Short-Term Let Paperwork 2015 (Yet To Be Finished: Fill & Download for Free

Warning: This response includes a limited amount of cursing.“Tipton Traffic, N5512Q (his tail number was published in the news) Engine out, Tipton.” I heard over the radio as I sat at the operations desk at Tipton Airfield, in Ft. Meade, MD (actually just south of Ft. George G. Meade’s “wire”) on November 22, 2015. Ironically, I had been typing a Quora Answer trying to convince a user that flying was safe; that she had nothing to fear (I have yet to actually submit that answer.)I walked over to the radio, “12Q (the last three digits of a plane’s tail number can be used to identify it if no two planes share the same digits,) Tipton Unicom, say again?”No response.With a slightly more concerned voice, I said, “12Q, Tipton Unicom, please confirm engine out.”Nothing. The pilot was doing as he should, prioritizing flying the aircraft over communicating.Through my office window, I saw the Mooney M60E that was N5512Q coming in with the wind on his tail (usually, you’d land into the wind so as to have more air over the wings with a lower speed relative to the ground.) Cue, a strong, very unfortunate gust of wind with 12Q less than 20′ off the ground.His right wingtip impacted the ground first. Going at least 70KIAS, the aircraft careened about 350′, spinning down the runway, with his wingtips acting as his landing gear and his landing gear acting more like dead weight. He stopped just short of the PAPI (precision approach path indicator) lights and the 6.8 amp, 500V live wires powering it.Somehow, he didn’t cartwheel. That would have been an instant death sentence. The fuel tanks would have ruptured and the 100 octane leaded Avgas inside ignited in a relatively large conflagration.“Oh, shit!,” I yelled out loud despite being the only person in the FBO at the time.I don’t remember freezing. I took two steps back to my desk and called 911.“Anne Arundel County 911, what’s your emergency?”“I just had a plane crash at Tipton Airfield, 7515 General Aviation Dr., Ft. Meade, MD 20755.”“You had WHAT?”“A plane just crashed.”“Roger, what do you need?”“I need an ambulance and a fire truck.”“Is the plane on fire?”“As far as I can tell, no, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t. It full of 100 octane fuel. (I knew this because I had seen the guy 30 minutes before filling up.)“You can’t tell? Where are you?”“About 350 yards from the plane sitting in the FBO.” said I, now with an impatient sounding voice.“The fire department is on their way. They should be there in 5–10 minutes.”(Tipton is a small airport. Our “fire house” is a storage shed and our “fire department” is non-existent. The FAA does not require us to have one nor could we afford to have one.)As a member of the Civil Air Patrol, I had been trained to not endanger my safety in a rescue attempt. The first thing you are taught is “Don’t become the mission;) don’t make us have to save you, too. Yes, its cold, but so is life. An explosion doesn’t give a damn about the fact you were trying to save a life.Even if I was trained to endanger my safety, there would have been nothing I could do. The crash was violent. I fully believed the pilot had suffered a spinal injury. I may have first aid certification, but that does not cover spinal injuries. You are taught to leave them in place and let paramedics/ fire fighters extricate the victim from the wreak.Fortunately, we have two Medstar Health helicopters based on the field. Unfortunately, they, and their paramedics, were both airborne responding to other emergencies.I hung up the phone and ended the 911 call. I waited about three seconds for the call to disconnect before picking the phone back up and calling Leesburg Flight Service Station (FSS) in Leesburg, VA to file a NOTAM (NOtice To AirMen) to close the runway.“Lockheed Martin (they operate most if not all FSS’s) Flight Service, (I’ve since forgotten his name,) how may I help you?”“Hi, this is Ryan Payne at Tipton. I need to post a NOTAM to close runway 10/28 due to an aircraft crash.”“How long is it going to be closed for?” (He’s required to ask this in order to file the NOTAM.)“I don’t know. Indefinitely. I’ll call you back to cancel it.”“I need an expiration date and time, sir.”“December 1st at 1300Z.” (The “Z” means zulu time, or, in layman’s terms, UTC. Approximately 8AM local time.) The date and time were random, we could always push the expiration date back if needed. I just wanted to give us more than enough time to resolve the situation.While I was on the phone with 911 and Leesburg, the aviation departments of both Anne Arundel County and Howard County police departments, both located in Hangar 84, hopped in their cars and floored it to the crash site.After getting off the phone with Leesburg, I walked outside to get a better view of the crash site to look for flames, the pilot, ect. It had been six minutes since impact.I walked out to shut off the 100LL Avgas tank. After all, we didn’t know if fuel quality was to blame for the crash. And we didn’t want to find out the hard way.I pulled out my cell phone and called the Operations Manager (they are both off on the weekends, only operations support agents such as myself are present on the weekends. Even then, its only one of us on duty at any time.)“Hey, C—- (operations manager, name withheld,) we just had a crash.”“WHAT!?!”“N5512Q just crashed. Fire department’s on the way.”“Alright, just keep people away from the crash site.”“Wilco.” (Aviation/ military/ radio/ abbreviation for “will comply.”)“I’ll be there soon. Did you call M—-?” (the airport manager, name withheld.)“Not yet, but I will.”“Alright, see you in a bit.”Then I heard the sirens.“Bye.”The vehicle gate between General Aviation Drive and the ramp and runway were still closed. And the fire department didn’t have a gate key.Nor did I.There is a way to quickly open powered gates and keep them open without a gate key. Let’s just say I know how and I’m not about to tell.I sprinted to and opened the gates and stood just outside them while I waited for the fire trucks to turn onto General Aviation drive. As they drove towards the FBO, I waved to get their attention. The gate is about 125 yards past the FBO parking lot.They pulled up to where I was standing and asked where the plane was. I pointed to it on, or rather, just off, the runway.“Right there.”, I yelled over the noise coming from the truck’s engine.“Is the runway closed?”“Yes, sir.”With those words, they pulled onto the ramp with the ambulance in tow and drove out to the plane.With trained professionals (the fire department) on scene, I began to calm down. I shut the gate behind them and “locked” it so as to return it to normal operation. (There is a pressure sensor on the ramp side of the gate that allows vehicles to drive out without a key.)I walked back to the FBO to grab my coat, gloves, and hat. It was the end of November, the week before Thanksgiving. It was COLD, and I wanted some warmth. (You’ll realize very quickly if you spend any amount of time at an airport that they are never comfortable. They are either baking hot with high humidity or freezing cold with strong winds.)I hopped into the operation’s truck and pulled up to the gate. At the time, we had state police cars flooding onto the airport to investigate. And the gate was locked. And they didn’t have keys. I hopped into the truck so I could trip the gate’s pressure sensor from the comfort of a heated cabin, allowing them to pull through.We probably had 12 Maryland State Police and eight Anne Arundel County police cars on the field at one point, not counting those belonging to the aviation departments . It must have been an otherwise slow day in the area.The general manager arrived first and motioned for me to open my window.