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What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

158 points by zarfius 6y ago

daodedickinson 6y ago
How did you get married and afford rent?
- macspoofing 6y ago
  It was a side project. OP mentions he has a full-time job ... also, is marriage contingent on an income level?
  - brianwawok 6y ago
    Both marriage and divorce rates have a very strong correlation with income in the US. It also makes being unprofitable and living in your parents basement harder. (Obviously GP missed that this was a side gig)
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      > Both marriage and divorce rates have a very strong correlation with income in the US. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12629 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12629 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5464617/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5464617/
  - dillonmckay 6y ago
    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.
    - cableshaft 6y ago
      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.
  - blargmaster33 6y ago
    If you want a quality partner then yes.
  - gentleman11 6y ago
    Money can be a large relationship stressor and source of concern leading up to a lifetime commitment
- zarfius 6y ago
  I actually have a pretty good day job. I just have a lot of spare time. I'd rather be working on a side project instead of watching Netflix. Thanks for reading!
chii 6y ago
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).
temporama1 6y ago
> 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.
- baxtr 6y ago
  People totally forget that new features add maintenance costs later. And I’m not only talking about business folks here but also devs. Regarding adding features, I like the approach here: https://www.defmacro.org/2013/09/26/products.html https://www.defmacro.org/2013/09/26/products.html
  - gfodor 6y ago
    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.
  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    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.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  The simplest software is no software at all. Reduce your technical debt as much as possible, and focus on simplicity. It's like the Apple principle.
citizenpaul 6y ago
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.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  > 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.
  - purple-again 6y ago
    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.
- cptaj 6y ago
  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.
- makeee 6y ago
  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 https://divjoy.com).
barrenko 6y ago
Failing is hard. I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often.
- nogabebop23 6y ago
  >> 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.
  - CorruptVoices 6y ago
    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.
    - wolco 6y ago
      You needed to join a real team to find out.
- pdfernhout 6y ago
  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. That said, consider Alfie Kohn's writing, such as "No Contest: The Case Against Competition": https://www.alfiekohn.org/contest/ https://www.alfiekohn.org/contest/ "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)"
komali2 6y ago
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?"
- kevinventullo 6y ago
  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.
- slfnflctd 6y ago
  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.
  - komali2 6y ago
    I think this doesn't cover all the positives of gardening. Getting sun (vitamin D, a tan, mood stabilizing effects of sun, sleep cycle stabilizing effects) Fresh air (dopamine) Increased backyard beauty (every time you look out your window you get to enjoy it) Sense of accomplishment Potentially fresh vegetables A little bit more post-apocalypse skills lol Contributing to local bee health
skizm 6y ago
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?
- hhas01 6y ago
  “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.
  - gfodor 6y ago
    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.
    - hhas01 6y ago
      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.
      - gfodor 6y ago
fourseventy 6y ago
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.
- suby 6y ago
  Do you have a link to your engine?
- mrlala 6y ago
  Also Godot being 100% free, and while I haven't used it crazy extensively the 2d portion I have used it for was amazing.
  - didibus 6y ago
    Yup, and now also Defold engine and Amazon Lumberyard as well.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  Iirc, the developer of Ogre is now just using unity
  - nikki93 6y ago
    He's using Unreal for his latest game: https://www.stevestreeting.com/2020/05/07/from-unity-to-ue4---part-1/ https://www.stevestreeting.com/2020/05/07/from-unity-to-ue4-...
gameswithgo 6y ago
thank you for the monogame contributions dylan!
- zarfius 6y ago
  You're welcome. Thanks for reading!
kabacha 6y ago
I'm so perplexed by people like this. You start something with no goal and... Act surprised you hadn't reached some goal?
- zarfius 6y ago
  I had goals. Some of those goals I did reach but having goals and knowing how to reach them are very different things. Thanks for reading.
  - kabacha 6y ago
    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.
    - zarfius 6y ago
      No problem. You're absolutely right. I did have fun making it and learned a lot in the process. No regrets. Goals change over time. Even now I'm making new goals that will no doubt be a bit different in years to come.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
didibus 6y ago
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.
- dpcan 6y ago
  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?
zanny 6y ago
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.
imtringued 6y ago
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.
- TAForObvReasons 6y ago
  > 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.
- zarfius 6y ago
  Thanks for reading! 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.
- gcheong 6y ago
  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.
ldd 6y ago
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. Anyways, thanks for the link to https://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/.
timavr 6y ago
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.
- zarfius 6y ago
  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.
notadonut 6y ago
"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.

