helped us travel around the world on the festival circuit and get us in front of a lot of people and open up a lot of opportunities for us that we wouldn't have otherwise had and that was just about being in the right place and at the right time but also we have a bunch of cancelled projects that I think we're really important in terms of building our visibility when we were working on them and helped sort of open doors and teach us a lot about making games so solar projects like skipping stones Red Rover and fledge we also do

contract work like I mentioned with Square Enix we've worked with Cartoon Network and other companies and we also do something called collab which is a fund that we started where we give people a couple thousand dollars like whatever we can afford at any given time so we're going to one to two month project out of our office where we give them resources help support and what I think is really interesting about collab is we don't take any ownership over the project so if the person we're doing a collab with decides to release their game for free that's fine if they want to charge money for it that's fine the money's there is it's not ours it's basically a thing that I wish existed for us when we were getting started for as experimental game makers and it's something that I think is really important and I'm gonna talk a little bit more about why you should give away your money if you have it this is a the first one that we did it's called garden areum by Paloma Dawkins cuyler and Alang Alang and this is orchids to dusk by Paul Clare sue and

Remzi Hruby and finally at co-op we've done a lot of workshops and we've been involved in the Montreal community where we're based and I think that that's been something that's been really important for us as well so what is co-op I get a lot of questions if it's like an art collective is it a company is it a workers coop and I think this is due to the fact that when we originally started we were really inspired by indie record labels like music record labels we wanted to to start a studio that kind of envisioned a way of making games where everyone's working on their own projects individually and they're supported by this umbrella name or this umbrella group called co-op we found out that because of not knowing what we were doing but that wasn't really sustainable and we kind of segwayed into being a more traditional studio structure where we're working together on smaller projects instead of everybody working on their own and that was just a thing where we realized we just didn't know what we were doing and everyone on their own was a recipe for disaster for us so

it is a company it's a federally registered company in Canada which gives us access to funding it's a for-profit corporation essentially and we're all salaried employees with benefits and our goal is to make artsy and experimental games commercially sustainably so most importantly we're structured as a workers cooperative so we're not actually legally registered as a workers coop and that's because when we were getting started we didn't actually even know about the coop structure the name ended up being a happy coincidence and we also want it to be a corporation because I gave us access to specific funding in Canada that's really really helpful to like give you hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially if you can get it but one thing that we did after our first year is decide to restructure the studio as a workers coop internally so we change our bylaws and what that means so like does anyone here know what a workers coop okay a couple of hands and so a workers

cooperative in ploy II owns the company at an equal level and that's regardless of their financial investment so if I put something like fifty thousand dollars into the start of the company and someone put in a hundred dollars we still own the same amount of shares and what's interesting is a lot of game studios and startups are actually very similar to coops when they just get started because you're just a couple of people you're all working you're wearing many hats you're sharing responsibility but what happens and where they diverge is when it comes to growth and I think when growth becomes your goal you're essentially optimizing for money and that's it and when you're optimizing for money it forces a lot of compromises and it creates exploitation even against best interest that's just kind of how capitalism works so as soon as you start doing things where you have to grow you're also increasing your overhead significantly and that means you have to

make games that like we'll be able to cover those costs and you start to make decisions that I think are exploitative because it's inevitable you need to keep the lights on so you do things that are that like will harm somebody at the end of the day so we handle growth by capping it so we have a rule where we can't grow beyond eight people and I think capping growth is one of the best things that you can do in this business because at the end of the day it's a numbers game and the less people you are the easier it is to find a sustainable model for yourself and it also means like when you're adding new people they are going to become an equal owner and that becomes really I don't know how to manage that at a certain size so staying small and staying sustainable is really I think key to being part of a co-op in making games and so what does that actually mean what does it change like if everyone in your studio is an owner at an equal level regardless of who they are it changes I think number one

responsibility people who are owners suddenly have this deeper responsibility in terms of the long term investment of the studio the projects your well-being and that impacts their decision making because they're making decisions in a new way now in mind of like what they want out of making games but also what the people around them that they're sharing and this responsibility need and want and it changes money because it changes how you decide to split money and what to do with money and that all has an ethical reaction and I think those ethical reactions impact things like crunch which I think there's a lot of discussion about crunch and Triple A but there's not really a lot of talk about things like what smaller businesses do because I think small business small businesses are as guilty as big companies in terms of terrible labor practices you just don't hear about it because there's no one reporting on it right and they're just like you don't hear about it as often

