Well, bureaucracy is high, but like other said, no need to setup a company in advance. But, he saved anyway way to little money ( I found strange that he is counting in USD, since euro is de facto currency, besides the RON ) to be able to sustain him and an apartment.
Lessons learn: don't quit your job until you have some sale volume.
However, since he's in Romania, he will get a job in no time, there's a chronic shortage of good developers.
The majority of his sales would be in USD (with EUR second, except if he especially marketed to European customers).
And $ gives a standard reference across the world. For EUR many people around the world need to do the conversion first, but even someone in rural Nigeria or Polynesia would have a good grasp of the value of the $ compared to their local currency.
There's also the thing that the average developer salaries are surprisingly low. They are well above the national average, but it's only the top 1-5% who really pulls in the money. The latest numbers I have seen is an average of 5300 RON net (1185 EUR). While the national average is at 2100 RON (485 EUR). The top 1-5% pulls in more than double the average: 10000 RON (2170 EUR), if not more. You're gonna need a salary like that to live comfortably.
It makes sense for him to count in US dollars because even though prices for apartments and cars are expressed in euros in Romania, the rest off the world is still very much US dollar centric.
Salaries are low compared to the rest of Europe (and the US). But it sounds easy to get a tech job there.
EDIT: Yeap, Romania has been doing well. However, I'd argue that the biggest risk is not corruption. From the Romanian workforce's point of view, its becoming too dependent on outsourcing. As salary costs rise, it becomes less and less attractive for foreign companies to outsource work to Romania. Right now, in the city where I live in Romania, 80% of the IT companies are outsourcing companies. It's getting better and better, and most good programmers know to avoid the outsourcing companies as they generally pay peanuts and the work is boring and repetitive.
See my comment down here, 80% of the companies offering jobs are outsourcing companies, which are not the greatest to work for IMHO. Or did you have a different experience? I worked for one for about 6 months and left. I've seen people around me with similar experiences. But those are just my anecdotal experiences.
He probably used USD for the same reason he wrote in english. 'everybody' outside the US knows, roughly, the value of a USD. Few people in the US knows the value of a a Euro.
Don't quit your job until your side gig is fully self-sufficient and you are being paid enough to cover bills/food/necessities and you have a few months saved up for emergencies and such.
If you can't work 40 hours per week at a basic job (and squeeze in a few hours of at least thinking/reading about your side project, if not actually coding/writing) and work another 20-60 on your side gig, you probably don't like it enough or have enough passion for it to sustain it even if you hit your stride.
Plus, as others have said, releasing the game while employed may expose you to the risk of having your employer claim IP ownership.
With all due respect, I am obliged to invite you to ingest excrement. Whilst there might be some people out there who have everything they need to spend another 20 to 60 hours a week on a side gig besides passion, I believe that one needs to have a set of not so common circumstances to be able to devote 40-60 hours a week to something other than a job.
I worked 50 hrs/week at my main job and another 40 until this one took off. All it took was not having much of a social life outside of it. There's nothing that difficult about it.
60 hours per week is far more feasible (if you have few obligations outside of work), but I think that once that number starts increasing the number of people physically capable of working that long is going to drop very sharply.
I work three 16 hour days and three ~10 hour days (sometimes I take two days off and work another 16 hour day). One full day with my oldest child, and the other days I wake up very early and get home to do dinner and evening activities.
>>the majority of the population is not going to be to do this without slowly killing themselves.
We're talking about entrepreneurs, aren't we? People who want to make stuff? Yeah, they aren't the majority. I never said they were.