I'm wondering if he'd still feel like quitting had it been making ton of money.
One thing I've noticed is any passion project that becomes too much like work starts to feel like a chore and the passion for it disappears. I don't think making money off of it would change that.
I've learned that when I do side projects, I need to think of it as having fun and playing. And with that, you accept to stop something and move on to something else as soon as the enjoyment is gone, and maybe come back to it later if the interest shows up again. It's hard, because you can let this feeling of "failure" creep in, like you haven't finished anything, or accomplished any of the projects you were excited about. But if you accept that your goal isn't to actually get anything accomplished, but only to entertain yourself and have fun doing things you're interested in, it helps with that, and makes the whole thing much more healthy.
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.
I had a game reach about $600 per day in revenue for a few months way back in 2010. Overall I think it made around $100K, and another game made about $30K.
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?
What taxes are you talking about? You mentioned that you were selling through app stores, which I assume handled sales taxes for you in the few cases when they may be required. Your business income taxes would be the same as any business in your city/county/state/country. What else is there?
Google Play is starting to remit taxes by state, but they haven’t always done this. It was/is up to the seller. And if you sell with PayPal or something on your own site, check all the laws of where your product is being downloaded, you’ll be surprised. My accountant ruined my year that year.
I'm not still selling on Google Play, and haven't for a while, but if you're interested in seeing where Google currently remits taxes by state and country, the link is below:
Thanks for sharing! That’s the downside of mediocre success. Too little money to outsource tasks, too much to abandon and allocate your time resources elsewhere.
Glad you made the right call and I hope you find another passion project soon!
Maybe I live in a totally different universe, but it's really hard for me to consider a software product that grossed $100k to be a "mediocre success."
In my universe, I make that (net even, not gross) in half a year with essentially zero responsibility for marketing, taxes, customer support, etc. - nobody can realistically steal my work and cut into my wages with it - far less stress - and I keep making that over and over again every 6 months without having to do anything really that new or different.
In comparison, a game that grossed $100k, which I have to pay self-employment taxes on, and perhaps app store fees out of that too, sounds awfully mediocre, at best.
Hehe same here but, the poster mentioned 2010 and total revenue. If it’s $100.000 in 1 year, then sure! That would probably have potential for growth as well. This didn’t read like that :)
A revenue of 100.000 spread over 2 years wouldn’t be enough to support me and my family. Living in a Western Europe country. I’d prefer freelancing (or a job) for income in that scenario, over making ends meet with a software product and battling off copycats and whatnot. It should grow month over month and if it stalls for a year+ at low revenue, that’s most likely bad and I’d kill it, considering it a mediocre success! Hope that makes sense :)
I think the first $70-80k were in the first year, then I made about 60 from games over the following 2 years.... if my memory is correct, and I think it is.
$100k in revenue is a lot less than $100k in gross salary (let alone net) - probably more like $65k/year which is less than you can earn as a developer as an employee or freelancer (depending on where you are of course, but even here in Berlin you'd earn more than that and in US tech hubs you could earn 3x what you'd earn for the same job in Berlin).
If they are really senior & in a US tech hubs total comp from a FAANG could be almost 10x that.
I’m not sure if I want to share the titles, but the games were in the sports category. First of their kind on Android Market before it became Google Play. They were really feature heavy and bug-free. One of them sat at top 3 in Android Market and Google Play sports category for several months. Then about 10 of the top 50 games were all the exact same type of game.
My second game was more of a golf game, and I knew there was competition, but I put a “play my other games” link in the free version of my most popular game which had about 3 million free downloads and that propelled sales.
No blog or twitter. Just placement in the Google Play Store and having been first of their kind.
I think Apple makes it easy, but we were only on Android at the time, and it took months to finally pay all our taxes. I was sending pennies to counties. It was awful.
Thanks for sharing!
Regarding 1): I can recommend the combination “Fastspring” for order processing and taxes (nothing to worry about and super easy setup) and LimeLM for software protection; dynamic license key generation is super easy in conjunction w/ Fastspring :-)
Hard to say. Being one of the first games of its kind, the free version got to about a million downloads really fast. I didn’t get many emails even with that many players because I was really careful to make it bug free and work on most devices, but I’d say the real hate mail started rolling in as soon as the nice new Samsung phones were rolled out and my game didn’t look as good on those, and also, Android finally had some mass market appeal and it was more than just the geeks who had android phones.... it was everybody.