because it flies under the radar so someone's reporting on that stuff it happens in a completely unregulated without any accountability sort of way but when you have a co-op and you're and you have things like crunch you are actually making that decision as a team and even if it's the bad decision at the end of the day you are the one who's profiting from that work not somebody else you're not crunching because you have to and then someone makes money and they can either fire you or keep you doesn't matter they get to retain whatever the result of your crunch is and you just hurt yourself in a really significant way for someone else and I think that that's really messed up and then profits you can decide what to do with that as a team and in terms of health I think being a Knick how up is a more emotionally healthy way to make games because I think making games actually really sucks and is not a very enjoyable process in a lot of ways at least it isn't for me and so I think that when you're sharing that responsibility with people on an equal

level you're able to emotionally be more cognizant of what's going on and something that people ask about is like well if everyone's making the decisions together how do you handle disagreements and I think what people need to understand is that just because you're all owners doesn't mean that you all have to like agree on everything that you're working on you can have different disciplines and people are trusted to do different things but overall because you're all in it together you tend to find decision-making is geared towards the best like what's best for everybody and I think everyone kind of agrees on what's best so we haven't actually had to deal with a lot of disagreements and also how do you handle people leaving to be honest I don't know the answer to that because in the six years that we've started our studio no one's left yet and I think that that's actually a testament to to the coop model that people have this deeper emotional stake in the company and in making the games together that so far no one's left so I want to

talk about some survival strategies in relation to being a co-op and the first one is the team makeup so just like kind of what I was talking about how no one's left yet part of that is our personalities and our skill sets but I think a really important thing is the aspirations and when you're choosing like who to work with and who to start something like this with your aspirations are where you see the vision for the team in the studio and when you come together on that I think it's more important than any sort of like experience that you might have I actually think experience is probably the least important thing in making games because like I said making games kind of sucks so you want to do it with people who are on the same page as you and when you're going into business with them and you're sharing the ownership responsibilities being on the same vision is the most important thing being involved in the local community actually really enriches and influences the people around you like just being one of few coops in Montreal I think we have a

lot of discussions in the local community about that model and about that structure and why it works for us and that can influence a new generation of game makers I think that there's a lot of intangible benefits that come from being involved in the community that I can't point to any specific thing and be like we did this so this made us more successful or more survivable but I think those intangibles are actually really important to our survival and something about our team is that we have an art first approach and I think if it all boiled down to one thing that that's the coop DNA is that our team is essentially made like art the ownership is a bunch of artists and they're in charge of every decision in the studio and we make that decision with an eye for surviving and sustainability but it is an art first approach and I think that also impacts things like what kind of values we have and one of the things one of the values that we have is valuing production and having a production model so as for me is like one of the key owners in the studio I am a full-time producer essentially I don't

actually work on the like the day-to-day making of the games I am the producer on all our projects and I handle the business side of things and I think the fact that I'm an owner but I'm doing that makes me really invested in these projects that I'm not like actually working on in a day to day basis and the fact that my team thinks that I'm important enough as an outsider almost the creative process to be involved really means that they value having someone like like me around and I think that that goes towards creating a really healthy model of learning how to actually make games and having someone handle all the things that you don't want to handle when you're worrying about design challenges or whatever and one of the things that I think gets tricky when you have a co-op is how do you shield like a team from bad news or something that's difficult or how do you shoulder responsibility when you're all owners and you're all sharing in that and I think I kind of mention this a little bit before but I think you actually want to silo a little bit like you kind of just trust people to take care of things that are their domains and that you don't have to like micromanage everything so people trust

me when it comes to the money everyone has access to our bank account and they can check how much money we have if they want to but they just don't they just ask me and they trust me to bring up any issues if they come up and I'm not gonna keep anything from anyone because we're all in it together on an equal level so if I think they need to know about something I'll tell them and if I don't think they need to know about something they trust me to like keep that to myself and people talk about siloing in a really negative way because it means it's a breakdown of communication but I actually think sharing everything can sometimes be an unnecessary burden when people are trying to focus on things that there they need to focus on and a practical like management tool that I learned from my friend Tanya short at Kitfox and I think that this is a very common tool that I just didn't know because I know what I was doing is having bi-weekly check-ins with the team that are one-on-ones and I think what's really interesting with that it's like you just sit down and you talk and you're like how are you doing how do you