“Have you been over there yet?” he said.“No. I’m not trained to do anything that could help and thought it would be best to stay out of their way.”“Okay. In the future, remember, when C and I aren’t around, you represent the airport. Follow me.”I followed him onto the runway and parked the truck towards the back of the group of cop cars. We had the cop cars, two fire trucks, and ambulance, my manager’s SUV, the operations truck, and one wreaked M60E sitting about 75–100 feet south of the runway.My manager started talking to this one guy. He wasn't in a uniform, but I recognized him. He had been in the FBO 45 minutes before the crash to buy oil. He was the pilot, the sole occupant of the aircraft during the crash.Amazingly, he not only survived, but was walking.I had thought that we would have a coroner show up at the airport to collect his body.Somewhat more optimistically, I thought we would have to have Med Star or some other Medevac company airlift him to the hospital. But no. He was perfectly fine.Any landing you can walk away from, right?The paramedics tried to convince him to go to the hospital to get checked out. He refused, likely because he was afraid they would find something that would ground him for life. Frankly, I can’t say I blame him. The FAA can be ass backwards when it comes to medicine sometimes.At this point, the fire department had declared the scene safe and left.You could tell he was in a state of psychological shock. N5512Q was his first plane, a nice plane. A plane he had paid over $60,000 for. ($60,000 being the average cost for an M60E.) A plane he had lost in an accident that almost claimed his life as well.And now it was merely scrap metal.After awhile, C arrived and told me to grab the camera, a Cannon DSLR, out of the Ops office closet and take pictures of the crash site.The cops documented the scene, taking pictures and measuring distances, before leaving. The right wing was bent upwards at least a 30 degree angle. Ditto for the horizontal stabilizer. The propeller tips were bent backwards at a 90 degree angle. There were holes in the wing caused by pieces of the airframe puncturing the skin. The engine had seized, which would have required an expensive overhaul if not complete replacement. His left main gear had collapsed back into the wheel well. His right main gear had pushed up into and through the wing, the top of its shock sticking out. The nose gear was 150′ behind the plane. At least the tanks weren't leaking.While the cops were documenting the scene, I tuned the handheld radio I had on my hip to 121.500MHz and heard the familiar sound of an ELT (emergency location transmitter) going off as designed. The ELT was sending GPS coordinates up to a USAF satellite. If he had crashed off field, these coordinates would have been routed to the USAF RCC (USAF rescue coordination center) in Tyndall AFB in Florida before being forwarded to local search and rescue forces, me included. Needless to say, no one likes hearing an ELT going off when the pilot is no longer in peril.I climbed into the plane and started looking for the ELT. I’d shut off non-distress ELTs before with CAP, usually after a pilot had landed hard and left. This usually involves removing the ELT unit (its a sealed orange box) from the plane and flipping the switch to the “reset” position before releasing it to return to the “arm” (standby) mode.I couldn’t find it, so I called the Emergency Services Officer at my CAP squadron.“Hey, Co (name withheld,) its Payne, I just had a plane crash at Tipton.”“Okay.”“Well, I can’t find the ELT and need a way to shut it off.”“Hmm…Okay, you won’t be able to SHUT it off, but you can block the signal. Wrap some aluminum foil around the ELT antenna.”“Got it. Thanks. See you Wednesday (at the weekly meeting.”)“See ya.”“Hey, does this count as a save? Hello? You still there? Damn it.”I hopped back in the ops truck and drove back to the FBO to grab aluminum foil and duct tape. Right before I stepped out the door, the phone rang:“Good Afternoon, Tipton Airport, Ryan speaking, how may I help you?”“Hello, this is (I forgot her name,) from the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center. We are picking up a signal from an ELT in your area.”“Yeah, I thought you were. I’m in CAP so I know how the system works. We had a plane crash here. The pilot’s uninjured. I was just about to head out and shut the ELT off.”“Okay, so the plane is on the airport?”“Yes.”“Thank you.”“You’re welcome.”As I walked around the plane looking for the ELT antenna, I noticed a flashing red light on the dashboard. The light was right above a switch labeled “ELT.” I flipped the switch to “reset.”Once the cops had begun to leave, M called a towing company we had used before. They told him they were busy and would be there in two hours. We went back to the FBO with the pilot in tow. He was still shocked.One of the cops, before he left the airport, noticed the pilot’s Ipad inside the plane and brought it into the FBO for him. Since I had nothing else to do, and the plane was totaled, I decided to clean it out for him.I drove the ops truck onto the runway and loaded everything that wasn't bolted down into the ops truck. Luggage, oil containers, sunglasses, seat covers, blankets, phone chargers, everything. I completely filled the entire passenger side of the truck with baggage and other belongings. I then drove back to the FBO and told the pilot I had unloaded his belongings for him.Before the truck arrived, he wanted to drive out to his plane one last time to view the damage. We hopped in the ops truck and drove out. He had to sit in the back seat since the passenger seat was buried.“Damn. Nice plane.” said I in a disappointed tone of voice. “Do you have insurance?”“Only liability.”“Fuck.” said I under my breath, startled by the fact it had slipped.“Don’t worry about it.”Let me tell you, when you like planes and see one totaled, it is slightly depressing. Much like a motorhead would be saddened seeing a wreaked ’67 Mustang on a truck, us pilots (and aspiring pilots) are saddened when we see a plane wreak.He told me he wasn’t going to take all his stuff home with him, it was too much. He had recently moved to Florida and had flown up commercially to pick up his plane. He was taking off from Tipton to take his plane to its new home. And it crashed on the way out.We drove out the gate and pulled in front of the FBO’s dumpster. He began to sort through his belongings, deciding what he would take, what he would give away, and what he would throw away. He did this with his eyes on the verge of tears.After doing this, we pulled back onto the ramp and parked in front of the FBO. After I walked inside, my manager instructed me to grab an empty one gallon gas can from the fire house and take a sample of 100LL Avgas in case the FAA wanted a sample. I grabbed the can, took a sample, and sealed the can shut with a signed piece of duct tape. We would latter learn that our fuel quality was perfect and did not cause the crash.Some time later, the towing company showed up with a heavy duty wrecker (80,000Lbs capacity) and informed us they had a flatbed truck about 15 minutes behind. We lead him out to the plane. He had thought the aircraft had come down on the runway, not 75–100 feet into the grass. While we were waiting for the flatbed to arrive, the guy started to place airbags under the left wing in an attempt to pull the main gear back down. (Aircraft wings are angled such that the wingtip is