My game was originally designed to work on the G1 phone. Which was an awesome little phone.
I'm really confused. The goal is making money yet there has not been a single attempt at monetization. Patreon is basically equivalent to donations. There is no obligation to pay you. Your highest tier is $5 a month. Even with hundreds of backers you're barely going to earn anything worth the effort. You could have easily added a much higher tier that charged at least something like $40 a month for support prioritization on Github. You need to some basic market research and find customers that are willing to pay and give them a reason to give you money. There are lots of ways to monetize an opensource project. If you want money you'll have to focus on money, not on your project.
Your project was a success, only the (nonexistent) business strategy failed.
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.
Yeah, I wish my failures were nearly this successful :). That said it seems like a harder job to monetize an open source project that mainly works as an enhancement to a main open source project that itself does not appear to be heavily monetized and I wonder if that contributed to some extent in this case.
> I always assumed that one day I'd be able to turn it into some side income and maybe eventually replace my full-time job.
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.
Does the article ever actually mention what he failed at? He developed an open source game engine and... what? Did he expect people to donate to him or something? What was the monetization plan?
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.
The thing is... the alluring thing about side projects _is_ not having that clear objective. Most of our jobs are directed by clear objectives, side projects are great for experimentation without clear potential for personal gain (fun, fame or fortune), often you will at least gain a unique experience and learn, which is a good trade for a little time.
Perhaps what happened here is a side project grew into something larger, it's now just a project, and he fell into putting more time and effort into it without making a conscious decision due to popularity - perhaps that's when it can bite you, when you realise you don't enjoy it anymore and it's become one sided.
I think side projects should stay as small as possible unless there looks to be a real potential for both yourself personally and the rest of the world - even then failing fast feels like the best idea.
For small personal projects, I think a fair rule of thumb is: is anyone else using it? Once that answer turns to yes, you need to get your exit plan in place.
And +1 for failing fast. It is failing slow that’s the disaster.
It depends on what commitments you made to your users. It could be as simple as just abandoning the project or it could be something more elaborate like handing it over to someone else.
But why do you have to think about this "as soon as you have your first user"? Not every project is a business and not every project needs an "exit plan". Not everyone doing a project needs to think in entrepreneur terms.
The “exit plan” could be as simple as “do nothing and abandon it”. You don’t “have to” do anything and are under no obligation to do anything, however decency says that in some circumstances you probably should.
When you have people using your stuff, you have to decide whether you care about them or not. It’s ok not to care, you don’t owe anybody anything, but if you lead them on or give them the impression that you do, then they are invested in something because of it and it would be pretty shitty to just disappear. You still can, if you like, but you should at least do it consciously.
If you have people the impression that you would support something then you need to be clear with them that this isn’t actually the case, otherwise you’re a bit of a dick for leading them on. It’s perfectly ok to just throw something out to the world without supporting it in any way and it’s also ok to step back from something you did once support, but you should at least communicate this so people don’t get the wrong impression.
The terminology doesn’t matter. It’s used here because this is a very entrepreneurial audience and most people understand what is meant by it. I don’t think anyone means to imply that you need to treat your hobby/side projects like a business.
Well, the terminology matters to me. The language we use tends to frame how we think about issues. I find the language of entrepreneurship distasteful when used outside a business context.
I mean, I'm also working on a pseudo-game engine, which isn't general purpose but specialized for the primary goal of being able to mod this already existing game, but monetization of it beyond the level of "donate if you want to" would be impractical, in my opinion. The original game is freeware so charging for usage to unlock features upfront leaves a bad taste for me. I primarily work on it because I enjoy putting things together and can see tangible progress towards my goal of being feature-compatible with the original. At the point that working on it starts feeling like a job, I'd quit immediately.
