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Why I lost $42,500 making a VR game

71 points by Impossible 8y ago

zamalek 8y ago
I'm not sure if a clicker game is a good choice for VR. Playing VR takes a fair bit more effort than "open the game" and is hence better suited for deeply engaged titles (something that you are concentrating on and plan to play for more than a few minutes). Clicker games are time-wasters (you're waiting for the compiler or similar and have a few minutes). They are disengaged titles.
- SallySwanSmith 8y ago
  This was my thought as well. I usually buy games from HN to support people trying things, but the idea of spending uncomfortable time in the headset for an idle game just puts me off. If I'm going to play an idle game, it'll be while the tv is on and I'm in comfy clothes or in bed.
pavlov 8y ago
The story is informative -- VR games don't sell well, except if you can time to new hardware -- but the math behind the $42.5k number is dubious. Can I value all my hobby projects at $60/hour too? Over a million USD accumulated losses during my adult life so far...
- rjpr 8y ago
  Sure does make for a nice click bait title though.
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- excalibur 8y ago
  I'd be happy with $60/hr for my day job.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Currently making $17/hr pre-tax and it is liveable in my suburban area. With overtime which is generously available at 1.5x pay, I could afford to raise a family even, and this job feels much more stable than other tech industry jobs I've had in the past. I currently work for Star Gas, which is a northeastern USA based company that delivers heating oil to over 600,000 customers with revenue of about 1B per year (but razor thin profit margins of about 55m per year).
    - peteradio 8y ago
      What is the cost of living? That seems rough almost anywhere to support a family. What do you do?
      - maccard 8y ago
        > That seems rough almost anywhere to support a family Plenty of families in the UK survive off much less than that. Median income in the UK is less than it...
      - anoncoward111 8y ago
        I started out in customer service making that rate, and I've also done sales and billing adjustments at the company for the same rate of pay. Those roles are more like "internally advertised", whereas customer service is externally advertised because of the high need for these roles and the relatively high turn-over rate in the position because of the type of work (shouting customers who are angry about price or tardiness of service lol). My half of the rent and utilities is currently $1000 a month. A car payment, phone payment, insurances of various kinds and some food and entertainment spending cap out at about another grand per month, so $2000 total. With no overtime and after taxes, you start out at about $2200 a month in post tax, very reliable income. If you are willing to do 10-12 hour days, you can pull in about $4000 a month with no college degree and, to my experience, no crazy office politics or externalities. It might not be enough to support a stay at home spouse, 2 kids, 2 range rovers, a large mortgage, vacations and shopping, and a robust family medical insurance plan, but it is definitely enough for a normal apartment in a normal suburb, driving an older vehicle and enjoying some westernized habits like eating at a restaurant or doing lots of christmas shopping :) Thanks for asking, because I actually left tech sales completely for this field instead and I am pretty happy with the forced change of industry so far (oracle laid me off!!!)
- minimaxir 8y ago
  It's taking "opportunity cost" too literally.
- maccard 8y ago
  > The story is informative -- VR games don't sell well, except if you can time to new hardware I disagree - the story doesn't really tell you that. All the story tells you is that OP didn't really do any research (see "As far as I’m aware, Fruit for the Village is the first VR clicker game to exist as a published title." - maybe there's a reason), didn't publicise his game ("I really only showed it off in the 6–8 weeks before it launched"), and made a pretty crappy game (see steam links - 3 reviews, all bad, one was even free. Game breaking bugs not resolved 6 months later). Any one of those things should be enough to sink a game in the current market, but all 3, and you're just asking for failure
- ralfd 8y ago
  Today I learned I lost at least $60,000 playing Sid Meier’s Civilization...
- floatingatoll 8y ago
  What hourly rate would you have charged someone else to build those hobby projects for them as a contractor?
- sigi45 8y ago
  If you actually try to sell it as he did, yes.
- karmajunkie 8y ago
