Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

The super-helpful 2020 indie games company costs breakdown smorgasbord

Posted on September 14, 2020

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 $  219.0045.00%
Accountant $  135.0027.74%
Mailing List $    30.006.16%
Companies House $       1.400.29%
Apple $       7.001.44%
Antivirus $       3.250.67%
Backup $       6.001.23%
Banking $       5.001.03%
Internet $    80.0016.44%
 $  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.

Democracy 4 gets awesome new update, and coming soon on steam.

Posted on September 4, 2020

You will be excited to know that wordpresses automatic clickbait generator rates that headline as 73/100 because of the ‘power word’ *new*. I get points for the ‘uncommon’ word *awesome* too. Is this really human civilisation at its peak?

anyway…

I’ve just updated Democracy 4 to build 1.09 (still in alpha from our website here BTW), and there is a huge list of 31 official fixes plus some minor stuff I didn’t bother mentioning like grammar fixes (thanks ginny). The fixes are many and various but a lot of them are balance tweaks to make the game a bit harder, and various extra links between items have been added, and a bunch of equations adjusted.

I should probably call out the fact that prt sc key on your keyboard now drops a png format screenshot inside

\my documents\my games\democracy4\screenshots.

In fact it bugs me a bit that often you have to ask about a game with ‘how do I print or copy a screenshot in X’ where we all have a button that basically says SCREENSHOT BUTTON right there in our faces on the keyboard… bah. Plus its 2020 and hard drives/internet speeds are awesome, so screw lossy jpgs, I’m saving stuff as pngs :D.

For anybody unsure, the game checks once a day (if you run it obviously) to see if there is a new version, then pops up a box to tell you, and tells you what’s in this version, but then you have to go the humble bundle link and re-grab the installer and re-run it over the top. If you need your link resent, you can do that here. (be warned, sometimes they go in ‘spam’ or ‘promotions’.

oh dear…

I have exciting news in that yes, we now have a listing on steam, and so its officially coming to steam on the 6th October. If you think that’s really soon then *gulp* so do I, but I like deadlines :D. Obviously that’s EARLY ACCESS, not the final game release. So much more work to be done before then… although I expect that by that date we will have a bunch more countries in the game, even if its all still in English at that point.

So anyway… wishlists are a thing, and more important than you think because steam apparently takes the number of wishlists into account in promoting new games, so its super-helpful to have people who are interested in the game wishlisting it in advance. You can do that using this handy little widget below this text here…

Exciting stuff :D. The trouble is there is discussion among indie devs as to how many wish lists you need to get promotion for your game. Some people say 5k minimum, 20k awesome. Others say 50k minimum. That sounds like a lot. I have no idea how things will go in the mere four weeks between now and my steam release, but I’m hoping for a shot at 20k anyway.

This means I now have a new thing to check and obsess over EVERY DAY as part of my job, as though steam sales / direct sales / stock market / exchange rate / ad performance / youtube views were not already enough! Luckily I have a monitor that can keep 64 spreadsheets on the screen at the same time, so I guess that’s just fine :D

Enough of your juvenile hot takes, Show me the DATA

Posted on August 28, 2020

I read some stuff on twitter today (I wont bore you with the details) that is absolute crap. I guess 99% of the useless lies that I see each day on social media just fly past me, but I knew about this subject, and so I noticed it right away. To my dismay, it is heavily upvoted, liked, shared and cheered on, as always. The problem is, nobody wants to take the time to actually do any research whatsoever. The laziest of all seem to be so called journalists in the mainstream news.

Top 10 Data moments from Star Trek: The Next Generation | VODzilla.co | Where to watch online in UK

One of the major problems behind this is the concept in news of an ‘angle’ or a ‘take’. The idea is that we have to have one of these in our news, otherwise we cannot understand what people are telling us. Telling us that a town was attacked in an air strike and X citizens died is apparently something our feeble brains cannot process, unless we see a picture of a child’s teddy bear in some rubble. I presume news desks have a folder on a shared drive called ‘kids toys in rubble’ that they have a shortcut to on their desktop, to save time. We simply don’t understand the impact of war otherwise, apparently. If a teddy bear is found, the air strike was unjustified. I guess that’s the theory?

I recently heard a BBC interview of 2 party-leadership candidates that touched on Universal Basic Income. I am not a UBI supporter myself (not in principle, but in practice…another topic…), but even I could get angry at the nonsense that the ‘journalist’ was saying. Apparently we are too stupid to understand the concept of ‘universal’ unless its described as ‘people like J K Rowling will get the money too!’. Oh the horror.

This is what you get when you have spent forty years trying to explain things in ‘olympic sized swimming pools’ or ‘length of london buses’ or ’round the earth X times’ instead of using miles or kilometers, which is the whole POINT of universal systems of measurement. Apparently we cannot understand actual data any more.

Do you know how long a london bus is? or how big an olympic sized swimming pool is? Me neither. (FWIW 11.23 meters long and 50 meters).

Very Soon You'll Only Be Able To Board A New Routemaster Via The Front Door | Londonist

Once our media went from reporting facts and data, to enclosing it in ‘angles’ and ‘takes’ it was a very short trip in the days of clickbait to transform the story entirely, picking and choosing context to whip up as much anger as possible. The media salivates the minute anybody is killed at a protest, or if a police officer kills someone right now, because OMG this will drive people CRAZY. No facts are required, no context required, no analysis or data required. All that is needed is the race of each person involved, and hopefully some shaky-cam footage that we can edit in order to create as much outrage and as much anger (from both ‘sides’) as possible.

