Write Yourself a Minivan
Write Yourself a Minivan
A “Gold Rush” mentality has taken root in the indie game dev arena. The success of the casual game market, especially of such independent developers as PopCap and such games as Pretty Good Solitaire and Snood, has captured the attention of the game development industry–and even beyond.
I’m not against making a lot of money as an indie. Hell, it’s one of my own goals. What I want do to is suggest a possible alternative to trying to strike it rich.
There’s a story that Robert Heinlein started writing to pay off the mortgage on a newly purchased house. And then after that there was the car to pay off. And then other bills. And a vacation. On and on. There was always some new expense, so he just kept on writing. Love him or hate him, he was one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 20th Century. Because he wanted to pay the mortgage. [*]
This Dilbert cartoon is more about the foibles of management and incentive programs than anything else, but I like that phrase: “I’m gonna write me a new mini-van this afternoon.”
What I want to suggest to you is a middle path between “I want to make million$” and “I want to make a few extra buck$”. Instead of trying to replace your fulltime income with indie income all at once, focus on smaller, more easily managed targets. Like writing yourself a minivan.
We all have certain living expenses:
Beyond living expenses, there are the luxury items and consumer spending that drives the American economy:
Use these expenses and luxuries as the targets of your indie income. For example, say you need $100/month to cover the electric bill. Create a game or expansion or other product that you figure can generate at least $100/month in net income. Assuming the New Standard Indie Game Price of $20, with a profit margin of 50% (gotta pay those affiliates), that requires only 10 sales per month.
*Poof* No more electric bill. You get to put the $100 you would’ve spent from your regular income back in your pocket. Maybe you’ll even save it in your retirement fund. And then if the game does better than $100/month: it’s gone past “successful” and into “gravy train.” Maybe it’ll pay the gas bill too.
Or maybe you want to buy a couple DVD’s every month, because you just like collecting good movies. That’s only about $50/month. Think you can handle that as a target income for a game? And again, you get to take money you would’ve spent and save it or apply it to something else you want.
So maybe you really do want a minivan. For a new minivan, your monthly payments will be from $300-$600, depending on your negotiating skills and options packages. Do you think you could create a game that could hit that level of income per month? I think you could.
Besides slowly handing off your living expenses to Other People, you free up a lot of resources that you already have. So long as you can keep your expenses to the same basic level, and not just soak up your indie income and newly freed money with meaningless consumer spending, you could write yourself a new minivan, a new house, out of debt, and more.
This approach also has the advantage of getting your mind off of “striking it rich” with a single game. Instead, you consider the advantages of multiple products, all contributing their modest incomes to your bottom line. Every product you have out there selling increases your chances of having what the fiction world calls a “breakout” book, a book that moves an obscure writer into the ranks of mid-lists, or a mid-list writer into bestsellerdom.
Another advantage of creating several products is that you stop trying to perfect the first one. You move on. A career isn’t built out of one game.
Think big, of course. Map out how your current project will take over the world one day. But in the meantime, see if it can’t help keep the lights on.
-David
[*] This story is probably apocryphal, since Robert Heinlein seems to have made up most of the stories he told about himself. But it’s still a good story.
I like it! And I am currently in the process of trying to incrementally add revenue streams of any size where I can, explicitly seeking ones that don’t require any more work from me, i.e. royalty deals – looking to get board games published, mainly. I’m kind of shooting for a goal of retirement: making games entirely because I feel like it, with none of that darn marketing crap (I’d still sell them, but I like the idea of not sweating the details and just enjoying whatever comes my way).