Having helped to run a business myself, I’m always interested in other people’s experiences. Here’s the story of a video game studio that went under and the lessons learned by its founder, James Gwertzman.

Excerpts:

We had an all wrong idea of what we were going to do. We thought it was all about making the best game in the world, but in reality it’s all about making your publisher think you’re making the best game in the world.

Back then, we believed that demo material was a waste of time, but we now know that this was one of the reasons our game got cancelled. But that’s easy to say now.

We (the founders – ed.) often chose to work without pay, and therefore used up all our personal savings, leaving us with nothing when disaster hit. Instead, we should have fired the least qualified of our employees, so that we could have paid ourselves first.

Remember that life is too boring if you don’t take chances. My advice to you, though, is to have one paranoid member of your team and to keep listening to him.

Full article is here.

Amen, brother.