If I'm trying to make money off such a side project "quit whenever you want" isn't sustainable. But that isn't one of my goals. I just want to enjoy building things and give the project back to the community, and I'm lucky to have a separate source of income to accomplish that. If nobody cares, then that's fine. The time I spent puzzling over the problems I was facing was a more interesting use of my time for me than sitting around all day watching YouTube, anyway. Also, I at least believe I'm getting somewhere with my project still, so I still have motivation to keep working on it.
Maybe there's some confusion over the term "side project" which could mean "a thing someone developed in off hours that they're intending to bootstrap into a sustainable business," but it could also mean "some person's hobby."
But the fact that I currently have no way of monetizing this means I'll have to work on it in my spare time, meaning it will take that much longer to get to a point where I can declare it's shipped. Maybe I'll lose interest before that point. But to me that's perfectly fine and nothing to become gloomy over if it doesn't work out. Though, to be honest I might not be saying this if my project had users who would be frustrated with me for stepping away from working on it, but the reality is that it's so much work for one person to accomplish and at times it's draining to push forward on it every day, despite what I get out of working on it.
Saying the least important part of building a successful product is building the product is nonsensical. The response to the tendency on tech isn’t to generate anti-tech dogma, it’s to recognize its role as one of several key things to focus on.
It’s true though. I’d rather have so-so technology plus great market and marketing than the best technology in the world and sod all ability to sell it. You can always improve the technology later, once you’re generating the revenue to pay for that. But if you don’t have sales you don’t have squat.
Been there, done that, lost the shirt. Lessons learned.
You pretty much nailed it. I went into the project without a clear monetization plan and when I got around to trying to figure it out I didn't know how.
Here he defines his own success as the ability of his patreon to support him financially. He says he couldn't make that work.
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.
If it’s a side project, then work for hire would have been a side-side project, wouldn’t it? That’s quite a lot to juggle with a presumably full time job
My experience is that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise. Those people are mainly doing it with the goal of making money for no one but themselves. The fact that they don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money. One of those primary early ways to make money is that early on you may have to strike some potentially less favorable deals when you have no money to get your first projects off the ground. Which of course they are NEVER EVER are willing to do. ie profit sharing or something.
My experience has shown me that tools that help others build faster can be quite profitable. Currently make my living from one such tool and most of my customers are indie hackers (https://divjoy.com).
Game engines are different. It's a tiny market relative to web, and really the only people in the market for an engine other than Unity or Unreal are indies, who have near zero revenue and even less willingness to spend it. Those two are so far ahead in terms of features, support, and battle-hardening that you'd pretty much have to be insane to pick anything else if you had paying users.
Always be wary of any market where someone's willingness to try your product is in itself a negative indicator of ability to pay. Hit-driven markets that attract large numbers of non-serious dabblers are extremely difficult to sell tools profitably to, but it's easy enough to get minor attention that makes you think you might have something worthwhile (music production is another one that scatters corpses all over the place despite seeming large at first glance).
Yeah I guess the game equivalent to my tool would be one that helps people build faster with Unity or Unreal. Like I do with React, better to latch on to a tech that already has huge mindshare.
> Hit-driven markets that attract large numbers of non-serious dabblers are extremely difficult to sell tools profitably.
If I'm understanding correctly, do you mean it's easy to overestimate the size of the market? That makes sense to me. And there's certainly an upper-limit to how much dabblers are willing to pay. Still, for a solo founder that can sometimes be more than enough. I can think of a few tools like mine doing over $10k/month.
What I noticed is that it's actually much harder to use Godot than expected. Yes it does significantly reduce the amount of code you have to write for your game but it opens up questions of how to structure your project because the scene editor doesn't actually match how I would make my own games if all I had was SDL2. For example if you just straight up write code to add nodes to the scene graph it will create a disconnect between what is displayed in the editor and the actual game. Figuring out how to keep the editor and code in sync is a problem unique to Godot and this is very disconnected from general software development.
> What I noticed is that it's actually much harder to use Godot than expected. Yes it does significantly reduce the amount of code you have to write for your game but it opens up questions of how to structure your project because the scene editor doesn't actually match how I would make my own games if all I had was SDL2.
I agree. But what I've learned in my short time using Godot is embracing Godot's scene system and not fighting it seems to help.
You can also bypass the scene system. The scene system is a optional abstraction on top of a seemingly more data-oriented core where everything is just a RID (Resource ID).
