If you have ever wanted to pay $3/minute to talk to game developers on the phone—and who hasn’t?—today is your lucky day, thanks to the launch of Callvention, a wild new website that will no doubt be used by many people.
Over at Callvention, you can pay varying amounts of money to get some quality phone time with people who worked on games like Halo 3, Prey, and Wing Commander. Different devs have different fees—former Rockstar employee Matt Durgavich, for example, charges $3.38/minute—and they all appear to have a 15-minute minimum. As founder Bryan Cashman said in an e-mail, “We expect calls to be 15-30 minutes, so a call is about the price of taking someone out to dinner to pick their brain.” (That’d be about $50 every 15 minutes, or $200/hour.)
You can talk to these developers about whatever you’d like, which seems like a very good idea that definitely won’t be used in a creepy or abusive way.
It may not surprise you to hear that no women have signed up to participate in Callvention. As one female game developer pointed out when I showed the website to her, many of them have enough stalkers as it is.