  You can, and if you are self employed you can capitalize those losses under various circumstances. If you have even the slightest inclination to create something you think might sell one day, you probably should, if only for the purposes of establishing a tax basis for what you create. (This was a lesson learned somewhat expensively for me.)
jerkstate 8y ago
that's not $42,500, that's 820 hours
- peapicker 8y ago
  Another thing that's crazy is that writers, artists, 3d model animators, and voice actors[1] never make $60 an hour doing this kind of work, and yet he lumped those things under "developer time" high-level wages. [1](Unless they're famous people for their particular talent category)
  - jblow 8y ago
    Union voice actors make hundreds of dollars per hour typically (a standard good but not-very-famous video game voice actor makes 2x scale).
- onedr0p 8y ago
  Seriously if he didn't spend the time making this did he gain $42,500? No, he would have gained 820 hours.
  - powerslacker 8y ago
    I would spend well over $42,500 for an extra 820 hours.
ryanseys 8y ago
I lost $10 reading this post.
- leowoo91 8y ago
  Earned $5 laughing at this comment.
zygotic12 8y ago
Notch was only in it for the money! Not!
_ah 8y ago
Presumably, there are interesting skills and experiences obtained from this project which can be applied to future projects or leveraged for a better / higher-paid day job. If the time investment is being valued at $60/hr, it's only fair to perform a valuation on the incremental training as well. This seems like a case where the numbers are easily skewed in either direction to fit a desired narrative. Still, I acknowledge that it's very hard to spend a year of your life on something and only end up with $700 in-pocket.
Animats 8y ago
VR goggles are dead.[1] At least for this generation. [1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/proof-vr-sales-numbers-sinking/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/proof-vr-sales-numbe...
- jnwatson 8y ago
  The problem is the cheap ones are bad and the good ones are quite expensive. Cryptocurrency made it even more expensive, since the minimum graphics card is still several hundred dollars.
  - Animats 8y ago
    Even worse, once NVidia discovered that gamers would pay $1000 for a graphics card, they raised their prices. Their 1080 line, instead of becoming cheaper, has been discontinued. Their new 2080 line costs more and doesn't perform any better on existing games.
- onedr0p 8y ago
  A buddy of mine sunk about ~$2,000 into VR just as a casual gamer and not is not including the cost of a PC. He bought Oculas at launch, bought the controllers at their launch and bought many other accessories for driving and flight VR games. I initially thought VR was a fad but was still skeptical of its success. At this point I believe my skepticism is over. He and my other friends that bought headsets never use them anymore, it's been a year since they have played. They still defend their purchases, to them they say they got their moneys worth out of playing. EDIT: One other thing I forgot to mention. Having the space to play and dealing with the wires is a huge frustration I saw my friends deal with. Every time they wanted to play they had to spend over an hour setting it up to just play for an hour or 2. That is unless you had a dedicated space for it. I hope no one wants their living room cluttered with wires going across the floor and VR accessories laying around.
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joenathanone 8y ago
Check out the reviews of the game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/528930/Fruit_for_the_Village/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/528930/Fruit_for_the_Vill... There are three reviews and they are all negative. Maybe the only reason he didn't make money is it's just not a good game.
- SquareWheel 8y ago
  If the reviews were positive, would it have made a difference? You may think so due to word of mouth. However the Steam store has hundreds of games with high reviews that still have no players. Discoverability goes beyond making a good game.
  - uberswe 8y ago
    I try a lot of games with both good and bad reviews. I am more likely to try a game with good reviews. If you read the reviews for this specific game you will notice that they all point to very similar game breaking bugs which would make me even less likely to try the game. Why would I want to try a game that doesn't allow me to save more than once ever? I have 500+ games on steam, I buy games I never play and this game is giving me every signal not to buy it.
  - dleslie 8y ago
    ... yes? A user perchance manages to discover this game's Steam Store page and sees that its reviews are Bad; I would certainly expect that they would remain incredulous to the prospect of playing. Whereas if the reviews were Very Good or better... Moreover, it's in Steam's interest to keep bad games from being discovered. They don't profit more by exposing their customers to a deluge of poor product. Reviews ought to influence discoverability.
