The CEO of Ustwo Games, the developer behind Monument Valley, believes the days of long-term job security in game development are over. To keep costs as low as possible, instead she believes the industry will rely on contract work, with developers just coming in for one project, and then shipping themselves off elsewhere.
"There are people doing really, really well in those spaces on PC for much smaller budgets, that we will never be able to achieve because we're based in London and have employees with pensions and so on," Sayans said in an interview with Game Developer, explaining that Monument Valley is a franchise that can take greater financial risks, and have budgets that are in the millions. However, she believes this is only because of the series' previous successes.
As of the time of writing, Ustwo Games has around 30 employees, a number Sayans believes may be too high. "We've been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that's something we're looking to change going forward. I think going forward, we'll see that we've got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I've been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability ... but I think that's a shift in how we want to work with people going forward," she said.
Contract work might seem like a solution to ballooning budgets, but it'll likely cause different problems in the industry. Job stability seems a thing of the past already, but it'll be even worse in a contracting era. Moreover, it's likely that game production will become incredibly similar. We're already seeing so many studios adopt UE5, largely because it can be seen as a sort of universal language among developers.