In a continuing war with the patronizing wordpress ‘headline clickbait analyzer, I tried using smorgasbord to rate as an uncommon word…but no joy. Enjoy this non-clikbait post I guess…
How much does it cost to run a one-man indie game studio in the UK? What are all those costs that you don’t think about? I have no idea! but I can tell you what it costs to run positech games, if that’s interesting? Lets assume so:
WEB HOSTING
I have a dedicated server with liquidweb. Its possibly overkill, but it runs this blog, a lot of back-end stats reporting stuff and the challenges system for gratuitous space battles, the web pages for a handful of different domains and about a dozen games. Its also handy as a ftp-drop for sending stuff to people without worrying about dropbox accounts/limits/costs etc. The cost of this is $219 / month. A dedicated server is l33t because I can reboot it at will, install any version of php or whatever I want, and I’m not at the mercy of sharing a physical box with someone else.
ACCOUNTANT
I have a proper Limited Company, and its hellish without an accountant if you deal with VAT and multiple currencies, and multiple banks accounts and business investments etc…so I have an accountant in the UK that charges me roughly $135 / month. They are more like bookkeepers than accountants, as I handle my own VAT and don’t do any clever tax avoidance/offshore nonsense.
MAILING LIST
I use ymlp to maintain a small mailing list of about 10,000 people. I send one email a month and this costs me about $30/month. This means I don’t have to worry about my domain being seen as spam, and they can handle opt-in and unsubscribe handling etc. Not 100% sure its good value for money, always hovering on cancelling.
COMPANIES HOUSE
To have a limited-liability company in the UK you have to pay an annual registration fee. Worked out on a monthly basis its just $1.40/month.
APPLE DEVELOPER FEES
To sell games on apples store, and some other stuff, you need to pay them money (WTF?) looks like in the last 12 months I’ve paid them roughly $7/month for this honor.
ANTI-VIRUS SUBSCRIPTION
Do not risk being without it. I use malwarebytes paid version, works out at $3.25/month.
BACKUP SOFTWARE SUBSCRIPTION
Again, don’t risk it. I use carbonite, and it works out at $6/month.
BANK SOFTWARE
I use quickfile, to do automated tax-payments and access bank accounts remotely. It costs me about $5/month.
INTERNET ACCESS
I have fiber-to-the-premises (140 mbps down, 30 up) and a landline phone (I know old people!) and monthly this costs me a whopping $80/month.
Everything else I can think of is one-off payments for equipment, like a new PC or whatever, and project-specific stuff like PR or marketing/advertising budgets, or obviously what it costs me to hire people to do art/music/code and so on. But these are the current ‘fixed costs’ of positech. A summary:
| Web Hosting | $ 219.00 | 45.00% |
| Accountant | $ 135.00 | 27.74% |
| Mailing List | $ 30.00 | 6.16% |
| Companies House | $ 1.40 | 0.29% |
| Apple | $ 7.00 | 1.44% |
| Antivirus | $ 3.25 | 0.67% |
| Backup | $ 6.00 | 1.23% |
| Banking | $ 5.00 | 1.03% |
| Internet | $ 80.00 | 16.44% |
| $ 486.65 | |
Now I actually write it all out, it seems like quite a lot. Almost $500 to just exist, without eating or paying any other bills, or hiring anyone to do anything.