Unpaid Jobs in the Games Industry
Sometimes I'll be scrolling through LinkedIn (a terrible mistake) and find a post mentioning an open position for a game artist or some other job title... only for them to basically be asking for free labor.
I did a little bit of digging and it sounds like these positions are apparently all over the place, the reason being that it's so hard to break into the industry that people will be willing to work for free in order to gain experience. Which I think is reasonable if you're working with a few buddies or for a non-profit studio, but if you're doing free labor for someone who is going to eventually make money off your work, I think you should get out of there as fast as possible.
First of all, the first thing you should be focusing on, especially if you're an artist (though I'm sure this applies to other roles) is building a solid portfolio. The unfortunate part of this is that if you're working for a studio run by a random business person that does not give a damn about the game they're making, you likely won't get much in the way of a good portfolio piece out of that if the game itself isn't particularly great, and especially if they're demanding too much of you for an unpaid position that you can't just dedicate hours every day to. You would be better off making a smaller personal project that you can feel proud of and that does a good job of showing off your skills, and that you'll be able to spend enough time on to bring it to a high level of quality. I've heard of people being told to do an unreasonable amount of work in these unpaid positions, because I guess the people running these studios either don't know how much time these things actually take, or just don't care. And if that's the case, then there's no way you'll be able to spend enough time on the assets you're creating for these games to make them worth putting on your portfolio.
Also, we really do not want to make companies think that we're willing to work for them for free. The more these companies think that they can get away with having people work for them for free or for next to nothing, the worse off the industry is going to be, because it'll mean that in the future there will be less jobs that people can actually live off of.
And where this can get even more evil and scammy is when these companies claim that eventually you'll get to take part in some kind of revenue share after the game gets released and starts to make money. The problem is that you're banking on the fact that:
- The game gets released in the first place
- The game actually makes a significant amount of money after being released
- That you'll be getting a fair share of the revenue based on the work that you've done
And my concern with this is that I just can't see a lot of these companies making a lot of money off of their games. If talented solo developers struggle to make a living off their games, then why would these random startups with absolutely no released games to show off be any different? Maybe I'm missing something here, so if someone has found genuine career success with these kinds of unpaid/revenue share positions then please feel free to enlighten me on that, but the whole thing just seems incredibly suspicious.
Anyway, rant over. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend 👋