> For example if you just straight up write code to add nodes to the scene graph it will create a disconnect between what is displayed in the editor and the actual game
It does happen in Unity and Unreal too when you strictly work in the visual editor without writing much code.
It also happens in Qt and similar WYSIWYG visual editors where they often cannot render full dynamic content in the editors. But in all those cases you can just write everything in code without using the visual tools, and you can do that with Godot as well.
Very nice work! I've written a small API (https://m8.fyi/chord) to generate beautiful diagrams easily and quickly from Python. It's definitely not making a living from the income, but it is enough for a coffee every now and then.
Nice, cool idea. Is that a one-time fee or monthly? If one-time then I'd suggest emphasizing that fact and saying something like "lifetime access" (from my experience most people assume monthly for something like this). Also fyi, your PayPal button does nothing when I click it. Best of luck with everything!
Thank you for the great suggestion - I've already updated the page to add "Lifetime Access"!
Fixing the Paypal button issue will be more tricky! I just tried it in Firefox and it's fine, but I'm seeing temperamental issues in Safari. Will look into it further - thanks for the heads up.
No offense the product looks cool but this is basically just WIX for for hackers. Basically its a market share shaver from another successful product. Rather than a builder assistance tool. Either way I'm glad you have success with it. (I might use it one day)
I'm not saying you can never make money but as someone else put it, there are a lot more corpses than success stories in this field.
> that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise.
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.
I agree with this interpretation. The article OP experienced a real and true 'failure' because his goal was income generation and the project didn't provide that. The guys he handed it off to may have a goal of just being a recognized name in the space (clout?) and so consider their time and effort to be a success.
The whole one mans garbage is another mans treasure taken from another angle.
I wouldn't say it's a waste a time, just that in tech industry people have a tendency to overrate "selling shovels in a gold rush" when they have about the same odds of success. ie. Making a successful game vs successful game engine
I am not sure about that. There's this small company called Stripe whose entire business model is about making it easier to make your online store: They don't do anything you couldn't do yourself, but it sure mes it a lot easier. Similarly, in videogames, Epic makes quite a bit of money licensing engines, which, in practice, is all about helping other people build faster. We all built websites and ran companies before AWS, and yet they are also they might be Amazon's best division.
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.
I'm not sure if this is what the parent comment meant, but it seems reasonable that it's not a lucrative path to focus on anyone who doesn't already have a functional business without you. Partnering with that existing coffeeshop can pay off a lot more easily than the dozens of weekend game devs that will probably never make a cent themselves.
> The fact that [your potential supporters] don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money.
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.)
This is pretty contradictory even in its biases. You assume people can't do anything for motivations other than money and then you say people should give away their work for free.
The first one isn't true and the second one is simply not doable for poor people.
> the downside of adding more features is that it becomes increasingly time intensive to fix bugs, update demos, deal with pull requests and respond to questions.
Thibaut Duplessis, creator of Lichess, talks about this in a talk he gave (YouTube somewhere). He says that he's very reluctant to add new features due to the huge cost. The feature must be something very special to overcome the cost.
This is a solid post - I would say tho that sometimes the right way to view product development is through the lens of media. The bucketing approach in the article breaks down somewhat if you are not directly targeting solving a problem, but creating a medium for people to solve problems using their own creativity. So the question of features reduces down to how far the feature enhances the reach of the medium, not if they are (together or in aggregate) game changers wrt solving problems, because you as the product designer are not in then business of solving the problem, the customer is.
Yes, it's because people tend to think of features linearly. Eg "let's add one more feature". But since they tend to interact the complexity of the project grows multiplicatively.
My problem with this is the assertion that failure == not making a profit. For the OP, yes, if your goal is to make money off your code then writing free software is pretty prone to failure on that front.
Free software is philanthropy. Even if you somehow are getting paid to write it, it cannot be done for profit. If your objective is revenue discarding the burgeoning international IP regime as a source of income is foolhardy.
That being said, software for profit is hugely contrary to software that is used. Its infinitely harder to see anyone else use your code and you must always be cognizant that your proprietary for sale code is always going to see orders of magnitude less utility and adoption than free code.