    - SquareWheel 8y ago
      At present the game hasn't even received enough reviews to have an official review score.
- 8y ago
pj_mukh 8y ago
"Platform holders need to make it easier for VR game developers to get their games onto their platforms and reach the people who want the game they’re making. This goes beyond just financial, this goes towards publicity, mentorship and more." This point needs to be fleshed out more. What is say the Oculus App store not doing that the iOS app store is? As a user (not a developer) of both, I'm not seeing a difference.
- maccard 8y ago
  It doersn't really - The poster made a crappy game, didn't market it, didn't test it, and seems to blame others. There are 3 reviews, all negative, with show stopping bugs even 6 months after they first reviewed it. Poster says he didn't market it until 6 weeks before release. This is just shovelware, unfortunately
  - Impossible 8y ago
    Yes, in this case there isn't much more platform holders can do, even if they feature his game on the front page indefinitely it will get flooded with negative reviews and sales will be low. You can't compare VR platforms with iOS especially, but even Steam or a console market, because the number of users is orders of magnitude smaller (250K-1 million VR users per platform). In this case the best a platform holder can do is fund development so he can potentially make a better game (hire a programmer and an artist for example), but it doesn't seem like a situation where the concept was amazing and he failed on execution.
  - talltimtom 8y ago
    > and seems to blame others. Where do you get that from? He writes about his own faliures and even goes on about how he failed to play test sufficiently and did a poor job of marketing. How does that come off as blaming others to you?
theNJR 8y ago
I lost $50k making a VR game show. That was fun!
notjustanymike 8y ago
Honestly just sounds like a boring game. Wouldn't have been fun without VR, so immersion isn't going to be some kind of magic bullet. The steam page does it no favors; I couldn't find any examples of gameplay, and both videos show the same general content. I suspect no one bought it because, well, there was no reason to buy it.
lovehashbrowns 8y ago
Seems like an article that was written to get purchases from people that like supporting this kind of indie development--pity sales. Which, honestly, I wouldn't mind, except that the article itself is pretty bare of any actual content. The cash figure is made up, the game itself is apparently awful, and the information in the article doesn't support the conclusion(s).
hesdeadjim 8y ago
This is pretty poor analysis on his part about why the game wasn't successful and what it means for the state of the VR market. From a talk at the Game Developer's Conference last March it was shown that the average Steam game makes about $30k in it's first year. That's non-VR. According to the Steam hardware survey, about 1% of users own a VR headset. This paints a pretty grim picture about what an average VR game can expect to make on Steam. However that's what you could expect an average game to make. You make exponentially more money the more standard deviations you are from the average. A few things that push you in the direction of success: an obvious and interesting hook, a compelling trailer, some basic marketing, and quite obviously fun mechanics. I have not played his game, but I can tell from a glance that it is missing the majority of those requirements. It may be survivorship bias, but I can back this up with experience. I made a good-but-not-great VR game that hit all those major success points, and combined the PC and PS4 have grossed us mid-six figures.
- Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
  > and combined the PC and PS4 have grossed us mid-six figures. Which platform brought in more sales?
  - hesdeadjim 8y ago
    Can't share exact numbers due to NDAs, but it's pretty even.
- ben_jones 8y ago
  I'd add community growth, integrity (i.e. players first profits second - even at a tertiary level), and mod support, as integral pieces of many successful indie games that are often left out completely by first time developers of any type of product.
ngokevin 8y ago
Nothing really to do with VR itself. If anything VR is more favorable for an indie developer as there are less titles on the stores and a more fervent / willing base of users (for desktop VR users), and more room to be creative with interactions versus leaning on visuals. But making money from indie games is tough in general, it takes a long time, execution is difficult, and marketing is needed. Can even apply to just general making money from app stores or software. Need to have a good idea, execute, market, and stand out from the rest. App stores though give you some boost in discoverability.
