First gig

[Patrick Gaumond]

I'm not taking morals here, I'm talking business. Honesty doesn't put bread on my table. A client who agrees (in writing) to pay you for work and doesn't can always be taken to court. The time you've invested in a project that the producers themselves don't believe in enough to get funding is gone forever on the other hand.

And that's exactly the kind of thinking that these kinds of explotative "clients" are bargaining for. Just because you love doing something doesn't mean you should do it for free. I'm sure there are plenty of doctors, lawyers and mechanics our there who love what they do, nobody expects them to work for free.

By working on commercial projects without pay, you're hurting yourself and the professional community at large. Don't let yourself get brainwashed by anyone into thinking that because drawing/painting is "cool" or "fun", you don't need to/deserve to get paid.

The point wasn't about morality at all, it was actually only about business. A client that asks you if you'd like to contribute to a small game project and tells you straight you up nobody is making money off of it is clearly more professional than one that wants to pay you borderline minimum wage, and not only that but conveniently decides to "forget" to pay you. Whether or not you get the money is irrelevant. They were a bad, unprofessional client to begin with. Morality doesn't have anything to do with it. Living up to what you said you would do, as any professional business should, does.

Nobody here is being "brainwashed" into thinking we don't deserve to get paid. Everyone here understands that its something you do the first 1 or 2 two times as a feeler, and I still don't see why that's such a bad thing. You seem to think these projects take up years of your life, when they more likely take up maybe a week or two, and since there's no contract or obligation to do the work you can skip out whenever.


As book said, the argument that creatives are the only ones that do some free work is just not true. It can happen to anyone and it's their judgement alone that should decide the value of that experience versus the time lost and not some "rule". and it does provide valuable, real world experience, more tangible than just using that time to study or make your own work.

That said though, I think you have a good point about it happening more to artists in general than other professions, as I'm pretty sure every artist at some point or another has been approached by someone looking for free work, which is unfortunate. And ultimately, since we've had a good discussion and since I've changed quite a bit since starting this thread, I think that trumps most of the reasons I would argue to do free work on someone's project once or twice. If it wasn't so commonplace for people to approach creative types to do free work then I would have a different opinion. I still think my arguments in favour of doing it a couple of times as a feeler are valid, but I now agree with you in saying that accepting this too often, as a community, perpetuates the idea that it's easy to take advantage of us all

Thanks again everyone for adding your thoughts. It's much appreciated