So when you write software from day one the objective is going to be to either maximize money or maximize utility. They are contrary to one another. Some would argue that making money == ability to do more work == more utility but no amount of time invested into software used by a few will compare to less software being used by orders of magnitude more people.
And there is also no guarantee of success. Its why proprietary, popular software exists. Making a proprietary or free product does not guarantee money or use. But depending on which you want going for one will hugely limit your ability to obtain the other.
This axis also comes up in free software itself between permissive vs restrictive licensing. If your code is MIT / BSD / Apache / etc you will almost certainly never make money from it. Anyone can just use it however they want with no restrictions and will do so. It will maximize its utilization with no regard for the ethics or objectives of said use.
If you license it restrictively, IE GPL or CC-SA, you will reduce your potential adoption audience to not include those that want to distribute it in propriety without providing their users the same freedoms they got from you. This can, however, be the same exchange of utility vs money, or, more often, time. Infectious free software propagates slowly but does cause the general amount of freeness to increase through permeation. It also lets you sell licenses for proprietary use and is one of the only major ways to monetize free software consistently, see Qt.
A project is doomed to fail unless you setup a specific target success goal before you start.
Perhaps one can get lucky, and stumble into success - monetary or fame or something. But more often than not, a project that didn't initially define what success looks like would be doomed to fail (and meandering is also a type of failure under this model).
It's only a failure if you judge success by monthly income. I'm not saying that's not a good way to measure success, just pointing out that it doesn't have to be the only measure. A therapist told me this recently when I was struggling to find meaning in life.
Success can be tons of stars on GitHub - I would feel very good if I had positively benefited that many people. I think a major downside of capitalism is how it attempts to attach a price tag to both the concrete and the ephemeral - how can you put a price tag on the good feelings one gets for creating something useful from the world? But nah every side project has to be a hustle and if it isn't making you money, drop it in a second.
As for support requests, you don't really have to reply to them. You have control over your level of involvement in a project.
How much less enjoyable does your backyard garden become if every weed you pull you think "excellent, I've just increased the value of my house by .12$. Ah shit there goes inflation, hold on, my weed pulling nets me less than a dollar an hour, maybe I should do some contracting with this time instead?"
I remember having a conversation with coworkers a while back about what we do if we didn’t have to worry about money. So many people talked about starting a business! I guess the upside is that businesses can be self-sustaining long after you’ve passed, but from my perspective, the vast majority of good one can do for the world is not easily or practically monetizable.
Backyard gardening is riddled with inefficiencies in every imaginable way, and is not for everyone. The only tangible benefits I see are for people who receive positive benefits from the actual experience of doing the hard work and somehow use it to benefit others (directly or indirectly). If you're not sure that applies to you, stay away.
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.
Maybe the stuff doesn't universally suck, but would be soul-crushingly boring for one person yet completely engrossing for another. It might not change the fact that doesn't help anyone, but I would say there's no need to say it's always the goal to be productive in working towards something or have it be helpful to others in the end. Sometimes I just enjoy building things in itself.
I guess I'm coming more from the perspective of someone who's played with a whole lot of different things and is starting to realize the personal value (for me) of targeting my efforts better. I tried to be clear that I'm not saying it's a bad idea for everyone, but that at this point in my life it's counterproductive. There are other ways I can get the same benefits micro-scale agriculture provides with much greater potential rewards attached.
We dabbled with container gardening for the first time this year (just growing some plants out of pots that are sitting on our patio table). Our broccoli, spinach, and cilantro plants were failures, but our red pepper and basil plants are doing pretty well.
We harvested a bit of our basil again today and put it on a pizza we made, and it tastes amazing. That has made all the effort worth it.
We might try expanding our gardening efforts next year, but I'm not entirely sure of that. We'll at least keep the basil going indefinitely, just bring it inside during the winter, and plant more peppers next year, but not sure if I want to graduate to making a full garden yet.
>> I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often.
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.
I wish I could have figured out if I was good at Football. There were 120 people on the team and unless you were friends with the coaches kid, you never played. I was always first pick when doing 5th grade football because I could catch and was fast.