filamentWow 8y ago
Kind of pretty much clickbait, since no real money was expended across bank accounts between two or more separate parties. The author expounds on an appraisal of hypothetical money, if one imagine's that he paid himself all labor costs to perform the work. He spent several months working on a video game that didn't do well, and made zero dollars. Did I lose $6,000 dollars on a hypothetical bitcoin I never paid for in August, when the value dropped last week? No, I left the $10,000 dollars in my bank account, and I still have $10,000, and/or whatever real goods or services I purchased with said money.
- sigi45 8y ago
  He invested, on purpose and with the goal to make money, his time as a software engineer. The amount of time is not nothing and his hourly rate is reasonable. It is not wrong to say he lost it
  - jowdones 8y ago
    In all likelyhood all he paid himself was the price of his game ($2.99) times the number of units sold (about 100). So about $0.375 / hour. Given the horrendous competitivity and sheer statistics his efforts at making a profit were a powerball gamble. No way he didn't bet $42,000 on it.
- jowdones 8y ago
  Makes me vomit in my mouth when I read this sort of self-sufficient "I payed myself $60 / hour". You know what? An amount can only be quoted if you're PAYING someone else, it's only then when it stings. These sort of entitled-clueless individuals wouldn't pay $6 / hour for an UpWork contractor to make a game 10x better than their crap.
  - talltimtom 8y ago
    For accounting purposes he likely did actually pay himself the money, transferring it from the company to himself, and adding the perceived value of the game to tho company, which can write off the loss going forwards.
reilly3000 8y ago
Read the stories of also-rans from any medium and you'll find the same: lots of 'reasons'. We live in a winner-take-all world. Being truly innovative and enjoying the rewards that come along with it are exceptionally rare, and most certainly succeed by filling a need that isn't met. I haven't messed with VR since Oculus DK2's were brand new, but I'm certain the amount of vaporware. What I Need is an outsized, impossible experience that justifies the medium and my expensive purchase of tiny face monitors. The very idea of a clicker on a medium that involves physical pain if I play it too long sounds like the last thing I need. Kudos for trying though, its more than I have done.
throwaway7658 8y ago
phrasing it as losing money this way is dishonest attention seeking. If a friend told me a group lost $10k making a game over the weekend, i'd freak out
- talltimtom 8y ago
  It is a business loss. And if the business paid this though borrowed money it could end up going bankrupt, yet he’d still have the 42k$ that his company paid him.
setr 8y ago
The biggest concern I have is that he justifies it based on the idea that “he was pushing boundaries”... but really, he wasn’t: just because something doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it should (or would be interesting if it did), and at least from his description, it doesn’t seem like he made any real use of the vr medium. He just... wrote a pc game(?) and slapped a vr interface on top. Vr chat pushes boundaries. It plays with the medium in a fashion that is only available to that medium. A VR computing environment would be pushing boundaries. A VR mirrors edge might be pushing boundaries (kinda; its more like mirrors edge was a game that imagined what vr would be like, and executed that vision under pc constraints. Now that vr is actually available, transferring over would be the obvious thing to do). A vr god game might push boundaries, if they do it right. But cookie cutters and VN’s? I don’t see how you'd get anything out of vr in a straightforward port. By the time you actually got the medium doing something useful, it’d probably look nothing like an “incremental narrative game”
al_chemist 8y ago
He earned $60 per hour and billed (himself) 820 hours. Title should be changed to "How I earned $42,500 making a bad VR game". And he should tax it.
discobean 8y ago
It cost 43,200 to make and it sold 42,500 net, that's ok if he did it himself, for a first effort, nicely done.
- talltimtom 8y ago
  It didn’t sell 42,500 net. He writes that his net profit was -42,500. Note the minus in front. He sold ~100 copies.
Mikeb85 8y ago
So he actually lost nothing, apart from a bunch of free time, making a shitty game that no one wants, then blames others for him not making money at the rate he thinks he deserves. I've seen better looking atmospheric games made in game jams...

