Yep, I've been victim of that too. Especially when shit's actually happening. That's the easiest time to just start doing stuff and trusting people who say they're on your side. It's easy to let your guard down and if there's one thing capitalists and their cronies know how to do, it's take advantage of people through lies and deciet.
Be weary of backstabbers and wreckers kids, they come out of the woodwork when shit goes down. The Judas parable was a warning.
It's a game made by an independent studio with a small team compared to most games that it's competing with. "Indie Game" is a more specific term than "Independent Studio/Developer" I think. Mainly because of that movie that focused primarily on solo dev projects.
I'm just happy when studios can get no strings funding and are allowed to make what they want really. I think most solo projects should also qualify for grant funding too.
This whole argument happens in music too, I try to stay consistent and just allow the independent moniker for any artist that manages to either secure funding outside official industry channels, or fully self fund.
Sidenote: This is one of the most reasonable struggle sessions I've ever seen on this site lol. I'm also definitely off the opinion that we don't really have good terminology for this stuff yet since it's all pretty new.
Midway being AA is also funny because they were a Bally subsidiary that was publically traded and had like 600 employees. Same with Lucasarts.
Doublefine would be one that could take that moniker probably, since they mostly self fund and have a staff size small enough where most people probably still know each other (~100)
It's definitely a fuzzy divide. Kepler seems to have a cooperative ownership model and leaves the studio with a lot of creative freedom.
I feel like securing funding will always be necessary, but if you can maintain creative control over the project after getting the bag you could still be considered independent.
A larger corporate production company would absolutely be constantly making changes from the C-Suite
Independent Studio and Independent Developer are two different things. The latter would be a small company that has employees, while the latter is just a person and some friends making a game.
So yeah, I think using "Studio" instead of "Developer" makes sense
I feel like it's a fair moniker for any studio that doesn't have a board of directors and keeps any stock private and within the company. It's a way different model from Activision/Blizzard/Ubisoft etc.
Glitch apparently spends upwards of $500k-$1M per episode of their shows. I'd still consider them mostly independent. Turns out that creative products that take years to make can be expensive.
~20 people on fulltime payroll is still really small. 100 contractors for assets and voiceover and translation is normal. Put it's not like they're being paid a wage, just a contract rate for the work they do.
You aren't even considered a business in the US until you have 50 full time employees.
I use ArcGIS pro for work. It's incredibly powerful for any map related stuff. A personal license is like $100/year if the QGIS interface is to "open source" for you. I'd also be happy to walk you through the basics if you want lol.
Especially the how to rip literally any map data from anywhere and use it.
The good news is that after seeing what that means, it's not too scary (sociologically, not like in terms of losing critical infrastructure).
I have confidence that enough disasters like that with no help will rapidly build mutual aid and defense networks. Especially if there's state resistance to people trying to help each other outside the normal systems that no longer exist.
It just sucks that it takes the death of the world to get there.
Nah, we got basically nothing. Tons of line workers though. A couple Chinooks and like one truckload of guardsman. They mostly went out towards Chimney Rock though since there were a ton of people totally trapped and they needed to rebuild the road.
A few people who got in early got some FEMA money, like $700 I think? They approved more if you could prove damages, but that was difficult for a lot of people until a lot later.
She's Betty Boop but without the need to call for a man to save her