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?
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
Glad you made the right call and I hope you find another passion project soon!
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.
He has a point. But as an entrepreneur, I'll probably go through all of this again and again and again. Can't help myself.
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 :)
If they are really senior & in a US tech hubs total comp from a FAANG could be almost 10x that.
- a solo indie dev several months in
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.
That was nightmare. Best to outsource it completely with: Merchant of Record, an app marketplace or resellers.
I don’t think a lot of developers know their actual tax requirements when selling software. A good accountant will surprise a lot of devs :/
Wow, literally crazy
About how many customers did you have, when those things happened? If I may ask.
I wonder how large a group of people tends to be, when such crazies start appearing
(I wonder how those things made you feel and think)
My game was originally designed to work on the G1 phone. Which was an awesome little phone.
Maybe you'd find this article interesting, about crazy people when the group I'd large enough:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-...
(What! That became a Google amp link. The real link is: https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/ )
It got posted here at HN some months ago
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?