Small team game making in Australia : a case study of GOATi Entertainment

This study follows the Melbourne-based development studio Greatest Of All Time Interactive Entertainment (GOATi) from 2019 to 2020 through a period of change within the studio, industry, and wider cultural context. It details how GOATi was able to move from precarity to stability – and the specific context, scale, economic situation and labour required to create this stability. During this period, I volunteered with GOATi for a total of six months and engaged in interviews after this time. I followed the core team members as they developed a unique esports intellectual property (IP), attempted to crowdfund their game through a kickstarter campaign, engaged with blockchain technologies, launched a digital storefront, managed contracts, and worked for various organisations under piecemeal contracts. I explored how they grappled with precarious working conditions, how they engaged with emerging technologies (such as blockchain) to keep their doors open, dynamically responded to shifts in the industry, and how this work was shaped by the specifics of the Australian games industry. GOATi serves as an exemplar case of how small-scale studios navigate the economic instability of the modern games industry. I explore these by detailing the different practices the team engaged in to deal with this instability. The following terms and themes are explored: • ‘hustling’ – a mode of overwork and constantly looking for the next job or contract • alternative economic models and emerging technologies • building repositories of technology that enable them to work with, and across, various industries. In revealing GOATi’s ‘on the ground’ work through direct engagement and interviews, I explore how games are being made between the large-scale mainstream industry and the small-scale, do-it-yourself (DIY) artistic space. This thesis also creates a historical account of the on-the-ground work of a studio engaged with blockchain technologies. Rising as a new form of decentralised technology, and a space GOATi was already interfacing with. These technologies served to help the team, eventually find stability as a studio in this new space. With the prevalence of small-scale studios both in Melbourne, Australia and worldwide, research must grapple with how these studios survive within creative industries. As highlighted by the Games Action Plan (City of Porth Philip, 2020) the games industry makes up 17% of the design industry – with small studios (I believe) serving as an important part of this industry, and an important role in the culture and economics of the Australian games industry. This study thus details how a small-scale studio was able to escape precarity through emerging technologies and the hustle for contract work.