slightly higher than the wing root, so there was some space for the airbag.)Once he got it up and propped against a stack of 2x4′s (I’ve forgotten the technical term for them,) he tried to pull the wheel down. Unfortunately, it was jammed and wouldn’t budge.Time for Plan B.He grabbed a dolly and stacked 2x4’s on it. He used the airbags initially before using the crane on the wrecker attached to the nose of the aircraft to lift the plane up until he could slide the dolly underneath. Once the wing had some kind of wheel underneath it, he used the winch on a flatbed (which had been driven onto the grass) to pull the plane on.The winch was attached to the only feature on the aircraft they could find: the propeller. Pulling on the propeller essentially left it in an non-airworthy state; no “parting out” the prop.All the while, metal was screeching, as if the plane was moaning in agony. Needless to say, the pilot didn’t seem to enjoy that. He still seemed attached to the plane five hours after nearly dying. And who could blame him? It was his first plane and, now that it was totaled, he wanted to get as much money back out of it as possible.While this was going on, we had one plane enter the downwind leg of the traffic pattern announcing its intention to land on runway 10:“Tipton Traffic, N——-(I’ve since forgotten thier tail number,) on the 45 (degree intercept for downwind,) Runway 10, Tipton.”“N———, Tipton Unicom, the runway is closed.”“When’s it going to be open?”“I don’t know, we’re working on it now.”“Well, is there enough room for us to fit by?”“Look, the ru…”“Let me handle this.”, said M. “We had a plane crash. We are currently working on removing it.”“But will we fit?”“No. We’ve got a wrecker on the runway pulling the plane out of the mud. You can not land here.”Just as he said that, the towing crew got the plane onto the flatbed.“Give us 20 minutes to finish up here.”“Roger, Tipton Traffic, N——- is entering a holding pattern just off downwind, Tipton.”We couldn’t ship the plane to a scrap yard with the wings sticking out 15′+ on each side. Besides, we might have been called by the FAA or NTSB asking to inspect the plane in an attempt to deduce why it crashed.Somehow, the flatbed didn’t get stuck in the mud and pulled onto the runway with N5512Q on its back. We wound up towing it to one of the transient parking spots in front of the FBO and lowered in onto the ground. Metal scrapping on concrete is not a pleasant sound. Once it was one the ground, M and I grabbed some tie down straps out of the truck and strapped it down to the anchor points embedded into the ramp (light planes can be blown away in high winds, hence they are tied down to anchors embedded into the ground.)Once it was strapped down, I went back out of the runway and crept down it at five miles per hour preforming a VERY through FOD (foreign object debris) check. (The tiniest screw can catastrophically destroy a jet engine, leading to a potential crash. And we’d rather not have another one.)The towing crew then left. M offered to drive the pilot to the BWI airport Marriott hotel for the night. The pilot would catch a flight down to Florida in the morning. We then loaded the pilot’s belongings into M’s SUV. M then instructed me to download the pictures from the camera onto the computer and write a rough log of events before closing up. I did so.Once the incident “paperwork” had been handled, followed my normal closing routine, albeit, almost three hours latter than normal. I rinsed out the coffee pot, took out the trash, closed out the register, and locked the doors before finally driving home.I’m glad I was off for the next six days.The plane sat in that spot until January when it was moved to one of our seldom used parking spots along the taxiway.The last I saw of it was in May. Someone from an aircraft salvage company came by and began to salvage all usable parts from the airframe before cutting the wings off (they had since had their fuel drained) and loading it onto a trailer and driving it off the airport to a scrapyard.This was a small plane crash with only one person onboard. There was no fire, no explosion, no massive emergency services response. This had practically zero media coverage, save for a few very short news articles.Even though no one was injured or killed, and there was no damage save for the plane, the crash was stressful for myself and, to a greater extent, to the pilot.Initially, it was disbelief, followed by panic (“Shit! Did I just witness someone die!?!”) Then came boredom, followed by physical discomfort as we worked to remove the plane from the runway. Next was the annoyance of repeatedly telling a pilot the runway was closed. I later learned that someone at Leesburg had forgotten to click “submit” on his computer while filing the NOTAM. As a result the pilot had never received the NOTAM during his pre-flight briefing. In the weeks that followed, I had a very minor amount of nervousness whenever I thought about flying out of Tipton. Such nervousness was unneeded. Fortunately, it went away when I was offered a free flight by a friend. He was a flight instructor; his student, one of my dad’s coworkers. After about one minute of being airborne on that December day three weeks after the crash, the nervousness faded away.I imagine for the pilot it was a case of sheer terror followed by shock, followed by disappointment, followed by thankfulness (just in time for Thanksgiving.) I haven’t seen the pilot since (as he is now in Florida.) Hopefully he is still flying.

I was just working on some “second decade success” research and it seems applicable here.1) WIDE ANGLE VIEWHere is my current top 10 list for enduring success as a game development business.Correct Investment at the startGood industry Business IntelligenceExperienced staff esp. in steeringAbility to create fun on demandGood IP(s)Platform diversityLocal ownershipIdentity/cultureRevenue rectification strategyCellular team structuresNote: this answer is pretty lengthy. You will see that top 10 list 2 more times. I will follow the format of an old school game pitch:Wide Angle View: Consider the first version of the list to be the one-page executive summary for the Chairman/CEO.Zoom In: I’ll follow up with the steering committee version, that turns each of those points into a couple of short paragraphs for the VP’s.Macro Lens: Finally, I’ll walk through a more specific, detailed plan that implements the points, similar to a design document.Before we get on to the steering committee stuff, let’s take a quick look at what not to do. These are some popular ways to fail in a hurry:Bad Business Model – not enough profit in itFighting Among Owners - gridlockGrowth - too much, too fast or noneInaccurate Accounting – not knowingPoor Cash Flow Management – d’uhMediocrity – not adding anything newInefficiency – energy and time sinkManagement – bad, too much, not enoughSuccession – what if an owner quits?Market Change – not predicting, respondingIf you go to the Wikipedia list of game studios and just run down their current status, you see some general themes: List of video game developersLots of them fail. Some succeed to death. Some were bought, merged and managed by a disinterested party. Some had bad products, in-fighting, poor methods, failures to deliver or to change with the times.The longer term winners have been able to renew themselves periodically. They have an identity. They have at least one great IP. They value talent. They have good methods, good tech and keep a sense of fun. They are self-owning and self-steering.Ok VP’s, get in here. You are up.2) ZOOM INCorrect InvestmentIf you are