Defense had 0 tryouts. There was literally 2 attempts at being a wide receiver. 0 attempts at being QB or lineman.
I remember catching both passes, but maybe I wasn't fast enough? Whatever the case it was obvious it was hand picked. And our team won 2 of 8 games.
At least no one can dispute how much I sucked at track lol.
I would argue that esports can have a similar effect, unless it’s a moba, which sort of encourages a bad attitude towards losing and your teammates. Starcraft, quake, or even chess can be amazing
It is true that helping a child learn about resiliency is important. As Carol Dweck says, the brain is like a muscle and effort can eventually be rewarded with skill. So it is good to praise effort and persistence. And failure is part of life and needs to be dealt with.
"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."
From the book:
"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)"
Game engines is a really tough market to compete in given Unity and Unreal are now basically free. When I built the game that I launched on Steam I made my own game engine with the idea that I would open source it. The engine is now open source but when people ask about it I recommend they just use Unity instead.
It depends on the mindset. From my point of view, it is a huge success, because now when you apply for normal game jobs, you will massively stand out for creating something that people used and supported it over time. Basically you will have job for life. Most developers can only dream of that outcome.
From business side, I don't think it has anything to do with you. Quite often it is down to luck, ability to predict where market is going next and execution.
It is tough for Monogame C# framework to compete with Unity. Your tool is basically build on top of their Monogame funnel, so if their funnel is tiny, then you screwed. But at the time it is hard to see how it was going to go, because Unity has so many problems and closed source didn't really help.
Number of problems increased exponentially on the Unity side, but it became industry standard, so today if you making games and not using Unity/Unreal and not AAA studio, it is super risky to get funded.
Thanks for reading and thanks for the kind comments.
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.
I've been developing a game full-time for the past few months. I've sort of thought about how my journey will end.
In the meantime, I got to write a couple of VSCode extensions that are used at least by some people and React dependencies that I personally find cool.
I never really thought about it, but my open-source projects usually end up having 15-40 stars and that means 1 or 2 support tickets every 6 months. I guess not being popular has its upsides.
All that I can personally say is that, more than passion towards my current project, I feel as if I didn't make it, I would regret it deeply. So I wake up early every day to advance a little bit each day. I deeply enjoy the process.
I hope you someday look back at your project and see it as a success. A failure commercially, maybe, but a success in many other ways.
"failure disguised as success" is a profound insight.
The Silicon Valley version of this is raising a lot of money when you don't have product-market fit or the right co-founder or both. Getting other people to commit millions of dollars to a bad idea or the wrong team is a great way to waste years of your life. It leads to what I call perverse persistence -- not letting go until long after you should have.
Sorry didn't mean to offend you. However I'd urge you to stay optimistic — you made a great thing that inspired and taught a lot of people and probably had a lot of fun while making it! Not everything needs to be measured in shekels.
The only mistake you seem to have made is that you didn't quit soon enough which is a story as old as the idea of collaborative project itself and I think people will continue making it.
I think more along the lines of having a partner in a healthy relationship requires some time put forth, which unless the partner is pair programming, time is not being spent on development efforts.
Find a partner that has creative hobbies. My wife knits and writes, and I also write and design/code games/apps. We both need time to work on things, so it works out well for the most part (less so when she was in a creative slump and only wanted to watch TV every night for several months).
I also can do routine coding while the TV is on (doesn't require a lot of thinking, just typing it up and testing for minor bugs), so I can still make some progress during that, but it's less.
Granted I do have to spend more time on the relationship/taking care of dogs than when I just lived by myself, so I'm less productive than I used to be, but I still get to work on things.
One thing I've noticed is any passion project that becomes too much like work starts to feel like a chore and the passion for it disappears. I don't think making money off of it would change that.
I've learned that when I do side projects, I need to think of it as having fun and playing. And with that, you accept to stop something and move on to something else as soon as the enjoyment is gone, and maybe come back to it later if the interest shows up again. It's hard, because you can let this feeling of "failure" creep in, like you haven't finished anything, or accomplished any of the projects you were excited about. But if you accept that your goal isn't to actually get anything accomplished, but only to entertain yourself and have fun doing things you're interested in, it helps with that, and makes the whole thing much more healthy.