Lame Reward

Over the past year, I've helped develop and launch Bold Moves, a match-3 game for the Oprah Winfrey Network. It's been a really tremendous experience, and I've learned a lot about freemium models and data-driven gameplay. Bold Moves has been a huge success for the studio, and is actually RED's largest and most profitable game to-date.

As Bold Moves ramps up in success, it attracts more attention of people inside RED and at OWN. This isn't terribly surprising, but as more people come onto the project it feels like I have less and less control over the direction the game takes, and even what I spend my own time on. 

It's both flattering and frustrating. Chris and I worked to build this fantastic game that RED has never had experience doing before, and it works. Now that it's proven successful, higher-ups want to steer it in a direction to make it even more profitable, but don't want to "shake things up" by moving Chris or I off the project. 

Keeping us both on the game is a really lame call. First, taking control from the team actually developing the project is the biggest "shake up" you could possibly do. Chris and I have a history of making excellent games, and I feel like our reward is to stick around on one of those games without any say in it. Either he or I would be much better utilized in any one of the many incoming projects for RED. Second, there's really not that much to do on the game presently, and all the remaining work are things that a new hire could pick up perfectly well and still be excited by.

Highly creative team members require a lot of maintenance. They are like a fire, and you need to keep fueling that fire with exciting things to work on. I keep getting passed up for working on other projects because I did such a great job on this project that I can't be taken off. That's not much of a reward for doing great.