feel emotionally right now like how do you feel about work what's going on in your life or is it is everything good are you happy is there something that's making you unhappy and can I help with that and I think what's interesting when we're having that conversation as equals instead of an employer and employee relationship they don't tell me what they think they want me to hear right they tell me they're on it the honest truth and we can have that kind of discussion as equals and I think that that really levels the playing field and I understand where everyone is at and they understand where I'm at on an emotional level and I think that that goes such a long way like if I could boil down this whole talk it's kind of like be on equal levels and keep in touch on your emotions and that's making video games honestly and something that I think is bad advice that I heard a lot when we're getting started was just focus on your game don't worry about building a company and this might be good advice for some people that I actually think it's terrible because it doesn't really prepare you for a post ship reality and we treat our game

development as if every game that we're going to make is going to bring in zero revenue and that's how I think that's one of our most important survival strategies is like if we make stuff and we think it's going to do zero sales what do we need to do to stay in business and one of those and then even if you do think your games gonna be successful depending on the kind of funding you have you might not actually see any money anyways because someone else is recouping from your sales so you need to figure something out and one of the things that we do are is contract work and contracts are integral to keeping co-op alive but they can also be a trap it can be an emotional trap because sometimes bad contracts happen and you're stuck working on something that you really despise or hate and that can be really difficult but even when it's good you can end up in a trap where you basically do a contract it pays you fine and then you're at the end of it and you're like well now I need money again so I need to

do another contract and you can't break out of that cycle and that's something that I've seen happen a lot so what we do is we split the studio to do both contracting and original work if possible and I think that this ties into being a co-op actually and in our ownership because we're not like contracting out a B team to work on contract work we're taking like the people that we've been working with since the start and are putting them on contract and I think that we trust them to do that and we know that that work is feeding into this collective pot that's keeping us all alive and what we try to do is when contracts wrap up is we switch the team that was working on one contract to then we working on original work well the other team that was working on original to take on a contract and sharing that responsibility and I think we can only do that because we're all in the same level and that we all trust each other and it also means that we're getting contract work that's based on our specific reputation and our

specific experience and work which is really really important in terms of getting good contracts and finally I think I want to talk a little bit about money and how to give it away so I think one of the things that we do is we had this approach where we take whatever money we have and we put it in to like benefits like health care we do internship and mentorship programs and we do things like funding like for co-op for for collab sorry and honestly at the end of the day for [ __ ] money because I think you know regardless of how much someone invest it doesn't really matter because money and capitalism change our expectation of how to work with people and I think that that change of expectation really changes how you how it causes exploitation to happen because it creates a class system essentially of who has money and who doesn't and I think that when you reconsider your relationship with money you start to reconsider how to have a more ethical

and kinder sustainable way to think about work and relationships with people and I think that that's a more survivable model that's more emotionally like sustainable in the future and so at the end of the day I say [ __ ] money and that's my talk thanks Elaine we actually have some time for questions there's a microphone up there yeah you remember that hi interesting team structure I think I have a big question on how you actually do make the company decisions is it a vote based or it seems like you guys all have roles so maybe there's a specific role for making a final decision yeah so the question is is like how we actually make decisions on a day to day basis and a more practical sense right and I think yeah it is a voting based thing where whenever we have like whenever we have small decisions I'll just like that are in my domain or in someone else's domain

it will just make the decision and Trust but whenever there's like a bigger thing we call a team meeting usually once a week on like a Friday or something and we get some drinks and have a big meeting for one to two hours and kind of just fill in everyone on what's been going on and then put things to a vote and we do majority vote and so far in my experience there's almost never been a situation where like we've never had a split decision and when there are things that are a bit more contentious I'll first have one-on-ones with everybody to talk about things and then come together and have a team meeting and then just vote thank you this is really great talk thank you very much I've been actually sort of considering something like this I'm in Baltimore and we're thinking about putting something like this together but one question that keeps coming up is how intellectual property works in a system like this to a structure like this and keeping in mind the sort of [ __ ] money echoes like how do people who all own the company deal with if one person does eventually leave yeah their ownership of that intellectual property once they go yeah

