Six Months, Nothing Shipped: What Founding a Studio Actually Costs

Phantom Rowboat is six months old. It exists because the studio we worked at closed, and we decided we would rather build the next one than give up on game development.

The thing nobody warns you about isn’t the workload. It’s that every decision is now yours. Where the little money you have goes, whether you use Git or Perforce, how contracts get signed, what happens when you disagree with your co-founders, everything. There is no one behind the scenes, because you are behind the scenes.

This is six months of those decisions with the numbers left in. Why we stayed in Nova Scotia. How a side project turned into a company because a funding application required one. Why we self-incorporated against literally everyone’s advice, what that saved, what it cost us, and what we think the fallout will be. What it cost to draft our first development contract. Why deciding we wanted to employ people, ourselves included, turned that one application into a funding strategy. And most importantly, what we learned along the way.

I was a Lead Programmer at Ubisoft Halifax, and fifteen years in the industry didn’t prepare me for this. Let me help prepare you.