going to start something new, you will need cash.You don’t see as much venture capital involvement in video games as you might expect. VC’s scouting around games often know too little, take too long and ask too much. Game developers are suspicious of them, having heard negative things, true and otherwise. It would be interesting, at some point, to hear Marc Bodnick’s thoughts on Elevation’s work with Bioware, having heard some of the lore inside the walls.The point is, game investment is mostly a job for angels, family, friends, crowd sourcing and the like. Many game start-ups are self-funded. Origin was, Bioware was, id, Valve and Tripwire were also self-funded. They and many others somehow found enough cash to make a go of it. Or, in the cases where external funding happens, it is more like a movie deal. Experienced insiders work out the framework of a deal quickly, using a shared lingua-franca. Game companies, especially publishers, are an important source of funding for games, since they understand how money is made with games. Obvious, but true.In any case, not having enough cash to complete a sellable product means certain failure. Be realistic. We can design something to generate returns at various levels of investment, but you will need some money. The right amount for the right concept.Good industry BIYou cannot plot a course without a map and your own starting coordinates.You have to scour the available material to understand where the industry is, where it is going, what the trends are, who the people are, what works, fails, sells, sucks and sinks. Everyone from producer on up should spend a fixed portion of their day taking in business intelligence, analytics, news and commentary, from forums to blogs to formal reviews.I will also suggest you start to use a trend prediction methodology. It takes time to make a game but the market is changing every day. All the figures and examples I use below will start being out of date as soon as I type them. The whole thing is a moving target. It helps to understand where public tastes might be arriving, in the future, at the time you hope to sell units.Here is a link to the system I use: The Trend ClockExperienced staff esp. steeringThere are only so many people that have even worked on a successful game start to finish. There are still fewer that have managed that effort and guided a game to completion, to market and to profit. Fewer have repeated the process for years and years.Of course, I will tell you that to do this you need someone like me. Surprised? I do believe it, not only because it feeds me, but because for every detail in this long answer, there are more than a hundred others not documented here. It takes years of trial and error, bruises and sutures, to pick up the knack. It is far cheaper to buy that experience than build it. Just as it is cheaper to license a game engine rather than write one from scratch. Both get you to profits faster.Every small set of game company founders needs professionally competitive creative, technical and business people.Ability to create fun on demandThis is a great business, but to keep at it, we have to pay ourselves and our friends. That is why I am a student of game theory (esp. behavioral).Un-fun games are not successful. Cut and fit game design is very expensive and time consuming. Theory gets you on target quicker and reduces the time spent on feeling around in the dark. It lets you spend iteration time to go from good to great instead of from awful to acceptable.Starting smarter means you don’t run out of time and money before you get to the most important final polishing pass. It also means you won’t be the sophomore studio with a minor hit and no idea how to recreate the magic. This is your profession and there are formal foundations to game design. Learn them.Good IP(s)More than anything else, a good intellectual property will sustain you over time. An associate of mine is fond of saying how the Star Wars IP has a nearly limitless number of possible stories, settings and products because of that rich, imaginary universe.Further, looking at all of the successful, second decade+, game companies you see the value of cornerstone IP’s – Madden, Mario, Fallout, Far Cry, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, Diablo, Civilization, Mass Effect, Counter Strike, Sims, Resident Evil and so on. Good IP’s are value. More on this below.Platform diversityLet’s do the math. If it takes X dollars to make your PC game with potential sales of a million units AND it costs 1/10th of X more to port it to consoles with potential sales of one to two million units, why would you not do it? The platforms appeal to different segments; you are gaining whole new audiences and multiplying your total sales for a small investment.The best days for developers are when there are multiple, popular platforms. The worst days are between console cycles when PC alone must sustain us. These are good days.Local ownershipHistorically, one of the greatest challenges to having a lasting game company is remote ownership. It is great to get that big influx of cash, at first. Then, after several years, you have a weak season, they get bored, the world changes and the remote owners start to mess with you, sell you off or shut the place down. EA does this endlessly. If you must take VC money or need to be bought by a big publisher, try to buy yourself back later.Consider Bungie and Ensemble. Microsoft bought Bungie for Halo. As time went on, vigor was lost. Then, they bought themselves back from Microsoft. They then made Destiny. Now compare Ensemble. Even after making a mountain of cash for Microsoft with Age of Empires, Ensemble was just switched off; click. Point is, you have a stronger sense of self-preservation than remote owners.Identity/cultureSo, you made an ok game, but who are you compared to the other people that also made ok games? Are you mainstream, a bad boy, hardcore, forward looking, nostalgic, humorous, mysterious or just hungry?You need to put a handle on yourself that buyers’ minds can grasp. You instantly know who Apple is, EA, Rockstar, Nintendo. Who are you? Tell the buyers and the potential employees something authentic and consistent about your organization that you can live with and then go live it. Grow up to be the people you want to be when you grow up.Revenue rectification strategyCash flow management keeps the studio doors open. Making games costs money. Selling games earns money. Up and down, just like a waveform. Once you have more than one game, the waves of spend and earn for each project can be rectified to produce a more stable cash flow. In fact, they almost must be, because too much spend in the very short term, even when you are profitable in the midterm, is deadly.Just like phasing any other waveform, timing is your main tool. Someone in the group needs to have a feel for this stuff – not just project management, portfolio management, not just cash flow management, revenue rectification.Cellular team structures.Team A with 36 people makes a surprise hit game that sells a million units out of nowhere. They book 25 million dollars of revenue or $694k per team member (avg salary ~$80k). Nice.Meanwhile team B with 140 people, all with AAA experience, releases a so-so follow-on to a popular game. It also sells a million. Their $25 million of revenue is only $183k per employee (average salary ~$110k). Ouch.If team B had split their 140 people into 4 teams of 35, where one team totally failed, two earned a little, like the bland, big team and one earned as much as the hit indie team, they would have ended up making $268k per head