158 points by zarfius 6y ago

daodedickinson 6y ago

How did you get married and afford rent?

macspoofing 6y ago
It was a side project. OP mentions he has a full-time job ... also, is marriage contingent on an income level?
- brianwawok 6y ago
  Both marriage and divorce rates have a very strong correlation with income in the US. It also makes being unprofitable and living in your parents basement harder. (Obviously GP missed that this was a side gig)
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    > Both marriage and divorce rates have a very strong correlation with income in the US. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12629 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12629 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5464617/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5464617/
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  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.
  - cableshaft 6y ago
    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.
- blargmaster33 6y ago
  If you want a quality partner then yes.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  Money can be a large relationship stressor and source of concern leading up to a lifetime commitment
zarfius 6y ago
I actually have a pretty good day job. I just have a lot of spare time. I'd rather be working on a side project instead of watching Netflix. Thanks for reading!

chii 6y ago

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).

temporama1 6y ago

> 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.

baxtr 6y ago
People totally forget that new features add maintenance costs later. And I’m not only talking about business folks here but also devs. Regarding adding features, I like the approach here: https://www.defmacro.org/2013/09/26/products.html https://www.defmacro.org/2013/09/26/products.html
- gfodor 6y ago
  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.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  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.
cercatrova 6y ago
The simplest software is no software at all. Reduce your technical debt as much as possible, and focus on simplicity. It's like the Apple principle.

citizenpaul 6y ago

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.

s1artibartfast 6y ago
> 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.
- purple-again 6y ago
  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.
cptaj 6y ago
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.
makeee 6y ago
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 https://divjoy.com).

barrenko 6y ago

Failing is hard. I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often.

nogabebop23 6y ago
>> 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.
- CorruptVoices 6y ago
  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.
  - wolco 6y ago
    You needed to join a real team to find out.
pdfernhout 6y ago
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. That said, consider Alfie Kohn's writing, such as "No Contest: The Case Against Competition": https://www.alfiekohn.org/contest/ https://www.alfiekohn.org/contest/ "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)"

komali2 6y ago

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?"

kevinventullo 6y ago
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.
slfnflctd 6y ago
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.
- komali2 6y ago
  I think this doesn't cover all the positives of gardening. Getting sun (vitamin D, a tan, mood stabilizing effects of sun, sleep cycle stabilizing effects) Fresh air (dopamine) Increased backyard beauty (every time you look out your window you get to enjoy it) Sense of accomplishment Potentially fresh vegetables A little bit more post-apocalypse skills lol Contributing to local bee health

skizm 6y ago

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?

hhas01 6y ago
“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.
- gfodor 6y ago
  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.
  - hhas01 6y ago
    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.
    - gfodor 6y ago

fourseventy 6y ago

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.

suby 6y ago
Do you have a link to your engine?
mrlala 6y ago
Also Godot being 100% free, and while I haven't used it crazy extensively the 2d portion I have used it for was amazing.
- didibus 6y ago
  Yup, and now also Defold engine and Amazon Lumberyard as well.
gentleman11 6y ago
Iirc, the developer of Ogre is now just using unity
- nikki93 6y ago
  He's using Unreal for his latest game: https://www.stevestreeting.com/2020/05/07/from-unity-to-ue4---part-1/ https://www.stevestreeting.com/2020/05/07/from-unity-to-ue4-...

gameswithgo 6y ago

thank you for the monogame contributions dylan!

zarfius 6y ago
You're welcome. Thanks for reading!

kabacha 6y ago

I'm so perplexed by people like this. You start something with no goal and... Act surprised you hadn't reached some goal?

zarfius 6y ago
I had goals. Some of those goals I did reach but having goals and knowing how to reach them are very different things. Thanks for reading.
- kabacha 6y ago
  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.
  - zarfius 6y ago
    No problem. You're absolutely right. I did have fun making it and learned a lot in the process. No regrets. Goals change over time. Even now I'm making new goals that will no doubt be a bit different in years to come.

deleted 6y ago

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didibus 6y ago

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.

dpcan 6y ago
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?

zanny 6y ago

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.

imtringued 6y ago

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.

TAForObvReasons 6y ago
> 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.
zarfius 6y ago
Thanks for reading! 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.
gcheong 6y ago
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.

ldd 6y ago

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. Anyways, thanks for the link to https://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/.

timavr 6y ago

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.

zarfius 6y ago
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.

notadonut 6y ago

"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.