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

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

#71

Post by dkersten »

gfodor wrote: post #43
hhas01 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s true though. I’d rather have so-so technology plus great market and marketing than the best technology in the world and sod all ability to sell it. You can always improve the technology later, once you’re generating the revenue to pay for that. But if you don’t have sales you don’t have squat. Been there, done that, lost the shirt. Lessons learned.

You said technology is the least important part - not that it’s less important than sales or marketing.

Least important doesn’t mean unimportant, just that all the other things are more important, in relative terms.

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

#72

Post by gfodor »

dkersten wrote: post #71
gfodor wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said technology is the least important part - not that it’s less important than sales or marketing.

Least important doesn’t mean unimportant, just that all the other things are more important, in relative terms.

Yes, and this doesn’t make any sense. There are a huge number of elements to product development, many of which are less important than tech.

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

#73

Post by zanny »

bermanoid wrote: post #63
makeee wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience has shown me that tools that help others build faster can be quite profitable. Currently make my living from one such tool and most of my customers are indie hackers ( https://divjoy.com ).

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.

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

#74

Post by zanny »

My problem with this is the assertion that failure == not making a profit. For the OP, yes, if your goal is to make money off your code then writing free software is pretty prone to failure on that front.

Free software is philanthropy. Even if you somehow are getting paid to write it, it cannot be done for profit. If your objective is revenue discarding the burgeoning international IP regime as a source of income is foolhardy.

That being said, software for profit is hugely contrary to software that is used. Its infinitely harder to see anyone else use your code and you must always be cognizant that your proprietary for sale code is always going to see orders of magnitude less utility and adoption than free code.

So when you write software from day one the objective is going to be to either maximize money or maximize utility. They are contrary to one another. Some would argue that making money == ability to do more work == more utility but no amount of time invested into software used by a few will compare to less software being used by orders of magnitude more people.

And there is also no guarantee of success. Its why proprietary, popular software exists. Making a proprietary or free product does not guarantee money or use. But depending on which you want going for one will hugely limit your ability to obtain the other.

This axis also comes up in free software itself between permissive vs restrictive licensing. If your code is MIT / BSD / Apache / etc you will almost certainly never make money from it. Anyone can just use it however they want with no restrictions and will do so. It will maximize its utilization with no regard for the ethics or objectives of said use.

If you license it restrictively, IE GPL or CC-SA, you will reduce your potential adoption audience to not include those that want to distribute it in propriety without providing their users the same freedoms they got from you. This can, however, be the same exchange of utility vs money, or, more often, time. Infectious free software propagates slowly but does cause the general amount of freeness to increase through permeation. It also lets you sell licenses for proprietary use and is one of the only major ways to monetize free software consistently, see Qt.

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

#75

Post by shahinrostami »

makeee wrote: post #65
shahinrostami wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very nice work! I've written a small API ( https://m8.fyi/chord ) to generate beautiful diagrams easily and quickly from Python. It's definitely not making a living from the income, but it is enough for a coffee every now and then.

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.

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

#76

Post by imhoguy »

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…

> 1) Taxes

That was nightmare. Best to outsource it completely with: Merchant of Record, an app marketplace or resellers.

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

#77

Post by bdowling »

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…

> 1) Taxes.

What taxes are you talking about? You mentioned that you were selling through app stores, which I assume handled sales taxes for you in the few cases when they may be required. Your business income taxes would be the same as any business in your city/county/state/country. What else is there?

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by shakow »

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."

It depends on how it comes out once you divide by the time & resources you invested in the making of the game.

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

#80

Post by looping__lui »

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…

Thanks for sharing! Regarding 1): I can recommend the combination “Fastspring” for order processing and taxes (nothing to worry about and super easy setup) and LimeLM for software protection; dynamic license key generation is super easy in conjunction w/ Fastspring :-)
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