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

Re:What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game De... by imtringued on Sunday August 02, 2020 @03:56PM (#24031186)

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.

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Re:What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game De... by zarfius on Sunday August 02, 2020 @07:27PM (#24032683)

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.

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Re:What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game De... by gcheong on Sunday August 02, 2020 @07:43PM (#24032759)

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.

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Re:What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game De... by TAForObvReasons on Sunday August 02, 2020 @04:05PM (#24031257)

> 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.

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