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Comment by adenozine | Hacker News Reader

Can't speak for parent commenter, but there is a nugget of supreme wisdom in the remark nonetheless. Gamedev is notoriously punishing and mentally grueling. Pushing through these roadblock moments CAN lead to huge runaway successes if the market timing is right.

I'm in a field in no way orthogonal to gaming, but I can attest myself that pushing though the moments I -wanted- to quit the most, were the moments that yielded the most amount of advantage to me. I knew I could go further, work harder, learn to be smarter, because I knew that I had persevered where most others would've called it quits.

Hopefully that's what they mean.

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I've heard this before, mainly from "hustle culture" folks, but have never witnessed it in real life. I've followed quite a few people, both online and IRL, who have persevered through repeated failure, motivated by "passion" and convinced that success was around the corner.

Almost none of them achieved success. Instead, they ended up burned, jaded and in a few cases even genuinely suicidal.

As someone else mentioned in the thread, the kid is clearly talented. He has released 10 games on five different platforms at age 22 with no assistance whatsoever. That is genuinely exceptional, and he is without doubt in the top 10% of game dev grads.

I'm not arguing that you should quit after one attempt either (even successful designers fail maybe 50% of the time) but it seems irresponsible to suggest 10 failures in a row are a sign of success to come and he just needs to eat shit for the next 5 years.

Far more likely than not, the repeated failures suggest that his talents would be better applied elsewhere.

The biggest problem with "hustle culture" is that they praise each others effort rather than results. Like in this case, 10 failed games is a lot of effort but aren't good results. And if you look at the reviews and where he got traffic on this game they mostly come from other gamedev communities, meaning he sold to other developer hustlers interested in his journey rather than to real users.

At this stage what he needs to do is take a step back, stop seeking praise from other developers and instead focus on making a quality game he thinks users actually would want to play. Releasing games you know will fail doesn't teach you much, especially if it is your tenth one. Or he can pivot to becoming a gamedev influencer selling tutorials or monetizing views, if that is what he wants he is on the right track.

"meaning he sold to other developer" No, I was marketing the game on yerba mate groups etc + Argentina gaming and many other places. I don't market my games to game devs because they are not my target :-} I'm not posting info about my games on dev groups or anything, just from time to time, I'm back with my stats, but those stats are before posting about the game to dev groups, so sales comes from players interested in the game :-}

I understand you're coming from a compassionate place, you don't want to see them burn out, I've burnt out and it sucks.

You can make good money selling your time, but maybe it's not about money for them? By all other measures this game was a great personal success. At this point the dev is competent and successfully releasing games, they just haven't been commercially successful. Now would be a terrible time to give up.

My advice would be to run out of options first, then go work at that "elsewhere". Once you get settled into a career it can be really hard to step back out into solo dev.

I'm not going to refute the rest of your comment, as it's a valid opinion and I'd just be repeating myself, but in regards to this:

>Once you get settled into a career it can be really hard to step back out into solo dev.

I don't think that's true in and of itself. A lot of people struggle to adapt to the financial uncertainty of flying solo later in life, but that's only because they have a high-cost lifestyle and minimal savings.

I quit my day job last year, a few months before my first daughter was born, to run my online businesses full-time. The fact that my wife and I had saved huge chunks of our pay (100k+ in the bank), in addition to the fact that the businesses were already running at half-steam meant that the transition was stress-free and seamless.

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