Hacker News Reader

Comment by candu | Hacker News Reader

This is the sad reality behind much of content creation nowadays. Now that everyone's a blogging streaming indie-gamemaking content-spewing machine, the marginal expected value of new content - in a lot of areas - is close to zero. Once you factor in the cost of marketing to get noticed above the noise, the financial value you personally realize is often negative.

Of course, people will keep trying, because a) it is fundamentally rewarding in some non-monetary sense to make Real Things, and b) there are enough "I quit my job and now I'm a bazillionaire!" stories out there to entice (largely young, less established) people to play the lottery.

The real money is in owning the content markets (where you get your cut in developer account subscriptions, transaction fees, 30% of sales, marketing costs, etc.) or in providing tools, just as in the Gold Rush of yore.

View on HN

This is the sad reality behind much of content creation nowadays.

Don't be fooled. It's always been this way.

In fact, there was a time when content creators didn't get rich at all. If they were lucky they made a living, often due to patronage. Not to mention those who simply inherited or married into wealth.

The millionaire artist is a very modern invention.

> The millionaire artist is a very modern invention.

I actually wonder how many pre-20th century examples there really are... Artisan artists who made piecemeal works of art - like Rubens, say - could make a comfortable living, but it takes mass media to gain real wealth.

I can only think of a handful of fiction writers who got seriously wealthy just from writing alone back then - Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, maybe a few others.

The millionaire artist is a very modern invention.

Michelangelo was very wealthy and paid well for his artworks.

Yeah, because he had patrons, including Pope Julius II.

I don't think things have really changed. The games market is saturated, but the IoT is only just beginning, and the next "minecraft" (sorry I don't know a lot of indie games) will probably be something AR or VR.

AR is posing to really take off. I mean, I work for the government and I'm not very creative, so these upcoming things might seem lame to a lot of people, but we can basically cover a 15 km radius with slow "internet" (LoraWAN) for around $1000.

In this you can build all sorts of small devices. You can monitor street temperatures and giving the data to the public via open data. You can monitor if elderly people are alive by tracking whether or not an IoT lightbuilb turns on. You can build tourism apps that emit small stories via Bluetooth.

I mean, the options are endless, and it's basically shaping up to be the Wild West that indie games were 10 years ago.

AR isn't really going to become a thing. Not with current technology, anyway. The problem is twofold: There's no way to get enough power to the device to do anything interesting, and there's no way to make things darker. You can only add light, not subtract it. That means your AR interface will be basically unreadable in sunlight.

The power problem is the real killer, though. Oculus is only successful because it's tethered to a high-end rig. When you don't have that, you're basically tethering a mobile phone to your eyes. Not only do mobile phones die within a few hours if you play 3D games on them continuously, but their graphics aren't very impressive.

There's a third problem worth mentioning: When you're using AR, you're making an overlay on the real world. The real world is instant. Your overlay has to be at least 90fps to look seamless. That means you have to recognize a target + render the overlay within 11 milliseconds. That recognition step is a long way from being that performant.

I predict Magic Leap will be shown to be an elaborate ruse, and they were able to raise money mostly by tricking investors with tech demos that can't possibly advance any further. It's easy to make this claim, but the fundamental problems with the technology seem insurmountable on our current tech tree. It's not quite the same thing as being negative toward a new startup -- most startups have a chance of succeeding if they get users. But you can't get users with AR without wishing for new advances in technology that seem beyond startups' capabilities for the moment.

> there's no way to make things darker

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display#Twisted...

I thought so too, but unfortunately this doesn't work either.

The reason it won't work is the same reason scratches on your eyeglasses don't appear sharp. Your focus is in the distance, so you won't see whatever dimming has been applied Not unless you use it to darken e.g. an entire quadrant of your lenses.

Interestingly, this problem applies to text rendering too. It seems unlikely that you'll be able to project clearly readable text over anything when it's an inch away from your eye.

Can you elaborate? Isn't the basis behind VR that you can show different images to each eye to trick people into thinking they are looking at something far away? Is there something about the cornea/lens shape that prevents this from working with AR?

