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Comment by laborcontract | Hacker News Reader

Look at almost anything that Marco Arment has been a part of.. Tumblr and Overcast (probably at least a 5% share of the whole podcast player market) became massively successful with only a dev or two.

Stardew Valley sold over 30m copies on a solo dev's work. I think you'd be surprised

I'm building my own product right now and never have I wished I had more technical help. It's all the other junk like sales, marketing, distribution, that makes the business so hard. Marketing and sales, in isolation, I've had success with in prior jobs. I'm a fairly productive solo developer.

However, being able to context switch and do both dev and marketing? Now that's hard. I have beyond massive respect for anyone that's even attempted it, let alone been successful doing it.

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For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.

Which was all just to sit at the table for a chance at massive success.

Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere. Even if they would have been big had they caught on.

> Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere

Of course everybody sees that, and many can't stop thinking about those things when working on their own project, trying to fight the demons that say "This is a huge waste of time" and so on.

But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?

> But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?

The point here is to explain how much of a risk these small teams are making.

So that is the relevance of the example. It shows how much more difficult and risky these successes are, by pointing out that even if someone puts in a lot of work, it is actually more impressive because of the large risk.

This is relevant because the sub thread/topic was this:

"Now that's hard. I have beyond massive respect for anyone that's even attempted it, let alone been successful doing it."

Therefore, bringing up failures or the fact that there is large risk, supports this point that someone else brought up, which is that it is both hard and deserving of "massive respect".

So that is why someone would bring it up and why it is definitely relevant and correct to bring it up, in response to this point.

There are countless AAA teams that fail at game dev as well. It's just a really hard industry to garner success in. I'm not sure team size is the most relevant factor.

Hmm. I think we’d have to define what we’re measuring to think about what’s a relevant factor. AAA games with massive budgets seem to usually have to come up with some really annoying live service business models nowadays, so I’d tend to guess increasing the team size is a negative factor.

OTOH there are lots of little indie games… I mean, how are we going to count attempts, right? As an obviously not to be included extreme case, lots of games come out with a map editor, in some sense playing around with a map editor is “making a game.” But we wouldn’t want to include all the custom Warcraft 3 maps that were made as failed businesses, haha.

Stardew Valley didn't follow any of the entrepreneurial advice you'd find on this site, either.

There wasn't a "minimum viable product" launched in year 1 followed by finishing the product in year 4.

I've literally seen a post here where someone scolded a failed game developer for finishing their financial failure of a game before launch. The comment was something along the lines of:

"Read a business book. You shouldn't have spent a lot of time making your game. Instead you should have released a minimum viable product after doing market research."

It's only work if your sustenance depends on it, or if you bet on it to make it big, if you need to be compensated for it.

Otherwise it's a hobby, and enjoying your hobby 10 hours a day, 7 days a week is an envious life, if you can afford it. (Barone specifically could not; he had to have a part-time job as an usher in a theater; that was work.)

As someone who's done game dev professionally for a decade, as well as had countless personal projects and has known others to have done the same: don't underestimate the toll game dev can take on you, it's a cruel mistress. Stardew Valley is a massive outlier.

Can't disagree. But, you know, making love can be pretty physically taxing, but people do it, because the process itself is its own reward.

It's only work if you tolerate it for the reward on the payday.

Work that is its own reward is a hobby. Work that is rewarded by a paycheck is a job. There are other types of works too: chores, responsibilities, being a good neighbour...

All of these can be hard work, All of these can be taxing, all of these can be intrinsically fun and rewarding.

I wish people would stop conflating work with just employment.

There is no such thing as a 10-hours-a-day-7-days-a-week hobby.

^This is obviously a tangent, but sure there is, if you consider a hobby to be non-professional activities.

It is trivial to come up with activities that can consume a lot of time, but don't provide financial rewards.

I suppose maybe parent is mixing up difficult work and difficult hobbies. There are plenty of hobbies which are difficult and require a lot of hard work. Hobbies can be frustrating and yet still enjoyable when you overcome whatever it is that hindered your progress. Someone who does painting as a hobby might face a period of no inspiration - it can be immeasurably frustrating and it completely blocks you from painting. And then one day you see a particular way that the stained glass window reflects light onto the pavement and something gets switched inside and then you proceed to feverishly paint every waking hour and it will feel like it is not you who wield the brush but that you yourself are some sort of instrument being used by something greater.

Game dev is an arduous and draining process that both requires the patience to go through periods of dreary work where no progress seems to be made and yet the creative spirit to devise art, concepts, mechanics, rules, etc. If I had the time, I could easily see myself spending multiple years on a project like that without the need to see any financial reward. I wouldn't see it as work, I would see it as Work with a capital W. A hobby that requires a lot of personal effort but something I do because purely for the joy of doing it.

Why, a number of people would e.g. play games they enjoy all day, every day, if the other aspects of their lives were taken care of. Imagine being a schoolchild.during the summer recess :) Same applies to reading books, sailing boats, etc.

That's why they call it "retirement".

Farming?

Did they build the engine from scratch? 114975 man hours on a 2D game is unthinkable!

Building an engine from scratch cannot be the hard part. It’s not complicated.

Iterating on all the things that make the game fun is hard, and making all the ”content” in a game like Stardew Valley is very time consuming.

As someone who's built a few engines and also worked with third party ones: It really isn't the hard part for a 2D game. High fidelity 3D, different story. But something like Stardew Valley, I'd dare to say custom engine and something like Unity is pretty similar in effort, considering that you need to deal with doing things in the engine's way, which requires workarounds and what not. Bringing it to many platforms gives the engine a head start, but I'd say it's comparable.

Iterating on the game content itself: _Insane_ amounts of effort, in my experience.

Building an engine is a famously huge time sink, to the point where the standard advice is to make a game or an engine, but not both if you want to ship.

As always, it depends. Building something like Unity/Unreal that should support everything and everyone under the sun, one way or another? Yeah, huge time sink.

But a 2D engine that should only support exactly what the features need from Stardew Valley? Doesn't seem insurmountable, although I wouldn't exactly take that approach myself.

Its a huge time sink if you get bogged down building an engine.

It’s not if you just write the code you need for your game.

99% of people getting stuck on it have no real desire to make an actual game.

He wrote it in C# and used XNA for some stuff, but the engine itself is custom[1]

[1] https://community.playstarbound.com/threads/game-development...

People should ask themselves, "what did I spend the last 114975 hours doing anyway?"

After Windows, Stardew Valley was ported to consoles by other companies, like Chucklefish, Sickhead Games, and The Secret Police (not dev work but console Q&A was handled by others too, as was localization).

Barone is still a beast, just making sure the "one guy did the whole thing" thing has some nuance.

Flappy Bird had 50m+ installs.

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