overall. Better.The moral of the story is, as your dev company grows, build new teams that are the minimum size for your maximally successful game making pipeline. Cover every job function you need (almost) to make sellable product. Contract to fill gaps as needed.Hire to duplicate the successful team in chunks. Map making group, art asset group and so on. Train them by making sellable DLC or add-on content, like characters and maps. When you get the whole second set, you can make 2 products at a time.This concept can be extended in a cellular or fractal way, for more teams. Some can be external. Think hard before building big teams. Two small but functional teams are often a better choice than a single big one.That takes us through the veep level explanation, which means it is time to dig deeper into details for those of us on the ground.3) MACRO LENSCorrect investmentLet’s say our first major goal is to make a game that puts a new company on the map and keeps local ownership. Where small indie games have seen some good times, today there is a lot of competition for shrinking sales numbers in that sector. We’re not betting on recreating Minecraft. We need a reliable success and that means a ‘real’ game of a scale and scope that provides undeniably good value. Those are the new game products that succeed. The formula is many hours played for the price paid.So, let’s say we need to get $20 million committed to a project that will establish the company and our flagship IP. That probably means a handful of angel investors. We want to keep the number of investors small, to not diffuse control, while still insuring enough money to fuel the solid win we need to anchor the company.[At this point, let’s also mention an optional, small, bootstrap project. A new team that cannot put together seed capital among the founders could do a small game first, to start earning cash. This answer is already too long, so feel free to ask me, in a different question how to tackle that, very different, problem.]Meanwhile, use seed money to get the legal paperwork done to be a real business. Get a tiny, humble office (but one you can walk away from when you need to spin up a team and get more space). Minimally pay the few founders to not have to work full time for six months if possible. If you can’t do it yourself, pay for some good concept art for the big game.For this example, our financial pitch will be:We propose making a game with a 4 year, 3 to 1 return on investment. A ‘real’ video game, on 3 platforms. Not “indiepocalypse” stuff but a bigger, better, safer game that punches above its weight and competes with name brands.The business entity would be a LLC, just for the purpose of this project, like a movie (to buy ourselves back in the end). The work would be centered in Austin, the #2 game making place in America, right behind San Francisco, but at half the cost of living. The game would be made the way games are made, by people that already know how to make games.The numbers look like this:Seeking $20M to provide 1400 developer-months of effort @ $10k per month “fully loaded” (with tools, space, electricity, insurance, coffee, etc) or $14,000,000. That means a team of 40 for 3 years in this case. Half as staff, half as contractors.We also need $5,000,000 more for initial marketing through launch. With a million in discretionary/variance, that puts our cost to release at 20 mil.We’ll offer a standard unit at $44.99 retail / $27.70 wholesale and do all the math with that figure, but we will also have a Deluxe unit at $59.99 / $36.60. We’ll also offer DLC at $6-10 wholesale.That puts our breakeven point at 719k standard units sold, across all platforms.Year 1 sales projections here are by platform, with low middle and high estimates, then our projection, in 1000’s of units and in dollars:PC (installed base = 30M) – L 300, M 700, H 1500 – P 600 @ $16.6MPS4 (installed base = 36M) – L 200, M 1100, H 2500 – P 1000 @ $27.7MXB1 (installed base = 19M) – L 120, M 400, H, 900 – P 300 @ $8.3MProjected year 1 revenue on standard unit sales = $52.6MTo put those numbers in perspective, those are not hit sales numbers like Destiny, Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry or Batman. Those are about the same sales numbers as Farming Simulator 2015.Extended earnings in year 1 would also include:Vanity DLC packs @ $1MDeluxe game and upgrades @ $1.8MCreator kit editor and content packs @ $1.2MServer side monetization @ $4.8MFor $61M gross revenue or ROI of 3:1, conservatively.Double these sales figures would not be particularly unusual for a good game.At the conclusion of the term, investors are paid out at 3x investment and the team retains only revenues over $60M, future revenues, the code base and the IP.The team’s bet here is that sales come out 10% over estimates (and the estimates are made that way), so they end up with a year’s operating funds in cash, plus on-going DLC sales.The longer term plan will require getting two franchises running as soon as possible. The reasons and methods are below, under experienced staff and revenue rectification, but the short version is, to keep the business flourishing, we need a push/pull model with one team earning while one is spending and both earning more than they spend every cycle.Good industry BIAll those numbers got a little heavy. Let’s take a break to review some recent industry business intelligence, to insure we’re on the same page.Video game revenues are now bigger than the movie industry.(Quoting Anya Kamenetz in Fast Company, on game revenue)Grand Theft Auto did $800 million in worldwide sales in its first 24 hours. That was the biggest launch day ever for any piece of entertainment—any movie, any record, anything at all.It also cost $266 million to make—more than any Hollywood blockbuster…Last year, the category-leading first person shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 made $1 billion in 15 days. It took Avatar, the top-grossing movie of all time, two days longer to earn the same amount.The video-game industry is projected to grow from $67 billion in 2013 to $82 billion in 2017. At the same time, global movie revenue, both DVD and ticket sales, hit an estimated $94 billion in 2010, down 17% after inflation from 2001… overall domestic box office is pretty much flat since 2009.(Quoting Tom Chatfield in the Guardian)Last year will go down in history as the point at which the UK videogames industry pulled decisively away from cinema, recorded music and DVD sales to become the country's most valuable purchased entertainment market… more than DVD and music sales combined, and more than four times cinema box office takings.(Other sources)Worldwide film box office in 2013 = $35.9B – Theatrical Market Statistics 2013Worldwide video game revenue 2013 = $70.4B – 2013 Global Games Market ReportWorldwide video game revenue 2014 = $102.5B – Statista dot comGames as a service is an important, global model(Quoting Jason Della Rocca, former head of the IGDA, founder of consulting firm Perimeter and incubator Execution Labs, on multiplayer, online, game as service models)More and more genres of games, from shooters to sports, have some kind of social experience built in, and operate more as a service than as a product…You cannot pirate a service!An interesting case study is Korea. Like much of Asia, there was no viable game business since everything was pirated. Then about 15 years ago, there was a tremendous business innovation (games as a service)…now Korea is a multi-billion dollar game industry global juggernaut.The demographics of games have changed and are not kid stuff. According to the ESA (Entertainment Software Association):4 of 5 US households have a game platform and an average of 2 gamers.For the first time women are the majority of gamers (51%).The average male gamer is 35 years old. The average female gamer is 43.The most active purchasers of games are men with an average age of 37.Gamers have been playing for 13 years, on average.More seniors play games than males under 18.31% play games-as-a-service, 30% play action games, 30% play puzzle, board or card games.62% play on PC, 56% play on consoles, 35% play on phones, 31% play on tablets and 21% play on dedicated gaming handhelds.Gamers spend 39% less time watching TV shows and 40% less time watching movies.Gamers average 8 hours of play per week and 54% play multiplayer games weekly.The “game together family” is a new norm involving partners, parents, children and friends.