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

I don't know if I'd still feel like quitting but I would have more money so that would be nice.

Joking aside, it's really hard to say how I'd feel. 5 years is a long time and if I'd been able to put more money back into the project the story would have been very different.

In any case, I've grown a lot since I started that project and I'm ready to spend the next 5 years on something new. Hopefully more financially sustainable.

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 were countries. I chose not to sell my game in any non-U.S. country just because of this. So, the tax nightmare wasn't something I was interested in, and was a big part of exiting the game selling business.

2) Make updates or create something new?

I originally did well updating my game. It kept people interested, and seemed to spur new sales somehow, but working on the SAME game for months and months and only making minor updates was not fun. It was work. So, I decided to make more games. I had one game make about another $30K, but everything else didn't sell at all. This was incredibly discouraging.

3) Reviews and Customer Support

When you are dependent on game sales, you check your reviews daily, and you freak out about anything less than 5 stars. Every mean comment hits hard. Customers start writing you, and some of them are crazy. I received death threats for removing a small feature for example. I also received CONSTANT questions about getting my game to work on different devices and computers. I couldn't keep up efficiently.

4) Daily Sales Stress

I would watch daily sales like a hawk. If an hour was slow, I'd stress. If a day was slow, I'd panic. It all had to just end. I couldn't market all day every day and work on new features and new games, so I was at the mercy of the app stores and it made me nuts.

5) Sales slowed

Finally, sales started slowing because of all the competition to my game (maybe). Other devs saw it doing well and a bunch of clones started showing up. Some even used my assets. Some Just added an "!" after the name of my game and were somehow using my code. I wasn't getting sales because my game had been out for a while, and then there was pirating and fakes. I know some people have their own opinion about pirating, but I would get emails from people telling me my game gave them a virus, then when we got down to it, they had stolen it from some shady site and still wanted support and to blame me for installing an infected game.

So, all that being said, yeah, making okay money in the game industry just wasn't enough to make me want to continue, but I REALLY like to make games, so part of me wants to try again anyway. Perhaps learning from these experiences will make the next adventure a little easier, who knows?

In hindsight I totally agree with you. Unfortunately when I started the project I wasn't in that mindset. It started as a passion project, mostly an experiment in building an audience around something I enjoyed creating.

More recently I've been getting some help to understand the things I did wrong and to start with the business strategy.

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.

From reading the article author’s failure was failing to ask that question of himself. With no clear objective or milestones, the project ate a huge amount of manpower for no material gain and left him thoroughly burnt out.

It doesn’t matter if your project is for-profit or Free. Identify your deliverables, identify your schedule, and never turn a blind-eye to your failures to meet both.

Oh, and never mistake makework for productivity either. If your product isn’t selling, what it doesn’t need is more features. What it does need is better marketing and sales skills. Quite frankly, building the technology part is the least important part of building a successful Product. Being geeks, it’s awfully easy to work on (i.e. fiddle with) the one bit that you’re naturally good at, when what you should be doing is working on all the parts that you’re not.

It doesn't really go into detail about whether he offered other direct contracts or work fire hire or other tried other licensing or any other strategy.

I would with your sentiment if you said helping indie devs wasn’t profitable opposed to a waste of time. There is real value in supporting a community, you just have to know when you are doing charity work.

What is difficult in those kinds of businesses is to identify whether there's a real market there, and to convince enough people to try your product. For a new kind of product, you have to easily show large amounts of value, because people are used to get things done without your product.

So I'd not say that it's a waste of time, but it's just a difficult kind of business to enter.

This is a critical thing to assess in any case where you’re investing time and effort and expecting to get support (either financial or “in kind”) in return. I see this ignored in many “startups” of all kinds (companies, social clubs, workout groups... anything that requires some effort to make happen).

The key test is: “Can this thing continue running without me? Do people care enough to give something if I’m not pushing?” (Pay a fee, volunteer for well defined role, resolve disputes, etc.)

The first one isn't true and the second one is simply not doable for poor people.

Regarding adding features, I like the approach here: https://www.defmacro.org/2013/09/26/products.html

Same goes for a lot of other things. Sometimes you have no choice but to do stuff that sucks and really isn't helping anyone, yes. Try to keep it to a minimum.

So nobody, kid or not, wants to fail/lose all the time but after watching my three kids play lots of different sports the pain they feel after a loss is very fleeting and minor. The parents hold onto it for much longer; the kids just want to know if they can get ice cream.

That said, consider Alfie Kohn's writing, such as "No Contest: The Case Against Competition": https://www.alfiekohn.org/contest/

    "No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers. ... No Contest makes a powerful case that "healthy competition" is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. For this [1992] revised edition, Kohn adds a comprehensive account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One. He also offers a pointed and personal afterword, assessing shifts in American thinking on competition and describing reactions to his provocative message."

    "If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete. The implication, we might say, is that the real alternative to being number one is not being number two but being psychologically free enough to dispense with rankings altogether. Interestingly, two sports psychologists have found a number of excellent athletes with "immense character strengths who don't make it in sports. They seem to be so well put together emotionally that there is no neurotic tie to sport." Since recreation almost always involves competition in our culture, those who are healthy enough not to need to compete may simply end up turning down those activities. ... Each culture provides its own mechanisms for dealing with self-doubt. ... Low self-esteem, then, is a necessary but not sufficient cause of competition. The ingredients include an aching need to prove oneself and the approved mechanism for doing so at other people's expense. ... I do not want to shy away from the incendiary implications of all of this. To suggest in effect that many of our heroes (entrepreneurs and athletes, movie stars and politicians) may be motivated by low self-esteem, to argue that our "state religion" is a sign of psychological ill-health -- this will not sit well with many people.(Page 103)"

It's true, having this project under my belt has already helped my career in many ways. I'm pretty sure it was a big factor in landing my last job. Not to mention the many hours of practice I put into coding outside my day job.

I never really wanted to compete with Unity but in hindsight I may have been better off piggybacking my library on Unity rather than MonoGame.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading!