Do you really need to? Doing an easy job which pays the bills, has set hours leaving you plenty of free time and which can be instantly dropped from your mind when your workday is over is surely better than working yourself to the bone. If you don't need to make millions because you've accepted your goal is unreachable why work hard.
It's either that or get paid $20 less an hour. I'd need just about $3.5 million to follow my dreams, and I only really have one so that's likely never going to happen.
And I LIKE working hard, so long as I care even a little about the project. A spoonful of drive can fuel you for a long time.
Hmm... I think we're too different to discuss this - with my complete lack of drive I don't even make $20 an hour and won't anytime soon. Given $3.5 million I'd probably give half of it away to buy my way out of my life and live off the rest until I got bored, at which point I could kill myself without having a guilty conscience. I can't even guess what your dream may be if it costs that much!
Currently my job (and especially my chosen method of commuting) is physically draining so I sleep lots and don't have much time to think about how pointless it all is. It kinda works...
I can't even guess what your dream may be if it costs that much!
My dream for the past 15 years or so has been to start a game studio that specifically hires very talented people right out of school or with no schooling at all to have nearly full creative reign over a standing long-term project. So SO many extremely talented people get hired on as some cog-in-the-wheel that essentially kills their full potential by the time they are allowed to explore it. I want to make a safe place for game developers of extreme talent to be able to live out their dreams without first proving themselves in the industry.
Granted that it takes about 2 years to develop and polish a AAA game, $3.5 million is approximately the amount it would cost to float 2 dozen developers on 2 separate projects for 2 years.
Never ever going to happen for me.
Your dream plan doesn't seem to put merit on talent honed by experience, or industry veterans. Don't confuse that kind of experience with your perceived faults of the game industry's production system. Without that experience, your predicted game title production schedule would probably be worthless.
I think I know your reasoning though, hypothetically speaking, so take a look at Intrepid Studios for example. A nobody (from the gaming industry's perspective) raised a dream's worth of capitol to make his dream MMORPG (Ashes of Creation), unhindered by those very same traditional game developer foibles.... but he filled his studio with lots of experienced industry talent. The result, for him, has been game development that has (largely for the most part) been advancing ahead of schedule. Yet, if Intrepid Studios had simply relied on people without this rich melting pot of game development experience, I don't think they'd be anywhere near to reaching their goal as they are now.
In the broader sense of this conversation, though.... I feel I should point something out. There is a difference between "dream" and "fantasy."
If you truly have a great idea, something to help create and bring into reality.... and you worked hard at it, you can make it happen. In this modern day and age, anyone with a compelling idea can create a video and start a crowdsourced campaign.... and if that idea catches on to the cultural zeitgeist and instills the same excitement you feel for that idea into many others - then capital could be raised to help make that dream a reality.
However, if all you ever do is think about the idea, and never doing anything else about it other than think about it.... then it is just a "fantasy." There's nothing wrong with fantasies, they have their place. But in order to turn dreams or fantasies over to reality, they must cross over a "bridge of practicality," so to speak. And the pylons on such a bridge would be priorities. Priorities of your life. Should other things be more important in your life? What things in your life are you willing to change, sacrifice, or work towards? If you work through such existential questions, you can at least start to narrow down a path you might want to work towards in life. But keep in mind, life will never go "according to plan." Its more of a great river that you have to navigate through, but it's up to you to pick and choose what shores to settle on.
