The Last Day

15 Oct, 2026

Today's my last day at KO_OP and I'm in a weird place. My last day was supposed to be September 30th like many of my other coworkers being furloughed, but I got an extension because there was (and is) so much more writing to be done for Young Suns. But while today is incredibly bittersweet on its own, the weirdness and emptiness of it all has been hanging over me for a few weeks now because I am totally alone. My other teammates on the narrative team, Kevin and Marty, are both out right now-- Kevin is on PTO until November, and Marty is on extended leave for at least half a year. So all the channels we use to discuss our in-progress work, where we update each other and solicit feedback...all of them are empty right now. It feels like I'm leaving messages in a bottle for them to read when they get back, and it is profoundly lonely. Working with Kevin and Marty has been the best part of the last few years and it is deeply unnerving to be writing without them. It is also a lot less fun.

In all honesty, I am more than a little burnt out. I think all of us are. While I can't speak for the rest of the team, I wouldn't be surprised to hear if the majority of KO_OP members past and present are in a similar state. There are some theories I could make as to why, but I'm not interested in airing internal politics in a blog post. At the end of the day, I have so much respect and appreciation for everyone I call a coworker, but we have constantly been pushed into an untenable position by the demands of capitalism.

Bruno Dias had a recent excellent post aptly titled "On Leaving The Best Job I Ever Had" and there was one part in particular where he outlined something I'd never realized but deeply resonated with:

"A generally-recognized risk factor for burnout is a sense that demands are being placed on oneself that one has little opportunity to influence, and even at the best of times any kind of commercial creative work can really produce that sensation."

I consider KO_OP to be the best of times, and it still burns us out. When your company is in a position where survival is not guaranteed--such as when you don't have a surplus of revenue, independent wealth, or some other third thing--every mistake made in a production is dangerous. Decisions have to be made and followed through, even if they aren't necessarily the right decisions for the project.^{1 2} And if they aren't the right decision for the project, you had better hope that they aren't critical mistakes that will devour more time to fix them. I don't think any video game ever makes it out the door looking exactly how it was first imagined, because I have a hard time imagining a production in which the correct decisions are made at every turn and with no complications. It doesn't matter how ethically you run your business when the universe has curveballs in store.

In general, his whole post struck a chord with me--loving the place and the work deeply but being unable to continue. Our circumstances are different, but the outcomes are similar. Where my end date was chosen for me, I was offered the extension only if I wanted it. And when I got the offer, I had to really consider whether or not I could handle it. I think there is plenty more work to be done on Young Suns, and in creating my portfolio website and documenting everything in retrospect I am constantly digging through the graves of all of our past ideas from years of work on this game. But so many of the ideas we had to let die were things we punted down the road for "when we'd have time" while we scrambled to get critical systems into place later and later into production.³

If we weren't beholden to an external funder setting milestones and determining our ability to pay ourselves, maybe we could have taken more time to right the ship or even stay the course when we were moving in the right direction. If we had unlimited funds and none of us worried about rent or the cost of living, maybe we could've taken our time to examine the decisions we were making more closely and take the time to polish things to be the best they can be. But none of our choices on a creative level can change the material reality of the world we live in. Our continued survival as a company depended on us delivering milestones to our funder and getting them approved. The longer we take to deliver milestones, the faster money runs out. Time is money in every sense of the word.

There are a few phrases I tend to repeat to my friends and family outside of games to explain the circumstances we're making games in: nobody ever sets out to make a bad game, and every game is a lottery ticket.

Nobody Ever Sets Out To Make A Bad Game

This is a phrase I try to impress on my friends who play a lot of games themselves. A common refrain in the gamer/consumer mindset is "why did the devs do X when they could've done Y?" and there really isn't any one universal answer to that question.

In the case of Goodbye Volcano High, one of the main criticisms we got was that people felt like the choices didn't matter because the branching of the game was minimal and the ultimate ending of the game never changed based on your choices. While there were thematic justifications for this, the ultimate answer is: we didn't have the money for it. Our game was fully animated, fully voice acted, and incredibly high fidelity. KO_OP has never made enough of a profit from its games to be self-sustaining. If it did, then we could have taken as much time as we wanted to voice more dialogue, animate more scenes, branch more story. But I was hired explicitly to scope the game down as a script revisionist; the dialogue line count set us severely over budget for voice acting, and the rate of scenes being integrated was incompatible with when we intended to ship the game even after several delays.