71 points by Impossible 8y ago

I'm not sure if a clicker game is a good choice for VR. Playing VR takes a fair bit more effort than "open the game" and is hence better suited for deeply engaged titles (something that you are concentrating on and plan to play for more than a few minutes). Clicker games are time-wasters (you're waiting for the compiler or similar and have a few minutes). They are disengaged titles.

SallySwanSmith 8y ago
This was my thought as well. I usually buy games from HN to support people trying things, but the idea of spending uncomfortable time in the headset for an idle game just puts me off. If I'm going to play an idle game, it'll be while the tv is on and I'm in comfy clothes or in bed.

pavlov 8y ago

The story is informative -- VR games don't sell well, except if you can time to new hardware -- but the math behind the $42.5k number is dubious. Can I value all my hobby projects at $60/hour too? Over a million USD accumulated losses during my adult life so far...

rjpr 8y ago
Sure does make for a nice click bait title though.
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excalibur 8y ago
I'd be happy with $60/hr for my day job.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Currently making $17/hr pre-tax and it is liveable in my suburban area. With overtime which is generously available at 1.5x pay, I could afford to raise a family even, and this job feels much more stable than other tech industry jobs I've had in the past. I currently work for Star Gas, which is a northeastern USA based company that delivers heating oil to over 600,000 customers with revenue of about 1B per year (but razor thin profit margins of about 55m per year).
  - peteradio 8y ago
    What is the cost of living? That seems rough almost anywhere to support a family. What do you do?
    - maccard 8y ago
      > That seems rough almost anywhere to support a family Plenty of families in the UK survive off much less than that. Median income in the UK is less than it...
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      I started out in customer service making that rate, and I've also done sales and billing adjustments at the company for the same rate of pay. Those roles are more like "internally advertised", whereas customer service is externally advertised because of the high need for these roles and the relatively high turn-over rate in the position because of the type of work (shouting customers who are angry about price or tardiness of service lol). My half of the rent and utilities is currently $1000 a month. A car payment, phone payment, insurances of various kinds and some food and entertainment spending cap out at about another grand per month, so $2000 total. With no overtime and after taxes, you start out at about $2200 a month in post tax, very reliable income. If you are willing to do 10-12 hour days, you can pull in about $4000 a month with no college degree and, to my experience, no crazy office politics or externalities. It might not be enough to support a stay at home spouse, 2 kids, 2 range rovers, a large mortgage, vacations and shopping, and a robust family medical insurance plan, but it is definitely enough for a normal apartment in a normal suburb, driving an older vehicle and enjoying some westernized habits like eating at a restaurant or doing lots of christmas shopping :) Thanks for asking, because I actually left tech sales completely for this field instead and I am pretty happy with the forced change of industry so far (oracle laid me off!!!)
minimaxir 8y ago
It's taking "opportunity cost" too literally.
maccard 8y ago
> The story is informative -- VR games don't sell well, except if you can time to new hardware I disagree - the story doesn't really tell you that. All the story tells you is that OP didn't really do any research (see "As far as I’m aware, Fruit for the Village is the first VR clicker game to exist as a published title." - maybe there's a reason), didn't publicise his game ("I really only showed it off in the 6–8 weeks before it launched"), and made a pretty crappy game (see steam links - 3 reviews, all bad, one was even free. Game breaking bugs not resolved 6 months later). Any one of those things should be enough to sink a game in the current market, but all 3, and you're just asking for failure
ralfd 8y ago
Today I learned I lost at least $60,000 playing Sid Meier’s Civilization...
floatingatoll 8y ago
What hourly rate would you have charged someone else to build those hobby projects for them as a contractor?
sigi45 8y ago
If you actually try to sell it as he did, yes.
karmajunkie 8y ago
You can, and if you are self employed you can capitalize those losses under various circumstances. If you have even the slightest inclination to create something you think might sell one day, you probably should, if only for the purposes of establishing a tax basis for what you create. (This was a lesson learned somewhat expensively for me.)