so the question is how do you handle intellectual property when you have this sort of structure where everyone's sharing responsibility and ownership and what happens if someone leaves I think it's a really great question and that's something that we've thought about and at first we were really attached to the idea that like IP stays with the individual and his license to the company and we shifted to a model that is different because certain funding actually requires the company to own the IP to cover like some Canadian funding and so what we've done is honestly I think it's kind of a agreement right now that like because the way our company works every artist sometimes leads a project and it's their baby and and you know we all get really invested in that and we all take on that ownership but we know that there's a creative lead for every project and at the end of the day it's their decision what to do whenever there's issues and if they were to leave I don't imagine us ever working on that project because it wouldn't feel like it's our own and I wouldn't want to make a game on something that that I don't

feel like I actually own do you know what I mean yeah does that make sense yeah absolutely thank you thank you I thanks for your talk um so I feel like I might be the only one who thinks this is kind of like an anarchistic model but I really really love it I was just curious how you kind of prevent the anarchy other ways apart from just voting from like co-op and anarchy seem to be antithetical to each other so what are some more examples and also how how do you make up all those spokes like do you have a different type of gaming company model wise like you know if you could break down the roles as well two questions sorry okay so I think in terms of like how things don't like fall apart into like lacking structure is that I think having a production model is really important like being a producer and being like this is how we structure our days and this is what we're going to focus on on any given days but I think people just kind of when I talked about

the team fit I think we're all kind of people who gel really well together politically and ideologically and so we're all working we always feel like we're moving together in the same direction so I don't know if that really answers that part did you all start out together four of us did we're now seven people and so we started four and we hired over the six years three more people okay and your hiring process maybe yeah so for our hiring process it's not like you just get hired and suddenly you're an owner there's like a six to twelve month probationary period where we often will work with someone a new hire on their own project like a small game that's like a one to two months and just feel out if this makes sense for us but also this makes sense for them if they want to continue with this sort of model and then depending on how things go it kind of ramps up in terms of ownership to equal level okay vested time yeah exactly thank you so much welcome hey there hello I'm Dan question for you you say

[ __ ] money and well that's an admirable goal at the at some point you have to have seven people be able to pay their rent and have their kids go to school how do you reconcile that so the question is how to reconcile a [ __ ] money approach when you need money to survive and I think just what my point would be is that I think money is important I just think [ __ ] money like it's like money is really important you need money and you need to make decisions that bring in money so that you can survive but once you have an excess of that money what you do with it I think is really important and instead of just sitting on it and like making our runway longer we'd prefer to spend it on things and give it away if possible was here in the beginning of your talk you mentioned briefly on your initial goal of going

with a label like music label like structure I thought that was really interesting but you said it kind of fell apart but you didn't go into detail do you mind going into detail on what actually was the downfall or the pitfall of it yeah so the question is is I I talked a little bit about being inspired by indie record labels but how that didn't work out for us and why didn't it work out for us so some of the some of the projects that I mentioned were canceled projects those were all in our one year of being an indie record label in terms of our structure and I think it was just a matter of like I think it's inexperience at the end of the day that kind of killed us in our first year without model and I think it was a really important model because that inspiration like collected a group of people who are like-minded and were inspired by that but at the end of the day we didn't really know what we're doing I wouldn't realize how overly scoped our projects were and I didn't know how to be a producer for five different projects at the same time including my own that I was working on so if you were to go back in time would you say the model still viable but you

guys weren't experienced how to handle a model like that or is it just a bad model no I think I think that that model is really really powerful and really exciting and something I'd love to explore more but instead of individuals working on project I think it would be very small teams of two to three people and many small teams like that if possible thank you thank you is the last question okay you said you handle different financial investments the same I was wondering if you've had to handle different time investments the same people that have 20 hours a week versus 60 yes so the question is how we handle time investments across people so originally everyone was worked like we still kind of work all on our own schedules but we have a we have an office together and people have to come in to the office at least three times like three days a week and what we do essentially is everyone kind of puts in 30 to 40 hours a week and then after that it's just kind of like euro folk' go home it doesn't matter because I think it doesn't matter if you're doing 30 hours or 60 hours at

the end of the day it doesn't really change much so everyone just is kind of trusted to meet their responsibilities in whatever way they see fit at the end of the day okay thank you everyone [Applause]