There are two currencies that get people to show up and do hard work on a project: money and belief. Most of the time we only talk about the first one, because it’s easy to measure. Belief is harder to price, and that’s exactly why it’s worth thinking about carefully, especially if you’re building something like a video game, where belief is often the only currency you have for a very long time.

When someone is paid to work on something, the paycheck does the heavy lifting. It doesn’t matter much whether they love the product, the mission, or the codebase. The transaction is clear: hours and skill in exchange for money, on a schedule that doesn’t depend on whether the thing ultimately succeeds. This is how most commercial software gets built. A client hires you to build a system to their requirements, and you get paid whether or not that system changes the world. The risk of “will people actually want this” sits with the client, not with the person doing the work.

Belief works differently, and it splits into two very different intensities depending on ownership, probably the only one variable.

If you own the idea, if it’s your vision, your name on it, your years sunk into it, then your motivation doesn’t need topping up. You’re not just motivated, you’re responsible. Responsibility is a much stronger fuel than enthusiasm, because it doesn’t run out when the work gets boring or the outcome gets uncertain. You show up on the bad days because there’s no one else whose job it is to show up.

If you don’t own the idea, but you’re still asked to work without pay, something has to make up the difference. You need to be recruited into someone else’s vision hard enough that it starts to feel a little bit like your own. That’s an expensive thing to manufacture in another person, and it takes time you often don’t have at the start of a project.

So why video games make this worse?

Most commercial software has a built-in safety net: you get paid for doing the job, independent of whether the job turns out to matter. Video games, in particular indie ones, without a publisher check landing every month, don’t have that net. Nobody pays you for making the game. They pay you, if at all, for the game succeeding, and you only find out whether it succeeds at the very end, after most of the work is already done.

That creates a strange kind of project. It’s creative work, so unlike a lot of enterprise software, “correct” isn’t well defined (a boss fight can be technically finished and still not be fun), and you often can’t tell the difference until it’s in front of a player who owes you nothing. So the commercial outcome is both delayed and uncertain, stacked on top of each other. A contractor building an internal tool can point to a spec and say “I met it.” A game developer can meet every spec on paper and still ship something nobody wants to play.

This is a rough environment to ask someone else to be motivated in, unless they own it with you or are being paid regardless of outcome. Eight months into my own game, this is not theoretical. It is in fact, the exact fork in the road every indie project reaches.

So yes, go alone first. I found this to be the practical conclusion I’ve landed on. If you’re an indie developer building something you believe in, and you can’t yet pay people, go alone for as long as you possibly can.

Not because collaboration is bad. It’s because collaboration has a startup cost, and that cost is paid in the currency of shared ownership, which doesn’t exist yet at day one. Early on, your game is an idea in your head, half-finished mechanics, and a direction only you can see clearly. Bringing someone in at that stage means spending real time and energy getting them to believe in something that isn’t shaped yet, not in their head. The time you need to achieve that is time you could instead spend shaping it.

Solo work early on is also just faster, mechanically. No syncing, no explaining decisions before you’re sure of them yourself, no waiting on someone else’s availability for a piece of the vision that’s still shifting weekly. The fastest way to get a shapeless idea into something other people can react to is usually to build it yourself until it has a shape.

Once the game has that shape, what they call a vertical slice, a playable segment, something that shows what the whole thing wants to be, only then the equation changes. Now you have something concrete to recruit people into, instead of asking them to believe in a description. At that point it makes sense to bring others on, whether that’s paying collaborators out of savings, taking a loan to fund a small team, outsourcing specific pieces, or pursuing a publisher who will fund the rest. All of those routes require money changing hands in some form, because past the solo phase, unpaid belief stops scaling.

Of course, none of this applies if you’re joining a studio, or if someone is already paying you to be there. That’s a completely different dynamic. The paycheck does the work belief would otherwise have to do, and you don’t need anyone to fall in love with the vision for the project to move forward.

This is specifically about the indie case: no publisher, no studio, no payroll. Just an idea and the question of who else needs to be in the room before it has a shape worth defending.

If you’re building something like that right now, the uncomfortable but useful question is: are you asking people to be motivated by a paycheck you can’t give them, or by a vision you haven’t finished proving to yourself yet? Until you know the answer, it’s probably faster to build alone.

Let me know what you think.

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