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Comment by akrotkov | Hacker News Reader

Huh, this is fun!

I built Genfanad (http://genfanad.com/) as a browser based game with similar inspirations to yours a few years ago. A lot of the technologies you mentioned are very similar. It's surprising how easy getting something up and running is these days!

We ended up shutting down a few months ago as I couldn't figure out how to take it to profitability. Do you have plans for that, or is it just a fun side project?

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Nice job with Genfanad! That looked like a really neat game. I don't have a good plan for profitability other than try to keep my expenses as low as possible and see if I can find some way to scrape by in a year or two.

IknowIknow! You could have some lets call it "lootboxes" that people could pay real money for to open. And in them they would find items to use in the game! :-)

A bit more serious, I haven't seen many attempts at just making a donation bar showing how much it costs to keep it running per month? Let people donate until the bar is filled, when it overflows it goes to next month. Very visible on login screen. In this bar ofcourse include your salary for keeping it running after developement is doneish.

Maybe stretch-goals for donation to make new functions?

And please use Ko-fi for donations, much friendlier and less cutting into your profits :-)

I think presenting costs as a rough “per user/player” calculation might be more effective than presenting just the total cost. That way people are reminded of their own personal resource usage, which seems like a more manageable/tangible number, and it can be accompanied by the broader stats since of course not everyone voluntarily pays (and some people pay more than their fair share).

Back of the napkin math, but if the servers cost $0.25/month/player and the owner would like to make $5,000/month (very conservative but sure, why not) and there is a 20% "future emergency fund" in place, when the game has 5,000 players then each player would need to contribute on average $1.50/month, or $18/year.

I would want, in exchange for that, that the game be fairly stable, that there be things to do such as Quests or Tasks, and that I could enjoy the game for maybe an hour a week, maybe 2 if I'm in a rut.

Exactly, and I think that sort of request for contribution is much more likely to make people feel inclined to contribute than some abstract goal of getting $10k/mo in donations or whatever.

Valve has some great talks on monetizing free games. People will pay for social features that don’t change the game mechanics. E.g., make every donor’s avatar visually different, so people acknowledge they’re good people. E.g., wear a gold chain around their avatar’s neck or a feather in their hat. Or render them with more polygons! Larger donation = more polygons?! Makes sense to me. Or sell weapons that are the same as regular weapons but trigger fancy death scenes when they kill.

Do you have any suggestions? Your game seemed very popular. Anything you wished you had focused more on?

Set your expectations accordingly.

Coding is the fun part, but it's less than 5% of actually launching and making a successful product. If you don't think you want to spend most of your time not coding, don't try to make it a business!

Marketing is more important than making something. You will get a small boost from things like this (I was always too embarrassed to post here!), but it's an endless pit of time and money! To do it right, I've heard all sorts of numbers, but a good rule of thumb is every dollar/hour you put to making your game, put a dollar/hour to marketing it as well.

From a technical perspective, your stack is fine. You want to make sure you host all your assets behind cloudflare/s3 or similar, the $5 server is fine for gameplay but if you also try to make it send all the stuff, it's gonna die. (As evidenced today!)

Most of my other experience and advice is about how to run a team and set budgets and goals. If you're going about it as a hobby (and that's probably the best way to go!) then just keep doing what you're doing, write some blogs and foster a community instead.

Thank you!

I think, like you said, a good strategy will be to keep it fun and hobby-like as long as possible. I can definitely see the business-side of it sucking all my time and energy.

I think doing some educational materials will be a worthwhile way to market and gain interest. Community building with something like a Discord server will also help. Competing as a business with something like Jagex is 100x harder than just making a good game.

To be clear, it's not Jagex you're competing with. It's the 20+ other indie MMO solo developers who are trying to do the same thing as you, including but not limited to: RetroMMO, New Eden, Valorbound, Carth, Eterspire, Omuri, Shadefell, Cookie Dragon, Cinis, Cinderstone, Legends of Etherell, Legendarium, Mirage Realms, Aether Story, Ethyrial, and so on. There's more that come and go every month.

Unfortunately, the #1 lesson that I've learned is that while nostalgia gets some reception, there's a reason no big companies are really making MMOs, even at a smaller scale. There's just not that large a viable market for them.

I don't think marketing is too hard honestly. It's just that many people make a game that doesn't look amazing on the surface. The hits come with a different structure. If you can't hook someone in the first 3 seconds, it's going to be very difficult. That means name, screenshots, etc too.

I could do a little analysis, but Genfanad is probably hard to sell because... what's the name mean? It seems rather niche and artsy. I'm not sure what's going on from the site. Reconquest is quite obvious from the name and going into the screen, it seems... woah, maybe I have a lot of agency here? Then you look at comments and read of people getting ganked without moderator interference. That's likely why it took off.

Many games are fun to build and play, but they'll never ever be hits and have to be fixed from a structural level. Names are easy to fix. Steam is also very much hit and miss; if you don't have a certain level of wishlists, it's just going to be a waste of time doing any marketing.

Then I think you underestimate your marketing prowess; because these are not obvious things to everyone.

For me building cloud infrastructure is easy, the choices and tradeoffs are obvious to me. To all my colleagues in the past 16 years it's been some sort of magic. They are smart people, mostly, but lack the experience and make 'obivous' mistakes all the time.

They're all learnable skills. But I guess my point is if it's taking 95% of the effort, it's probably the wrong path. But when you've already put the effort into that one game, it's hard to see yourself marketing a different game.

There's a good video on designing games to be sold. The base idea is to treat it like a search algorithm. You can be an amazing fisherman but you can't catch many fish where there's no fish. https://youtube.com/watch?v=o5K0uqhxgsE

FWIW I've had great experiences recently with Bunny [0] to deploy content to a very affordable, very configurable CDN. Integration is also dead simple (you deploy normally to your regular site and then just replace hostname in all URLs with the CDN hostname, it handles the rest automatically)

Different than industrial CDNs but my new go-to for small-to-mid and indie sites.

[0] https://bunny.net

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