jerkstate 8y ago

that's not $42,500, that's 820 hours

peapicker 8y ago
Another thing that's crazy is that writers, artists, 3d model animators, and voice actors[1] never make $60 an hour doing this kind of work, and yet he lumped those things under "developer time" high-level wages. [1](Unless they're famous people for their particular talent category)
- jblow 8y ago
  Union voice actors make hundreds of dollars per hour typically (a standard good but not-very-famous video game voice actor makes 2x scale).
onedr0p 8y ago
Seriously if he didn't spend the time making this did he gain $42,500? No, he would have gained 820 hours.
- powerslacker 8y ago
  I would spend well over $42,500 for an extra 820 hours.

ryanseys 8y ago

I lost $10 reading this post.

leowoo91 8y ago
Earned $5 laughing at this comment.

zygotic12 8y ago

Notch was only in it for the money! Not!

_ah 8y ago

Presumably, there are interesting skills and experiences obtained from this project which can be applied to future projects or leveraged for a better / higher-paid day job. If the time investment is being valued at $60/hr, it's only fair to perform a valuation on the incremental training as well. This seems like a case where the numbers are easily skewed in either direction to fit a desired narrative. Still, I acknowledge that it's very hard to spend a year of your life on something and only end up with $700 in-pocket.

Animats 8y ago

VR goggles are dead.[1] At least for this generation. [1] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/proof-vr-sales-numbers-sinking/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/proof-vr-sales-numbe...

jnwatson 8y ago
The problem is the cheap ones are bad and the good ones are quite expensive. Cryptocurrency made it even more expensive, since the minimum graphics card is still several hundred dollars.
- Animats 8y ago
  Even worse, once NVidia discovered that gamers would pay $1000 for a graphics card, they raised their prices. Their 1080 line, instead of becoming cheaper, has been discontinued. Their new 2080 line costs more and doesn't perform any better on existing games.
onedr0p 8y ago
A buddy of mine sunk about ~$2,000 into VR just as a casual gamer and not is not including the cost of a PC. He bought Oculas at launch, bought the controllers at their launch and bought many other accessories for driving and flight VR games. I initially thought VR was a fad but was still skeptical of its success. At this point I believe my skepticism is over. He and my other friends that bought headsets never use them anymore, it's been a year since they have played. They still defend their purchases, to them they say they got their moneys worth out of playing. EDIT: One other thing I forgot to mention. Having the space to play and dealing with the wires is a huge frustration I saw my friends deal with. Every time they wanted to play they had to spend over an hour setting it up to just play for an hour or 2. That is unless you had a dedicated space for it. I hope no one wants their living room cluttered with wires going across the floor and VR accessories laying around.
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- 8y ago

joenathanone 8y ago

Check out the reviews of the game. https://store.steampowered.com/app/528930/Fruit_for_the_Village/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/528930/Fruit_for_the_Vill... There are three reviews and they are all negative. Maybe the only reason he didn't make money is it's just not a good game.

SquareWheel 8y ago
If the reviews were positive, would it have made a difference? You may think so due to word of mouth. However the Steam store has hundreds of games with high reviews that still have no players. Discoverability goes beyond making a good game.
- uberswe 8y ago
  I try a lot of games with both good and bad reviews. I am more likely to try a game with good reviews. If you read the reviews for this specific game you will notice that they all point to very similar game breaking bugs which would make me even less likely to try the game. Why would I want to try a game that doesn't allow me to save more than once ever? I have 500+ games on steam, I buy games I never play and this game is giving me every signal not to buy it.
- dleslie 8y ago
  ... yes? A user perchance manages to discover this game's Steam Store page and sees that its reviews are Bad; I would certainly expect that they would remain incredulous to the prospect of playing. Whereas if the reviews were Very Good or better... Moreover, it's in Steam's interest to keep bad games from being discovered. They don't profit more by exposing their customers to a deluge of poor product. Reviews ought to influence discoverability.
  - SquareWheel 8y ago
    At present the game hasn't even received enough reviews to have an official review score.
8y ago

pj_mukh 8y ago

"Platform holders need to make it easier for VR game developers to get their games onto their platforms and reach the people who want the game they’re making. This goes beyond just financial, this goes towards publicity, mentorship and more." This point needs to be fleshed out more. What is say the Oculus App store not doing that the iOS app store is? As a user (not a developer) of both, I'm not seeing a difference.