That's what forced our hand on an indie level. Now imagine being a triple-A studio with shareholders or even a parent company--you are not only managing your own team's capabilities and project needs but also the expectations set by disconnected executives who only care about numbers going up. Dragon Age, a franchise I've loved for years, is one with a fandom rife with people who have strong opinions on what the games should've been. And before I worked in the industry professionally, I might've been one of them. But where Veilguard might've personally disappointed other long-term fans, when I played it I couldn't help but wonder what decisions were made as a direct result of external factors. I remember hearing rumor of Veilguard initially intended to be an online multiplayer live-service game, and only diverting course at the last second. I can see remnants of the initial design intentions in the game, and the bandages applied to bridge it back into what the series has always been as a story-rich single player RPG.

All games are Frankenstein's monster in that way; made up of parts that had old lives and purposes combined together with new things to create something that we hope gets struck with lightning and brought to life. How it moves and acts after that isn't necessarily determined by our design decisions alone but by the nature of what parts we've grafted together. And this would be an interesting element of the art form to celebrate if it wasn't first and foremost an unfortunate consequence of capitalism.

Every Game Is A Lottery Ticket

This is a phrase I use to express how uncertain working in games is to anyone outside of it. Because it's true-- you're not really making a product that goes on a store shelf and can have a reasonable calculation of cost to manufacture X point of sale. You're making something that you hope will be lightning in a bottle and sell exponentially more than it cost to make, and games are fucking expensive to make. We begrudge the cost of games and consoles getting more expensive by the month and year, but fact of the matter is that the cost of making games has never ever been equivocal to how much money they make back. So even if a game "does well," it is still incredibly unlikely to actually sell enough to maintain a studio.⁴

In its 14+ years of operations, KO_OP has never won the lottery. We've done well critically, which is nice, and our work has meant something to people personally, which is wonderful. But none of that translates to revenue, or at least not the level of revenue needed for a studio of our size. ~30 people each getting paid the same salary of 90k CAD / ~63k USD a year means that making a million dollars isn't enough to sustain us for a full year. This is a drastic oversimplification of things, but again-- this is just at our indie scale. Consider companies with 100 to 300 people, and consider companies whose engineers are paid six figures.

Even if Microsoft wasn't making bad bets themselves, plenty of the studios they owned would've likely closed down or laid off employees even if they'd stayed independent. The egregiousness of Microsoft's actions stems from the fact that they are one of the biggest corporations in the world and that should grant them the luxury of time and resources to make their games the best they can be. But as we've seen, corporations care less about the quality of their commodities compared to the quantity of their profits.

So where does that leave us? I don't know. Games will continue to be made, professionally or otherwise, and I know that I am hoping to use my unemployment era as time to return to my own small personal projects. I have a contract lined up for December, thankfully, and the privilege of a safety net that will hopefully let me rebuild my savings while I save on rent from living with family. But even if I didn't have a contract lined up in games, I'd still be planning on making games in some capacity. Plenty of people outside of the "games industry" are making fascinating, inventive works, and I find myself more drawn to those projects creatively and personally than I do to the next triple-A blockbuster.

Ultimately, I think the most interesting games are going to come from those who approach their constraints in creative ways, and the most polished games are going to come from those who have the privilege of stability to grant them the time needed to refine their products. Really, I think that the most worker-friendly environment you can create is one that is stable. And stability is a rarer and rarer thing these days.

And Now For Something Completely Different

It is very easy to end things with bitterness. I don't want to do that. Despite my burn out, despite my frustrations, there is no place I would rather work. There are no people I would rather work with. As Saleem said at the launch party at the beginning of the month, we're not a family, but we are comrades. And that means something.

I do not dream of labor, but I do dream of making games. I want to make games with people who care about the conditions we make them in, about the artistic value in the process of creating and the end result we reach together. There is no place like KO_OP. I want KO_OP to survive, not only so that I can come back, but so that we can continue to make our corner of the world better together. So that we can make KO_OP itself better. I don't think the games industry will last, but I know who I want to surround myself with to navigate what comes next.

What I got the chance to experience at KO_OP so early in my life and career is remarkable. I am--or was-- the youngest person at the studio. I frequently tormented my coworkers by reminding them how old I was when X game came out or when Y console released. But the amount of freedom, respect, and space to grow I was given is something I will forever cherish. I was trusted with critical work for shipping Goodbye Volcano High, and I got to help shape the world of Young Suns from its inception. I was 13 years old when KO_OP was first founded, and now I'm 27⁵; I have lived more of my life in a world with KO_OP in it than without. I hope that continues to be true for many years.

Working on both Goodbye Volcano High and Young Suns was an honor and a privilege. I've hidden countless pieces of myself and people I love in those games, and I am excited for players to continue discovering them in Young Suns. I hope I get to do more.

In the meantime, I am going to be taking some time to pet my cat, get through my backlog, and learn what kind of work I want to do without KO_OP to define me. I'm incredibly sad that this chapter is ending, but I am grateful for a break and for the chance to slow down and rediscover my practice.

#personal