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What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

dylanwilson.net

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Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#81

Post by imtringued »

I'm really confused. The goal is making money yet there has not been a single attempt at monetization. Patreon is basically equivalent to donations. There is no obligation to pay you. Your highest tier is $5 a month. Even with hundreds of backers you're barely going to earn anything worth the effort. You could have easily added a much higher tier that charged at least something like $40 a month for support prioritization on Github. You need to some basic market research and find customers that are willing to pay and give them a reason to give you money. There are lots of ways to monetize an opensource project. If you want money you'll have to focus on money, not on your project.

Your project was a success, only the (nonexistent) business strategy failed.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#82

Post by dstick »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #66
dstick wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing! That’s the downside of mediocre success. Too little money to outsource tasks, too much to abandon and allocate your time resources elsewhere. Glad you made the right call and I hope you find another passion project soon!

Maybe I live in a totally different universe, but it's really hard for me to consider a software product that grossed $100k to be a "mediocre success."

Hehe same here but, the poster mentioned 2010 and total revenue. If it’s $100.000 in 1 year, then sure! That would probably have potential for growth as well. This didn’t read like that :)

A revenue of 100.000 spread over 2 years wouldn’t be enough to support me and my family. Living in a Western Europe country. I’d prefer freelancing (or a job) for income in that scenario, over making ends meet with a software product and battling off copycats and whatnot. It should grow month over month and if it stalls for a year+ at low revenue, that’s most likely bad and I’d kill it, considering it a mediocre success! Hope that makes sense :)

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#83

Post by TAForObvReasons »

imtringued wrote: post #81

I'm really confused. The goal is making money yet there has not been a single attempt at monetization. Patreon is basically equivalent to donations. There is no obligation to pay you. Your highest tier is $5 a month. Even with hundreds of backers you're barely going to earn anything worth the effort. You could have easily added a much higher tier that charged at least something like $40 a month for support prioritiza…

> I always assumed that one day I'd be able to turn it into some side income and maybe eventually replace my full-time job.

That doesn't magically happen. Even in the cases where people do turn their work into side income or a job, there's a huge amount of outreach and effort behind the scenes.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#84

Post by imtringued »

zanny wrote: post #73
bermanoid wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game engines are different. It's a tiny market relative to web, and really the only people in the market for an engine other than Unity or Unreal are indies, who have near zero revenue and even less willingness to spend it. Those two are so far ahead in terms of features, support, and battle-hardening that you'd pretty much have to be insane to pick anything else if you had paying users. Always be wary of any market…

And Godot. You know, the 15 year old totally free engine of 30,000 commits 2.5 million LOCs that also does pretty much everything.

What I noticed is that it's actually much harder to use Godot than expected. Yes it does significantly reduce the amount of code you have to write for your game but it opens up questions of how to structure your project because the scene editor doesn't actually match how I would make my own games if all I had was SDL2. For example if you just straight up write code to add nodes to the scene graph it will create a disconnect between what is displayed in the editor and the actual game. Figuring out how to keep the editor and code in sync is a problem unique to Godot and this is very disconnected from general software development.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#85

Post by makeee »

shahinrostami wrote: post #75
makeee wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, cool idea. Is that a one-time fee or monthly? If one-time then I'd suggest emphasizing that fact and saying something like "lifetime access" (from my experience most people assume monthly for something like this). Also fyi, your PayPal button does nothing when I click it. Best of luck with everything!

Thank you for the great suggestion - I've already updated the page to add "Lifetime Access"! Fixing the Paypal button issue will be more tricky! I just tried it in Firefox and it's fine, but I'm seeing temperamental issues in Safari. Will look into it further - thanks for the heads up.

Looks like the issue is that the element below it has a negative top margin of -22vw and is overlapping the button. Removing that fixes it for me ;)

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#86

Post by qes »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #66
dstick wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing! That’s the downside of mediocre success. Too little money to outsource tasks, too much to abandon and allocate your time resources elsewhere. Glad you made the right call and I hope you find another passion project soon!

Maybe I live in a totally different universe, but it's really hard for me to consider a software product that grossed $100k to be a "mediocre success."

In my universe, I make that (net even, not gross) in half a year with essentially zero responsibility for marketing, taxes, customer support, etc. - nobody can realistically steal my work and cut into my wages with it - far less stress - and I keep making that over and over again every 6 months without having to do anything really that new or different.

In comparison, a game that grossed $100k, which I have to pay self-employment taxes on, and perhaps app store fees out of that too, sounds awfully mediocre, at best.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#87

Post by cutemonster »

dpcan wrote: post #51
didibus wrote: post #47

I'm wondering if he'd still feel like quitting had it been making ton of money. One thing I've noticed is any passion project that becomes too much like work starts to feel like a chore and the passion for it disappears. I don't think making money off of it would change that. I've learned that when I do side projects, I need to think of it as having fun and playing. And with that, you accept to stop something and mov…

I had a game reach about $600 per day in revenue for a few months way back in 2010. Overall I think it made around $100K, and another game made about $30K. So, even though I was making money, I still wanted out. The reasons came down to those listed below: 1) Taxes. I wonder if it's easier now, but back then, I had to manually pay individual counties in my state, I had to pay individual states, and and then there wer…

> some of them are crazy. I received death threats for removing a small feature

Wow, literally crazy

About how many customers did you have, when those things happened? If I may ask.

I wonder how large a group of people tends to be, when such crazies start appearing

(I wonder how those things made you feel and think)

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#88

Post by ldd »

I've been developing a game full-time for the past few months. I've sort of thought about how my journey will end.

In the meantime, I got to write a couple of VSCode extensions that are used at least by some people and React dependencies that I personally find cool.

I never really thought about it, but my open-source projects usually end up having 15-40 stars and that means 1 or 2 support tickets every 6 months. I guess not being popular has its upsides.

All that I can personally say is that, more than passion towards my current project, I feel as if I didn't make it, I would regret it deeply. So I wake up early every day to advance a little bit each day. I deeply enjoy the process.

I hope you someday look back at your project and see it as a success. A failure commercially, maybe, but a success in many other ways.

Anyways, thanks for the link to https://www.indiehackers.com/.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#89

Post by throwaway2245 »

citizenpaul wrote: post #8

My experience is that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise. Those people are mainly doing it with the goal of making money for no one but themselves. The fact that they don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money. One of those primary early ways to make money is th…

Counterpoint: almost all paid work is assisting someone with building their thing.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#90

Post by the_af »

dkersten wrote: post #70
the_af wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an "exit plan" in the context of small personal non-corporate projects?

It depends on what commitments you made to your users. It could be as simple as just abandoning the project or it could be something more elaborate like handing it over to someone else.

But why do you have to think about this "as soon as you have your first user"? Not every project is a business and not every project needs an "exit plan". Not everyone doing a project needs to think in entrepreneur terms.
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