“Millennials are putting video games at the center of their entertainment preferences, but it is a new kind of gaming that is more social, interactive and engaging."– Neil Howe, President of LifeCourse Associates, leading researcher on millennialsBest selling games of 2014 (ESA)On PC: The Sims, Diablo III, Elder Scrolls Online, World of Warcraft, Titan FallOn Consoles: Call of Duty, Madden NFL 15, Destiny, GTA V, MinecraftBest selling games for the first half of 2015, all platforms (NPD)Mortal Kombat X, Grand Theft Auto V, Battlefield Hardline,Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Minecraft,Batman: Arkham Knight, Dying Light,NBA 2K15, The Witcher 3, Super Smash BrothersOk, back to work.Experienced staff esp. steeringGoals 1 and 2 were to get investment and then make a game that stakes an IP. Now, in year 4, we have one winner. This is where good managers really go to work. We can start turning this beachhead into a destination; maybe even a luxury resort.The first game was made without the support of a publisher and the deal with the external investors is now complete. The team is not left rich, but they are more experienced, equipped and established.A second version of the game is almost a sure thing and multiple publishers would be willing to fund the development.We have a year of cash buffer in the larder and on-going DLC revenues.Goal 3 is to set up our push/pull business model which needs two IP’s or franchises.Goal 3 will require us to divide the original team into 2 halves. Put one half – the asset creation heavy half, on a nice update for the live title. This needs to be done in less than a year, but earn enough to mostly support the half-team for a year and extend the life of the game.Next, we can use the other half of the original team (the leadership heavy half) in a deal, with a publisher to make version 2 of the game. This ultimately costs money since we’ll be paid a royalty, instead of the lion’s share of revenue we could get if we could self-fund. On the other hand, the milestone payments support this half-team, leaving our cash alone.Now we have a year’s cash and almost everyone’s salaries covered from other money and two new revenue sources on the list – one near term, one a couple of years out.The creatives will need to find the time to brainstorm a new IP, before the update to game 1 is finished. Tell them to provide a couple of options.When the update goes on sale in year 5, we’ll pull some of the leaders off of the IP #1, version 2 game, now that the design is firming up. We’ll back fill with asset-side people coming off the update. Recall that a full year of salaries lasts 2 years for only half of the team, since the publisher is paying the other half.Jumping ahead, we’re going is a place where, not too long after we sunset the original game, version 2 (funded by a publisher) is being announced.Meanwhile, in year 6, our internal project, IP #2 is approaching a vertical slice/ first playable stage.When IP #1, version 2 ships in year 6 or 7, we’ll have new revenue and everyone can pile on IP #2 to finish it.IP #2 then releases a half development cycle later, initiating our push / pull mechanism.Goal 4 is adding a 3rd team, for better revenue rectification by year 9.Goal 5 is adding a fourth team to complete a dual, push/pull arrangement in year 11 or 12.With that machine in place, you have some fault tolerance, robust revenue, the ability to make a public offering if desired and a generally reliable mini Activision that could last a long time.Ability to create fun on demandThis is where I mention, again, the usual 6 requirements of a game:Entered into knowingly, willinglyHappens in a non-real placeHas a goalHas challengesHas rulesHas an end or graduation state.I will also mention the 3 stages of game activities:Playing – A fun, flexible, forgiving state of discovery and explorationGaming – A tense and close observation of rules while striving to win.Mastery – An advanced state where one can win, even improvising.And the behavioral game activities that trigger brain chemistry rewards:Amassing value - food, money, arms, land, points, etc.Building skills – rank, abilities, levels, spells, accuracy, etc.Public skills display – running, throwing, shooting, jumping, etc.Public wealth displays – elite outfits, armor, hats, mounts, gear, etc.Political negotiations between hierarchy and equality.Now, peek ahead to see what IP concepts are selected in “Good IP(s)” below then come back here and think of 2-6, single word, action verbs for each IP. The verbs should accomplish things listed in this section and be cooperative with the proposed game worlds. Expect verbs like fighting, trading, casting, solving. If you come up with more verbs, cut some. Those 6 or fewer words become the keys to the game design. Games are activities and those are all you need.Now answer all those questions implied above – what is the goal, what are the rules, what challenges do we face, what are we amassing, what skills will we build…I happen to know that both concepts require character classes and skill trees, so I hope you’ll investigate this linked post showing how combinatoric number surfaces can help you create classes and trees are guaranteed to be able to be balanced, that contain equilibrium and yet are also satisfyingly asymmetrical.Game Design TrianglesOh, and if you simply must have some story, maybe this will help:Minimal Nareme ExampleGood IP(s)Ok, let’s dip into the portfolio management thing. What do we know so far? We need 2, maybe 3 excellent, franchise worthy, game IP’s. The only ideas we have so far are all of our pet concepts and we’re not doing those unless we can do all of them.Never make your masterpiece first. No, we need to get rational. We know we want titles on PC and consoles. What do those people like?Well, the top 3 genres on each box looks like this:Top 3 PC Genres by ShareStrategy 37.7%Casual 24.8%Role Playing 20.2%Top 3 Console Genres by ShareAction 28.2%Shooters 21.7%Sports 20.2%Hmm. So we need dual-platform IP’s but the top 3 have nothing in common. What should we do? hybridize? RPG/Action? Casual/Sport? Strategy shooter?Ok, what have the creatives been working on? Let’s look at that high concept list:Palidonnas – Dark, female-centric, Action RPG set in Rurik Eastern Europe circa 1200. Magic, combat, quests. Believable armor for a change. Unique art style.Live Slice – Sim with all human inhabitation limited to a 15-mile-wide north/south band that moves east at 1 mile per year. Constant new building, tech tree, crossing terrains, oceans.Wood Age – RTS set 11k years ago. Factions from real places lost to post ice-age flooding. Sundaland, Zealandia, Doggerland, Beringia, Kerguelen. Lost civilizations, tech.All Mine – Future FPS set in a massive, planet mining