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Comment by suhastech | Hacker News Reader

I just read the 4 hour work week book. He actually talks about the 80-20 rule. 80% of returns come from 20% of work emphasising on the effectiveness of your actions not efficiency.

Applied to this, they could have enjoyed the initial success and moved onto better things. The later effort seems like beating a dead horse.

or maybe this is just my hindsight bias.

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I don't think this has as much to do with the Pareto principle as it does with long tail economics. I get the distinct impression from the article that the author and his partner are considering doing this full time as a career. They clearly have a long way to go, but especially in the beginning, they stand to gain a great deal by getting their apps in the $30-50/day revenue area than letting them stay (I tried to avoid the word "languish") in the $15-20 range.

I assumed both are closely related (I'm no economist). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution My original comment was to put just enough effort to capitalise on the first few parts of the distribution.

As an outside observer, indie game development is still doesn't seem sustainable. I've read too many stories of people with initial success and try to build a company around it to finally fail. There are too many variables in play to build predictable revenue.

There are of-course exceptions, it mostly involves making as many games as possible and praying one of them clicks (Zynga, Rovio etc). In such a market, the competition is ruthless. Both perfect competition and complete monopoly are not favourable[1].

[1] http://blakemasters.com/post/20955341708/peter-thiels-cs183-... (Read from "IV. Capturing Value")

It's an interesting strategy that I've wondered about before - make lots of games until you make a hit, or at least have lots of things bringing in a small amount each. Even internally, it's worth prototyping lots of ideas to find the best one to develop into a full game.

However, with over 700,000 apps on the app store, it's incredibly hard to get noticed at all. Therefore I think there's some value in working on something over a longer time frame, trying to build up a community around it.

Back around September of last year Jay and I were at a bit of a crossroads - keep going with ZOS/C3O, or switch to something else. In the end we decided to part ways, Jay left Binary Space in December and I decided to keep making updates for ZOS and C3O. I'm buying out Jay's share of Binary Space by giving him a share of revenue for the next several years.

Back in 2010-2012 we were trying to build Binary Space into a legitimate business - ie something that could support us full-time. I agree that indie game dev is incredibly hard to make a living from. I've now scaled my ambitions back to it just being a hobby. It's a fun hobby though, and it makes enough money to pay for itself :)

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