Hello friends,

Greetings from Utrecht!

First of all, I’ve been plugging away behind the scenes to get my website in a better shape. There were two things guiding this process:

• I wanted to retain the flavor and optionality of a personal website, while at the same time providing a clearer focus on what I do as a professional consultant
• Within these constraints, I also needed to make it clearer what, exactly, I can do for videogame companies, what problems I want to help them solve, and what value I can offer in doing so.

I think I managed to find a decent version of this balance for now, and I’ll continue to tweak the website as I go. For now, I'm particularly happy with the addition of directly bookable consulting hours, which I'll explain in a bit more detail below.

Today at a glance:

• A bit of background on my consulting hours
• An open source list of game dev salaries
• A deep dive on the operational challenges of theme park queueing
• The anatomy of the amazon 6 pager

Consulting hours

For my website, I wanted to make it as easy as possible to get in touch and schedule a meeting. Calendly is a great service that does just this. It makes it possible for people to book a meeting directly in my agenda. No going back and forth on meeting times, just pick a time and we’re set.

Importantly, Calendly also makes it possible to charge for calls. By doing this, I can meaningfully distinguish between meetings for discussing a potential consulting project, and shorter meetings for people that simply want to pick my brain for 30 or 60 minutes or so.

As for pricing, I’m following Rami Ismail’s example, and set the rate for independent game companies at € 30 for 30 minutes, and € 100 for 60 minutes. I think this strikes a good balance between making consulting affordable for smaller companies and studios, and providing enough compensation for me that I can actually dedicate a decent amount of my time to taking these types of calls.

I’m very curious what the uptake will be! If you happen to be sitting on a business challenge and need some help figuring it out, don’t hesitate to book some time in my agenda here.

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Photo by Andrea Natali on Unsplash​

The Best Bits

​Global Game Dev Salaries: Various game development professionals have been sharing their salaries on Twitter under the hashtag #GameDevPaidMe. This document compounds all that info into a searchable excel sheet. It's fascinating to see the range of salaries for comparable psoitions, and it should come as no surprise that US and especially California salaries are in a league of their own. Non-US countries are not very well-represented yet, so add yours to help make game dev salaries more transparent.

​The complicated history of Disney FastPass: Get ready to watch a 1 hour and 43 minute deep dive on queueing, and loving every minute of it. This video explores the history of Disney’s Fast Pass system, and explains the fascinatingly complex queuing mechanics behind it. Standing in line has never been more interesting.

​The anatomy of an Amazon 6-pager: it's a well known fact that Amazon never uses powerpoint presentations, and instead requires employees to write detailed 6-pagers that serve as the cornerstone for management meetings. This article by an ex-Amazon manager gives a detailed (fictional) example of such a 6-pager. I'm not sure I'd recommend this for videogame companies, let alone smaller outfits, but it's very educational to see how one of the biggest companies in the world approaches meetings and information sharing.

See you in two weeks!

Martijn

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