A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

Yes, the game market is often hard. But I find this author's attitude fatalistic and weird. (Also I agree that the numbers do not add up).

He seems to think that "rolling the dice" is the primary thing going on, and that he can't influence this substantially by any amount of development skill, proper tactics, and so forth.

I wonder if this kind of mindset is a side-effect of modern-day political correctness -- that if you succeed, it is 100% due to your good fortune (combined privilege and luck) and not because you did anything special to get there. The upside of such an attitude is that we recognize luck and recognize that people who failed did not necessarily fail through fault of their own. One major downside is that we feel a lack of agency, and this lack of agency is almost certain to drastically decrease the chances of future success.

Be careful what you believe, because it matters.

For my part, I think talent and skill and grit are huge factors in success, so if I want to succeed at something, I am able to formulate some kind of a plan. I don't feel that I am "just rolling the dice", even when luck is involved (which it is all the time, in everything).

I don't think most people think all success is 100% luck, but many people do find issue with those who consider themselves self-made without any consideration for privilege and luck.

It feels like you're setting up a strawman here of people who believe that all success is unearned. The author only said that there are those who work as hard as he does and are as smart as him and yet don't succeed. How else would you rationalize situations where you find your peers failing and you succeeding, even though you might consider yourselves equals in ability and tenacity? Or do you simply consider yourself above and beyond and attribute all your success to that?

I appreciate the honesty in this post and I'm pretty sure we people who make games can all learn from this.

having said that, before relating to the story please take into consideration he is going solo at it. Difficulties are very different if you are working as a team: It's a lot more expensive but a collaborative approach to creation can yield better odds of success if they can look at the game from different points of view (story, graphics, programming)

I'm not in favor of either approaches to game development, but Please remember that following your guts on creative work is both a blessing and a curse, and teamwork is a totally different beast.

The original point was valid - that it is hard to read writing with many spelling and grammar errors.

> The people I once called sheep, aren't that. They just didn't have the means to roll the dice.

One thing I see often and often (I've done it too) is that when you quit your job to pursue your dream, everybody else working at a job is a sucker. They are too comfy in their life sucking job and one day they will get fired and realize that they wasted their time making someone else rich.

I was lucky that failure caught up with me really fast and I realized I am no better then others (so did the author).

But I've seen cases where the person believes in this so much that even after catastrophic failure they can't go back to a job because, well, of all the horrible things they said about being an employee.

I was in start up school this year and one of the common theme was about people who where at the brink of losing their home for an idea that was not even close to ready to launch. The instructor stress them to get a job.