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A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

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Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#211

Post by tylerhou »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #206
tylerhou wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I feel like the success of Harvard students is mostly selection bias with respect to their admissions department - i.e., everyone who gets into Harvard would be successful anywhere else. But then again, I was just rejected from Harvard, so you might want to take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Studies of people accepted to Harvard but who chose to attend other schools support your theory.

I also thought that, but I couldn’t find any references to any of those studies when I was writing my comment. Do you happen to know where I could find them?

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#212

Post by briandear »

sremani wrote: post #58
amirrajan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I give you my Armchair Expert of the Year Award. Congrats :-) Must be nice to live in a world without having to give Apple 30%, insurance premiums, taxes, and royalties/partnership splits. Take this comment in good spirit. We all make mistakes. Nothing but love for you. Go build awesome things. Hire a CPA for all the math related stuff.

I see this every day, people take the gross income number to the bank. In software world, the operational costs are less compared to other domains, but there are still costs and taxes. Apple taking 30% cut is insane.

So don’t sell in the App Store. Set up all that distribution, collect correct sales taxes for every country in the world, accept payment from anywhere — deal with a potentially high rate of chargebacks and the fees associated with that, also create a search and discover platform so that people can find your game nobody ever heard of until they visited the App Store. Also, do it in nearly every language on the planet, accepting almost every currency. Also handle actually hosting your content and securing downloads to boot authorized devices.

I’m not sure 30% is expensive enough compared to doing all of that yourself.

Dark Room would not have sold $800,000 anywhere else. The author even said Google Play was an order of magnitude less than Apple.. so is an order of magnitude worth 30%? It seems like a lot of people would trip over a dollar to save a nickel.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#213

Post by jaclaz »

freetime2 wrote: post #113
jaclaz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>[0]: http://www.firecalc.com/ gives us an 80% chance of success for a $750k portfolio on $30k withdrawal a year over 50 years. Which will be good 4 out of 5 times. This is using all available 50 years "stretches" since 1871. If you try limiting the "since" to 1960 the success rate goes to 25%. Still since 1960, 40 years are 44%, 30 years are roughly on par at 79%. And while sticking at the shorter 30 years, if you s…

To be fair, I think the parent poster is not suggesting that you retire outright with $750k in the bank, but work independently "free of bosses". Hopefully in several decades of self-employment, you would be able to generate some meaningful supplemental income during that time.

>To be fair, I think the parent poster is not suggesting that you retire outright with $750k in the bank, but work independently "free of bosses".

Honestly I don't know what he is suggesting or not suggesting, but the reference to the Reddit group makes me think that he actually suggests about becoming "financially independent".

My note was however only about not taking the 4% and firecalc calculator (BTW very good) as an oracle.

More a reference to:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/292417-every-morning-in-afr...

than anything else.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#214

Post by baby »

ajkjk wrote: post #66
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #11

The math on this makes no sense at all. > - Live off of $15k a year. Don't buy a house. Don't buy a fancy car. Just save. - Do this for a year. - Land a job that makes you $100k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution. - Celebrate by living off of $30k a year. - Do this for three years. - Land a job that makes you $140k a year. Save the rest. Max out your 401k contribution. Get a Roth, put $5k a year in…

Those numbers are ridiculous. I saved up about $100k in 3 years at a tech job and I haven't worked in the last two years on that, no problem (living in a not-inexpensive US city with a car, also).

What do you do with 100k of savings? What's next?

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#215

Post by jng »

jblow wrote: post #152
yannyu wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Have you seen A Dark Room? It's text. He ported a text game, that someone else had already designed and implemented, to iOS. This is not a huge amount of work compared to what most game development people do, and is not particularly challenging compared to what people are doing with 3D graphics, etc. I am pointing this out not to be mean, but to respond to your point: "those who work as hard as he does and are as sma…

MIRTS is an incredibly deep take in distilling the essence of RTS. The spartan look is instrumental to that. I don't think you get it.

I only played ADR for a few minutes, so I didn't discover its depth, but the reason it became so popular on the app store is that it was able to create a compelling experience with the least amount of resources, a creative tour de force if you ask me.