Yeah, so the reason VR works is that it controls the entire scene. The light being projected towards your eyes is from a consistent focal plane -- the light comes from a flat surface located exactly N inches away from your eyes. That means you can focus sharply on it.

AR is a very different beast. In the real world, your focus is usually several feet away, or sometimes across the room. Your focus also changes almost instantly. Yet AR still needs to project light toward your eye from exactly N inches away.

You can simulate this: Find some glasses and put some black tape over part of the lens. You'll notice the tape doesn't appear sharp and crisp. It's a blur.

(Or just close one eye and put a finger close to your other, and look out in the distance.)

I'm not sure AR has any hope of rendering text in a readable way. It'd be like writing some letters on your finger, then putting it up to your eye while looking out in the distance. Even if the letters glow, so that they're a light source, you still can't read it at all.

I didn't think your explanation could be right, since VR headsets are very close to your eyes. Try closing one eye and putting a finger close to the other. You can't see it in focus even if you don't look out in the distance.

The bit I was missing is that VR headsets use lenses to adjust the angle of the incoming image to simulate the image being farther away (this is completely different from the depth perception created by sending different images to each eye). This video is a great explanation: https://vr-lens-lab.com/lenses-for-virtual-reality-headsets/

This does make AR much more difficult, since a lens that adjusts the simulated image would also adjust the real image behind it, but I don't think it makes it impossible. There may be a way to simulate a Fresnel lens just for the simulated image or use miniature one-way mirrors to do so.

Edit: I think hololens actually accomplishes this, but its very complicated: http://www.imaginativeuniversal.com/blog/2015/10/18/how-holo...

> AR is posing to really take off.

Even if that turns out to be true, the pattern of 1-2 Minecraft-like winners and 99.9% losers is likely to hold. Existing platforms are already accessible to indies.

Though if your goal is to make it a hobby instead of a living, "losing" on income may not bother you.

IoT, AI, biotech and possibly VR/AR (it's too soon to tell) are so development intensive, they are the purview of giant corporate teams, not indie developers.

The web spoiled us. It's hard problems from hereon out.

I think there are a lot of opportunities for indie development. We build a lot of more-story elderly housing and in those you have a doorbell and gate opening system. This used to be pretty costly because you needed a professional system with wiring and what not.

These days we do it with IoT. Basically we run our own private and encrypted internet, LoraWAN, and we setup a small $10 door control in each apartment which connects to the main door via our slow private net.

The components and software was developed by a single student at a hackaton.

Similarly we have a lot of town history on record. We've given people access to this, and a group of student went around town setting up 957 little Bluetooth transmitters which emit these stories to their app all over town.

Another example is a medicine cabin that monitors it patients/elders take their meds and automatically alarms staff if they don't which is something we offer today. The plastic bag and electronics that does it were developed by a small local bakery with two employees.

I do agree with you in that some areas are going to require google sized companies. But things like the raspberry pi and all these small/cheap "standard" components which anyone can build themselves are really shaping up to change a lot of things and it's not big companies who are driving it forward.

While certainly not the norm, there is also Jonathan Blow who made Braid & The Witness, both afaik full time with borrowed money. Though few people have his vision and resolute.

Me, I'm fine with making games on the side for now. But if an idea were to come along which I deeply fall in love with, I can easily imagine quitting my day job (being frugal, always putting on the side helps with that) and just work on something for a few years.

Minecraft started as an indie game, so this statement is not quite correct.

Citing Minecraft's success is a shining example of survivorship bias, approaching the level of baby-boomers assuring any kid with programming talent that "one day you'll be the next Bill Gates".

Flip side saying "don't make money" is the reverse. Even just "very, very, very rarely" would be a big difference.

Yes, Minecraft and dozens of other indie games have been very very successful. But how many indie games were created in just the year Minecraft was released that didn't make much money at all?

For every one moderate to major success, you've got hundreds of games, maybe thousands, that didn't make it. One can always believe their game is going to be the next big thing, eventually someone is bound to be right. But pretending like that sort of success is regular and common thing isn't realistic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com