maccard 8y ago
It doersn't really - The poster made a crappy game, didn't market it, didn't test it, and seems to blame others. There are 3 reviews, all negative, with show stopping bugs even 6 months after they first reviewed it. Poster says he didn't market it until 6 weeks before release. This is just shovelware, unfortunately
- Impossible 8y ago
  Yes, in this case there isn't much more platform holders can do, even if they feature his game on the front page indefinitely it will get flooded with negative reviews and sales will be low. You can't compare VR platforms with iOS especially, but even Steam or a console market, because the number of users is orders of magnitude smaller (250K-1 million VR users per platform). In this case the best a platform holder can do is fund development so he can potentially make a better game (hire a programmer and an artist for example), but it doesn't seem like a situation where the concept was amazing and he failed on execution.
- talltimtom 8y ago
  > and seems to blame others. Where do you get that from? He writes about his own faliures and even goes on about how he failed to play test sufficiently and did a poor job of marketing. How does that come off as blaming others to you?

theNJR 8y ago

I lost $50k making a VR game show. That was fun!

notjustanymike 8y ago

Honestly just sounds like a boring game. Wouldn't have been fun without VR, so immersion isn't going to be some kind of magic bullet. The steam page does it no favors; I couldn't find any examples of gameplay, and both videos show the same general content. I suspect no one bought it because, well, there was no reason to buy it.

lovehashbrowns 8y ago

Seems like an article that was written to get purchases from people that like supporting this kind of indie development--pity sales. Which, honestly, I wouldn't mind, except that the article itself is pretty bare of any actual content. The cash figure is made up, the game itself is apparently awful, and the information in the article doesn't support the conclusion(s).

hesdeadjim 8y ago

This is pretty poor analysis on his part about why the game wasn't successful and what it means for the state of the VR market. From a talk at the Game Developer's Conference last March it was shown that the average Steam game makes about $30k in it's first year. That's non-VR. According to the Steam hardware survey, about 1% of users own a VR headset. This paints a pretty grim picture about what an average VR game can expect to make on Steam. However that's what you could expect an average game to make. You make exponentially more money the more standard deviations you are from the average. A few things that push you in the direction of success: an obvious and interesting hook, a compelling trailer, some basic marketing, and quite obviously fun mechanics. I have not played his game, but I can tell from a glance that it is missing the majority of those requirements. It may be survivorship bias, but I can back this up with experience. I made a good-but-not-great VR game that hit all those major success points, and combined the PC and PS4 have grossed us mid-six figures.

Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
> and combined the PC and PS4 have grossed us mid-six figures. Which platform brought in more sales?
- hesdeadjim 8y ago
  Can't share exact numbers due to NDAs, but it's pretty even.
ben_jones 8y ago
I'd add community growth, integrity (i.e. players first profits second - even at a tertiary level), and mod support, as integral pieces of many successful indie games that are often left out completely by first time developers of any type of product.

ngokevin 8y ago

Nothing really to do with VR itself. If anything VR is more favorable for an indie developer as there are less titles on the stores and a more fervent / willing base of users (for desktop VR users), and more room to be creative with interactions versus leaning on visuals. But making money from indie games is tough in general, it takes a long time, execution is difficult, and marketing is needed. Can even apply to just general making money from app stores or software. Need to have a good idea, execute, market, and stand out from the rest. App stores though give you some boost in discoverability.