The mainstream audience wants flashy things, and these games are probably never going to catch on there, but not for a lack of value, work, or depth.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#216

Post by gregorias »

pyro2927 wrote: post #202
l33tbro wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the entire thing? > The people I once called sheep, aren't that. They just didn't have the means to roll the dice. Source: later in blog.

That's still an extremely opinionated viewpoint. Some people are happy to work a 9-to-5 gig because it affords them stability in exploring their other hobbies.

I agree with your sentiment and find the judgemental, derisive attitude that some entrepreneurial communities exhibit distressing. Going so far as to call 9-to-5 workers sheep is a display of arrogance and (perhaps) own insecurities. It would be better for us not to foster such attitudes.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#217

Post by amirrajan »

gregorias wrote: post #216
pyro2927 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still an extremely opinionated viewpoint. Some people are happy to work a 9-to-5 gig because it affords them stability in exploring their other hobbies.

I agree with your sentiment and find the judgemental, derisive attitude that some entrepreneurial communities exhibit distressing. Going so far as to call 9-to-5 workers sheep is a display of arrogance and (perhaps) own insecurities. It would be better for us not to foster such attitudes.

This has been a big regret of mine. I should never have preceived anyone in a 9 to 5 that way. And as mentioned above, there is nothing wrong with a 9 to 5 (dice or no dice). It’s a prefectly valid course of action to pursue the more important things in life.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#218

Post by k__ »

pinchharmonic wrote: post #145
k__ wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the library. Lived in a shared flat. lol

So basically you just studied/worked on projects for a year, lived very cheaply in a shared flat, cooked your own food? Worth it do you think?

Pretty much, yes.

Gave me new perspectives on life. Went into self-employment after that year. Also I invested much time in my peronal life, stopped doing monogamy and had much time for my two partners.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#219

Post by briandear »

midnightclubbed wrote: post #200
user5994461 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unspoken secret is own your home. Life is a lot easier when there is no rent.

True, but then you need more than the $750k to buy a house outright AND retire. And you certainly can't buy in the areas where you were earning that $140k. Owning outright makes things easier but there's always property taxes to pay, along with maintenance and upkeep.

With $500k, you could put 25% down on a 50 unit apartment complex, clear $12500 per month profit — tax free due to building depreciation — and that’s after the rest of the collected rent pays for property management, property taxes, a repair budget and the debt service — all while building equity in the building that you can then leverage to buy another property. With $500k cash you can turn that into real wealth rather than hoping for S&P rates of return. Cash on cash return for multifamily buildings puts the stocks and bonds investments to shame and other than finding the deals, it is pretty hands-off in terms of day to day work.

Re: A Dark Room: From Sabbatical Year to $800k

#220

Post by briandear »

amirrajan wrote: post #160
krutzger wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it looks like a half-loaded web page on a nexus (which is the reference device for the platform) then something is wrong. Please don't take offence, I'm just trying to explain why it did so bad on android. edit: you don't need to test your app on 1500 devices. They are all the same, if you plan for it only two devices (big/small screen) should suffice. Source: former app developer.

You’d be surprised at how many variations exist out there. Source: app developer who has had 300k downloads of his Android port and has dealt with death threats from people trying to run his game on a device that has the processing power of a toaster.

I can feel your pain. I get aggressive complaints from my users when their 5 year old Android can’t use modern video codecs because they can’t upgrade the OS. Somehow that’s my fault. (This is for secure video chat FWIW.) With iOS, it’s a simple as ensuring their OS is current. Far, far less pain dealing with iOS and Mac users than anything with Android. That isn’t a complaint against Android per se — just a business fact. Android users quite simply cost us more money in support and development time, not to mention Android users generally are more “value conscious” which is another way of saying “cheap.” We have a HIPPA compliant video system and it’s amazing that mental health professionals billing $150 per hour still insist on attempting to conduct highly security sensitive work on extremely outdated devices. I can only imagine how it must be to deal with casual gamers without any professional motivation.
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