operation that fell down. Miners, corporates, unions, gangs, guns, heavy machines, bugs, rare gems, rarer air, traps, traders.Well, Live Slice could be ok on PC if it was dense, or ok on phones if it wasn’t, but it doesn’t work great here, so it is out.Wood Age could be a fine base for a DOTA or Heroes of the Storm type thing, if those didn’t already exist. Why pick a fight with tigers? Let’s set that aside for now.All Mine needs a better name, but a sci-fi shooter could work on console and PC, even though FPS only pulls a 6.5% market share on PC. We’ll need to beef up the role playing aspect for PC, adding character classes and skill trees that can be streamlined on consoles. Think Bioshock meets Borderland in the mine complex from Aliens.Palidonnas is a chance to appeal to women (a strong demographic), to turn a genre on its ear and to show a really recognizable art style. That one builds identity, so it goes at the top of the list as IP #1. Think a Slavic, Daughters of Boudicca meets Bayonetta, drawn by goth Mucha, after playing Witcher 3.The visuals and eras are very different in a good way, for visual differentiation. Both games can share an engine and some code, including character class libraries, animation systems, physics and even some UI functionality, reskinned. Done & done.Platform diversityWe have 12-year plan sketched out, which will take us through a whole new-gen console cycle and out the other side. The bad news for us is the low ebb, when PS4 is old and outmoded, comes just as we’re getting our 2 IP, push/pull strategy implemented. Shucks.We have 2 choices here:Either speed up the dev cycles slightly to get titles done for the golden, end of the cycle era, where the maximum number of consoles are out there waiting for content.Or, we delay to ship on the oh-so exciting, but not yet sold in great numbers, next gen boxes. We also probably would have to do some refactoring / re-porting and maybe even engine version upgrading, which hurts, a lot. So, let’s hurry instead. Even if we have to reduce scope. We want next-cycle products to line up with next-gen consoles.Also, beyond 5 years, it is not helpful to guess what new hardware will look like. Who knows, we may be playing 4k, 60 FPS, massively multiplayer shooter, live world wars on Google glasses. But I bet we’ll still be playing something.All we can do is keep an eye on the data (like the Steam hardware survey, EE Times and the GPU / CPU pages on Passmark) and set strategic goals to evaluate coming hardware as early as possible.We can also plan some mitigations, like a phone or casual game, a VR game next year or the year after, special releases for non-US markets where hardware is a little behind us.Local ownershipListen up you would-be game company founders. A lot of this falls on you. First you have to scrape around to put the fledgling company together. You also have to be skilled enough to contribute development work to the effort, because that is fewer people we have to pay. You have to deal with the cranky, questioning investors, the press, do annual reviews, keep up with accounting and a thousand other things.The hardest part is, you have to grow personally, for the company to grow. It starts inside. Make yourself better to make the company better.Always carried an extra 15 pounds? Lose it.Dress like a slacker grad student? Buy a suit for E3.Have a some narcissist, tenderfoot, daddy’s girl proclivities? Get over yourself.Not confident in your written communications and spelling? No excuses, tune it up.Have a temper? Tame it.The good news is, you are now a real game maker and you even own part of a business. The bad news is, you woke up this morning a business person. Something as un-game, un-cool as state tax breaks for new employers can really impact your business. Saving on janitorial supplies suddenly matters.Here are a few more leader things to remember.You are not special, destined or above the rules of business.You have to learn 3 modes of speaking – super frank, efficient, truth talking among execs, softened speech for the employees that automatically add extra drama to whatever you say and super controlled and metered speech to the press and public.People’s mortgages are on the line here, stay focused.Being friendly gets tricky. It is hard to be a boss and a buddy.It is surprising how many times you have to repeat something for it to sink in sometimes.Write things down, don’t rely on memory, like a bad waiter.Never argue for something that doesn’t make sense, because of rules.Salaries comes from accomplishments, not need.It is reasonable to expect good work for good money and to say so.Letting a person go for not delivering is fair, it is business and it is not a reflection on them as a human being, just as an employee, here and now.Thinking of things we could do is the easy part. Trimming it down to the things we must do is the art.Identity/cultureCompany identity faces outward to the world and culture faces inward, to the employees.Company identity and culture need to be native, organic and true. The features should be drawn from the organization itself and slightly amplified, but not so much you can’t live with them for years. They should also be aspirational; a little ahead of where you are and closer to what you want to become. They should be somewhat distilled, purified and idealized. They are the codes you draw strength from in a tricky press conference or personnel action.These things are so custom crafted to match a set of individuals and the energies around them when they collaborate that I cannot just pull something out of my pocket and call it culture. Every studio is different, in this respect.Tripwire came from the modding community and retains a bit of hot rod and heavy metal culture today. Bioware was founded by doctors, so instead of a bowl of candy on the reception desk, they had a bowl of tiny bottles of hand sanitizer. Cali-centric EA once gave us central Texas employees a logo-ized drink cooler “for the beach” and corporate Nerf balls. Sony online had perk discounts with the Sony store, Sony home entertainment hardware, Sony music and movies to make you feel like part of the global entity.The example here is just an example. It is pure fiction just for illustrative purposes. Not what to think, just a bit of how to think about it.Identity starts with a name. We can imagine that at some point, the founders of a start-up game company would have cause to celebrate. The first meaningful investment, renting a first office, completing a milestone, signing papers, earning a dollar and other firsts might call for a round of champagne. Some game people have odd things lying around the like toys, comics, airsoft guns, sports equipment and even a few swords have been seen in game studios. Putting all that together, let’s imagine the venture under discussion here will be called Sabrage Games.Sabrage is the name of the act of opening a bottle of champagne with a saber. The name suggests something bold, flashy, celebratory, upmarket, vaguely dangerous, historic, romantic and madcap all at once. The sword or bottle imagery could be part of a logo or letterhead. Those same elements could be animated for a logo roll. The act itself can be played out in a press event for effect and a glass of ceremonial bubbly each can be like a company sacrament at key moments in the shared adventure. Finally, pictures exist of nearly every famous person in the last hundred years, even competitors, sipping the signature symbol.Now we have the beginning of culture. A name, a logo. The celebration sacrament. The One official champagne sword (because we don’t want an