I never said your people were only idea guys but I’m saying its very often the case when you talking about people who new to this whole thing.
I dont know any one who is only a project manager that does nothing else that has had a standing front page game. Most often developers who have trial and error experience do it just fine on their own. Im not trying to say its a job that requires you do development cause but all means marketing is a task most team lead developers (typically being a scripter) has someone with a already credible audience or background do.
Project Managers in my opinion need to be able to do exactly the marketing production to be saying they want anything just for something as simple as “Person X do Y” or “Person X is in charge of Y group on Z of the project.”
@TechSpectrum No offence, I don’t think either of you guys have much experience in this area.
Project Managers are pretty much a requirement for any successful game nowadays. If you look at almost any team-made game, you will see this structure.
Example: StyLiS Studios
StyLiS studios is lead primarily by litozinnamon and axisangle. They don’t just develop for the game, they used their own funds to improve and fund the original game (from Call of Robloxia) before it was successful. I can pretty much guarantee that Phantom Forces wouldn’t have been as popular as it was if it hadn’t been litozinnamon and axisangle working on it. They owned a stream of successful games (just like chichine) and organised a top-tier team of devs with a good payout.
You also refer to the 5% payout. I can promise you, 5% in a large (10 man) team project is very reasonable. Think about it - about 50% goes to funding the game, and then 5% for every team member (plus team leader). Everyone is getting an equal cut. If you want more, I don’t think that this is for you. No reason to go trash his thread if you want more than everyone else.
I really don’t understand your objection especially @TechSpectrum considering you run multiple similar game dev studios. This is the exact same principle here.
Here are the benefits of this offer:
extremely modest pay (if it’s a successful game, you’ll be devexing constantly with just 5%)
You get to work with top developers (check the staff list ) on a game with them
You get to have your name on a game which has a high likelihood of getting off the ground
You work under experienced project leaders like chichine to streamline your work
I can’t really think of anything wrong with the offer.
I don’t have a problem with the pay cut - originally I misread that 5% pay cut goes to the developers but wasn’t my beef here because I agree that’s reasonable on the account that their job is well met on their part. I don’t even have a problem with the management here, the root of my problem has been with the ownership and money handling if you were for say expecting to make projects well over 100,000 for instance and without some sort of for say contract, written agreement anything, it leaves the developers with no if the group owner doesn’t pay out be it intention or non intentional.
"Project Managers in my opinion need to be able to do exactly the marketing production to be saying they want anything just for something as simple as “Person X do Y” or “Person X is in charge of Y group on Z of the project.”
The whole purpose of this is to help them market their games. My role in this is to help them plan their games out efficiently, get the team members they need (scripters, builders, GFX, music etc) to have the opportunity to be front page. We have Team Leaders per team, including me. We help them to gather team members together to create a successful game, we support them and give them our ideas. Of course within group payouts, monetisation for this is key. They’re all in charge of their game, it’s a team effort after all.
Yeah - the issue of contracts is a global issue - it shouldn’t be brought up here.
…however
Developers are free to draft legally binding contracts, and NDAs. Personally, I won’t sign anything that ROBLOX staff haven’t sent me themselves, but you are free to do so
However, for developers not paying, it’s still based on trust. Unless you are willing to follow up an NDA or other legal document (unlikely) then it’s worthless imho. I, personally, having met Chichine irl trust him - and I also trust many of the staff members on his team.
If a devforum member does perform something like this, often it can be resolved by devrelations. Scamming isn’t allowed obviously and if there is something that ROBLOX can do, then you can work with moderation and devrel to fix it
Scamming is not something we’d ever do; I am completely against scamming people. As a developer myself, I wouldn’t go to the extreme lengths of scamming anyone as it would ruin my reputation completely and would ruin my chances on Roblox alone. Yes, it’s hard to trust people online, but having said that, we’re not forcing anyone into joining Vision if you don’t want to trust us. We’re solely doing this for the simple fact we want to HELP the community, that’s all
Project managers are essential – for instance, loleris is ridiculously successful, but his games have okay building and no sort of proprietary scripting that other games can’t compete with. His games have succeeded entirely because of his thoughtful management.