filamentWow 8y ago

Kind of pretty much clickbait, since no real money was expended across bank accounts between two or more separate parties. The author expounds on an appraisal of hypothetical money, if one imagine's that he paid himself all labor costs to perform the work. He spent several months working on a video game that didn't do well, and made zero dollars. Did I lose $6,000 dollars on a hypothetical bitcoin I never paid for in August, when the value dropped last week? No, I left the $10,000 dollars in my bank account, and I still have $10,000, and/or whatever real goods or services I purchased with said money.

sigi45 8y ago
He invested, on purpose and with the goal to make money, his time as a software engineer. The amount of time is not nothing and his hourly rate is reasonable. It is not wrong to say he lost it
- jowdones 8y ago
  In all likelyhood all he paid himself was the price of his game ($2.99) times the number of units sold (about 100). So about $0.375 / hour. Given the horrendous competitivity and sheer statistics his efforts at making a profit were a powerball gamble. No way he didn't bet $42,000 on it.
jowdones 8y ago
Makes me vomit in my mouth when I read this sort of self-sufficient "I payed myself $60 / hour". You know what? An amount can only be quoted if you're PAYING someone else, it's only then when it stings. These sort of entitled-clueless individuals wouldn't pay $6 / hour for an UpWork contractor to make a game 10x better than their crap.
- talltimtom 8y ago
  For accounting purposes he likely did actually pay himself the money, transferring it from the company to himself, and adding the perceived value of the game to tho company, which can write off the loss going forwards.

reilly3000 8y ago

Read the stories of also-rans from any medium and you'll find the same: lots of 'reasons'. We live in a winner-take-all world. Being truly innovative and enjoying the rewards that come along with it are exceptionally rare, and most certainly succeed by filling a need that isn't met. I haven't messed with VR since Oculus DK2's were brand new, but I'm certain the amount of vaporware. What I Need is an outsized, impossible experience that justifies the medium and my expensive purchase of tiny face monitors. The very idea of a clicker on a medium that involves physical pain if I play it too long sounds like the last thing I need. Kudos for trying though, its more than I have done.

throwaway7658 8y ago

phrasing it as losing money this way is dishonest attention seeking. If a friend told me a group lost $10k making a game over the weekend, i'd freak out

talltimtom 8y ago
It is a business loss. And if the business paid this though borrowed money it could end up going bankrupt, yet he’d still have the 42k$ that his company paid him.

setr 8y ago

The biggest concern I have is that he justifies it based on the idea that “he was pushing boundaries”... but really, he wasn’t: just because something doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it should (or would be interesting if it did), and at least from his description, it doesn’t seem like he made any real use of the vr medium. He just... wrote a pc game(?) and slapped a vr interface on top. Vr chat pushes boundaries. It plays with the medium in a fashion that is only available to that medium. A VR computing environment would be pushing boundaries. A VR mirrors edge might be pushing boundaries (kinda; its more like mirrors edge was a game that imagined what vr would be like, and executed that vision under pc constraints. Now that vr is actually available, transferring over would be the obvious thing to do). A vr god game might push boundaries, if they do it right. But cookie cutters and VN’s? I don’t see how you'd get anything out of vr in a straightforward port. By the time you actually got the medium doing something useful, it’d probably look nothing like an “incremental narrative game”

al_chemist 8y ago

He earned $60 per hour and billed (himself) 820 hours. Title should be changed to "How I earned $42,500 making a bad VR game". And he should tax it.

discobean 8y ago

It cost 43,200 to make and it sold 42,500 net, that's ok if he did it himself, for a first effort, nicely done.

talltimtom 8y ago
It didn’t sell 42,500 net. He writes that his net profit was -42,500. Note the minus in front. He sold ~100 copies.

Mikeb85 8y ago

So he actually lost nothing, apart from a bunch of free time, making a shitty game that no one wants, then blames others for him not making money at the rate he thinks he deserves. I've seen better looking atmospheric games made in game jams...