office full of blades) on the wall in reception. We have a game release tradition and the name for it “tasting stars”. We have the makings of a great picture for the press and the first question in an interview and yes, even a source of controversy for public discussion, which is still better than no discussion.As sabrage practitioner Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “Champagne. In victory you deserve it, in defeat you need it.” Sabrage either way. That might end up in an ad someday.Revenue rectification strategyIn electronics, rectification is a means of converting (fluctuating) alternating current into (continuous) direct current. It works because of a little thing called phase relationships. The short version is, if you have 2 rising and falling sine waves and put them together, but offset them in time, the rising of one cancels the falling of the other. Phase cancellation it is called.In cash flow, it is easy to graph incoming revenue as points above a zero line and spending as point below that line. When you do that for a whole game development cycle you may see a rising and falling wave, with spending during development, revenue from pre-orders, spending on launch advertising, revenue from sales, spending to make a patch/update/DLC, followed by more revenue and so on.The resulting wave looks a lot like the audio waveform that synthesizer players call ADSR for Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release. Like a piano note, this game cash flow wave has a big spike (attack) when a game is launched followed by a quick fall from the maximum peak (decay) before reaching a sustained period of moderate earnings that eventually decline to nothing (release).When you have more than one game, you have more than one waveform of earning and spending. While they are not exact duplicates, they are similar. When in phase, as in the simultaneous releases of 2 games, the peaks and valleys are exaggerated. Revenue is roughly double, but so is spending and that is the problem.For most game development companies, protecting and building the cash reserves is essential. A greater than expected transient of spending is a dangerous thing. Even if you are solvent for 11 months of 12 and only insolvent for one, you are still out of business.If we stage the game releases over time, we may achieve some phase cancellation between spending and earning, thus rectifying the cash flow. I know this sounds completely obvious, but you would be surprised at how often it is overlooked.Now, consider two games each coming out on 3 platforms each. We can stage the release dates of the different products and we can also stage, or smear, the release dates of each product, per platform so the console release precedes the PC release, for added cash flow smoothing.If you have rolling forecasts for your game products’ spending and earning, you can put the monthly estimates (Samples) on a grid, as a line. Then you only need to add integers to predict the net result for a month. “plus 12 on product A for July and minus 6 for product B puts us at plus 6 for the month.”A number of products can be superimposed and summed for given points in time. Strategies arise for tugging one product forward or back in time to produce improved rectification.Since the amplitude and frequency of waves change over time, you can, by careful planning, not only rectify earnings, you can even produce “gain” by using the changing frequency to align additive positive peaks more often, while keeping negative-going features more phase cancelled.For instance, managing the marketing spends for multiple platforms and the individual spikes of earnings for releases to the best advantage. You might pay for PC marketing, then release the PC version timed to negate the marketing spend for two coming console releases with PC earnings. While the PC release earnings are greatly reduced, the simultaneous release of both console versions are additive and have pre-paid marketing, resulting in greater peak profits than 3 discrete releases.Cellular team structuresYou could do a lot of game making with a 35-person team. If I was ordering one up, custom made, I would probably ask for:1 Producer1 Associate Producer1 Lead Designer5 Designers (1 systems, 1 gameplay, 3 gamespace)1 Lead Artist / Art Director2 x 2D Artists3 Environment Artists2 x 3D Modelers (1 character, 1 hard surface)1 Rigger3 Animators1 Lead Programmer11 Programmers (1 graphics, 1 AI, 2 engine, 2 gameplay, 2 generalists, 1 audio, 1 UI, 1 back end)1 Audio Lead1 UI / UX Specialist1 FX ArtistTogether they cost about $350k per month fully loaded or $4.2M per year. $120k/yr each. They have about 7000 developer days of capacity per year to apply to a project. Three and a half developer years, per calendar year. Their work should bring in north of a $400k* per team member per year, in a 3 year ($12M) development cycle.That means their game needs to earn $42M, which means 1.5 million units sold across all platforms in 3 years, which equates to a 3:1 ROI after some extra expenses.They are a game making machine, if you build a quality machine and maintain it, it will deliver. Put in a good idea and 12 million and 42 million falls out three years later.You could replicate this kind of team several times over for different titles. Put in your first 12M, get 42M back, then put 12M each in three different team machines. Stagger their start times for more continuous returns.Better yet, use a 2 speed gearbox approach that applies fewer people to the pre-production, problem solving phase of game making and then uses a big production phase pile-on of extra people, to get everything finished, now that we know how to do it.That means the 3 teams share some of the asset creation people. Roll some of them on to a project and then off, in a well-timed bell curve and we can get the price down to about $10M per cycle, averaged over 2-4 teams, without reducing the size or quality of the products.BTW, there was an asterisk back there, on the $400k per team member metric, often called contribution to earnings (CtE). Let’s look at how that shakes out.I am reading from a screen of data that I can’t share with you, but it lists 10 studios with some current top selling products, that you would have heard of. The screen shows their headcount and revenue which gives us a rough CtE for each.Good, reliable indie studios and a large, established AAA studio hit between 300 and 350k per head. Here is where you are a stable business – 3 to 1.A well-established team with a version 2 sequel to their hit, a mega-hit indie team and a new team made up of experienced devs with a popular first game have all managed to land between 600 and 800k per head. This is a great place to be. You can’t do it all the time, but you try.Two teams on the list edged over $1M per head. They are an experienced team that introduced a new franchise a few years ago and released two successful versions in short order and a new, small group you might not recognize, that saw limited success with their first effort, but had so few heads, the numbers look great. These results are giddy good and hard to reproduce.ConclusionSo there you have it – my collected thoughts on what it takes to start and keep a game development group running for 20 years. A pragmatic and rough how-to. I doubt many will make it to the end, but no worries. It is just the kind of thing I pull together in my job, so I had source material at hand. It can hang around as a reference, though the figures will gradually go stale, the steps should still be valid. If any of the slanguage is unclear, ping me for clarifications.Good luck.