However, while project managers are supposed to drive success, the members of Vision Development Studios don’t seem to have anything to back that. Gagou has some pretty successful games, but I’m not seeing anything concerning project management from the other members. Zyleak/Diste work on successful games, but as far as we know only on implementation – not project management. From the rest of the team I don’t see any successful games. I’m not sure why you expect developers to trust you to lead their project to success when you don’t have a history of leading projects to success. You offer finding fellow developers as well, but that’s what Collaboration and groups like Hidden Developers are for, which don’t cost 5% of the game’s earnings.
You may receive better feedback if you pitch yourself better. Explain why you’ll lead a project to success, and what you have to back that.
To me, being a project manager is essentially reserving the easy parts of game development to yourself. Seeing a market gap, coming up with a game idea, setting out a development schedule, even putting together a team.
That’s why wannabe project managers are a dime a dozen on Roblox. And that’s why I think they rub developers the wrong way.
And without a proven track record you’re going to find it difficult to get talented devs on board.
Seems like a lot of people here don’t know much about a full game development team
Knowing chichine, he’s def a trustworthy person, and contracts don’t mean anything if you don’t follow up with them.
and since most developers aren’t going to be in your area normally, and generally speaking you’re dealing with minors. A legal binding contract won’t stretch all to far.
Also stop complaining about the 5%, good god, seems like none of you have done research on anything other than working on roblox. I mean hell, sites like Evanto take a huge cut out of your sales. But it’s because they host your talent.
Vision would be “Hosting” the developers talent in their group. 5% is nothing to a successful game.
The cut is fine for a successful project manager. Project managers are fine. The members in Vision are good people who aren’t looking to scam anyone. None of those were problems.
Vision has no background to show that they are successful project managers (not developers), and have not made any reassurements in response – this is the reason for the criticism.
Thing is - he does have a proven track record.
I can assure you that leading a project is far more difficult than being a dev on one. It’s not ‘reserving the easy parts’
Likewise, they put their own money - substantial amounts of it - into the game because they trust the developers. You’re referring to the sort of ‘game dev’ “studio” that goes around spamming PMs, not the sort that advertises on RBXDev.
A project manager has arguably one of the hardest jobs on a dev team. I can implement anything I want on roblox in a few days. It’s an amazingly powerful engine. Developing the game isn’t that hard if you know what needs doing.
The hard part is figuring out what needs developing, and how to stay on top of the competition. If you fail, it hurts the entire team.
This being said, I would never take on a project manager who does not have a portfolio.
You still get taxed 30% before it enters the group funds, so really to make 100, 000 off of only 5% the game would have to be making 2, 600, 000… and unless you’re making that every couple of days it’s not worth it as a developer. I would rather work with less people and take a bit longer on the game and make 15% or 20%.
A better idea would to contract a builder and coder, then subcontract (pay X amount of robux) per music track, per ad, per thumbnail, instead of paying them a % of the total income. You’d save yourself far more money that you’d be able to then raise the % for your full time developers.
First off, huge fan. Much respect. But I strongly disagree.
It takes no effort, no hard work, no stress, and no time to know how to be competitive. It’s just a passive understanding that you gain over time through experience. Sure you can implement analytics, experiment with monetization, split test graphics, etc, but your primary tool and starting point is always going to be intuition. That’s why it’s easy.
That’s why every dev has a graveyard of projects they never finished. They had big plans, maybe a big money idea, but didn’t have the time or motivation to follow it through to completion.
What I find hard is creating content for endless hours a day, restructuring old code to support new features, and creatively pushing the limitations of both myself and the engine to make them do what I already envisioned them doing - maybe years prior.