Everybody knows ‘where they stand’ on a number of big political issues. We all have our tribes, and our beliefs, but how much of it is emotion, and how much of it is based on data? You are pro or anti-brexit mostly based on emotion. You are pro or anti gun-rights mostly based on emotion, and when it comes to economics…OMG peoples grasp of the data is absolutely embarrassingly slight.

Here is a quick quiz to see how well the media has informed you on some random topics.

  1. What percentage of US government spending goes on interest on the debt?
  2. Whats the most common cause of death in the US and how many does it kill each year?
  3. What percentage of US households earn over $100k per year?
  4. How much does a US senator get paid?
  5. What was the turnout at the last US presidential election?
Indonesia: Some children return to school in quake city hoping to see friends | World News,The Indian Express

I would be very surprised if anyone was close to all those answers ( I certainly was not). Here they are:

  1. 7.8%
  2. Heart disease: 647,457
  3. 30.4%
  4. $174,000
  5. 55.5%

We discuss politics using memes instead of facts. We either think senators are out-of-touch super-rich, or underpaid considering the tough job they do…but how many know what they get paid? The national debt is no big deal, or catastrophic depending on your tribe, but how many know what it actually is? There is no room for subtlety, or context, but only room for deciding if a number is good or bad BEFORE you find out what it is.

Our news providers do a TERRIBLE job. They talk about how the pound has ‘fallen dramatically’ without showing us a chart, or that gold prices have ‘soared’ without showing us a chart. Unemployment is ‘plummeting’ or ‘soaring’, again, where is the chart? Its 2020, we can cope with pie charts and bar charts and stats and numbers on the TV, but we rarely actually see them. I hear daily, yes DAILY reports about the covid crisis in the UK, but when did you last look at actual CHARTS showing you deaths and cases. here are some (official government ones):

We are not idiots, we can look at charts and form our OWN opinions. Its about time we started telling ‘journalists’ that terms like ‘plummeting’ or ‘soaring’ or ‘steep’ or ‘brisk’ are great fun in poetry, but they should play no part in serious news reports to a literate population who can understand the concept of numbers and charts.

When it comes to national elections, we are BOMBARDED with infographic hell for hours and hours showing us polling results in the most ridiculously over-analyzed detail. Why the hell cant we get those same infographic people to show us what’s going on BETWEEN elections? Give us more DATA.

But no… want to see how bad its got? I’m writing this in wordpress, using the latest editor. Its marking down my headline as not being divisive enough. I’m not kidding, there is a score of 48/100 and ‘tips’ to make my content get more clicks. Basically be more divisive. check it out:

WordPress! Now with free hints on writing divisive clickbait to help tear society apart even more… /cries.

FIFTY FUCKING YEARS

Posted on August 22, 2020

This blog post isn’t about democracy 4. I live, breath, sleep and think Democracy 4 all the time, so I need to escape from it and talk about life stuff for a bit. Don’t worry, I’m still working on it (including weekends!) and jeffs back next week…

I turned fifty years old last year. That means I’m very likely half way to death, even being optimistic. I’m not *unhealthy* but I’m not super-fit either, but frankly I think I’m WAY more likely to be killed by climate change than old age. BTW so are you. You really should do something about that. Like now, super urgently. The world is literally burning.

The 2019 California wildfires caused less damage than the last two ...

Anyway…

So fifty is a weird age to be. Its not really old enough to think about retirement, but you are definitely old enough to be bored with a lot of young people’s concerns and things. I’m married, my career has gone very very well, and I have paid off the house and car. These are things that people fight to achieve their whole life, and I seem to have done them. Normally, someone my age would have kids at university or starting their career, and would obsess about that, but we don’t have kids.

I see a lot of people around me, a similar age or older, who seem to ease very comfortably into this position, and spend their time getting involved in the minutiae of local politics, or stuff like the best village competition (yes its not a hot fuzz joke, its REAL), or they take up golf, or more likely where I live, shooting pheasants or going horse riding etc… None of this is for me.

I spend an hour a day playing Battlefield V with friends, chatting about politics and TV and games and work/code as we gun down the enemy. I’m am definitely the oldest in the group, and am aware that I am basically straddling two social circles. Relatively young game developers, and retired countryfolk who are drawing their pensions.

This is strange, and makes me feel ‘disconnected’, which is something I feel in general anyway, for long tedious medical reasons I wont bore you with. I am in a the bizarre position of being more of a workaholic than anybody I know, despite being quite capable of retiring, thanks not least to the amazing performance of my stock-market picks. When I wrote this just over a year ago:

The case for buying tesla stock.

Tesla stock was about $220. Its currently $2,080. Thats just amazing. And other stocks I like (nvidia, paypal, square, microsoft, amazon) have all done well too (not AS well but…).

Combine being very lucky on the stock market with being a workaholic who loves making indie games, and has been around the industry for over 20 years, and most people assume I would spend my days like this:

Great Gatsby Decor

Which to an extent… I do, but frankly covid has really torpedoed that. Even though I’m happy to go to restaurants now, many of my friends are not. I wouldn’t go to the cinema, there are no plays or outdoor events happening (although we did go to see 2 drive-in movies), and foreign travel is pretty much on hold right now. (not a bad thing, given climate change)

Something all this makes me realize is that the benefits of various parts of life are valued very badly, and it takes a long time (50 years!) for me to really re-evaluate them. A lot of people value financial success very highly, but beyond a certain point, its impact on your actual quality of life is negligible. If positechs income doubled tomorrow, it likely wouldn’t make any impact on me at all. I love where I live, and have no real need for a *bigger* house. I already have my dream car, and I’m not one for luxury watches or bespoke suits or whatever the fuck people spend money on. I suspect the real equation is like this:

Once you are not in poverty, and you are not thinking about how to pay the bills… your happiness races up, but once you get to be a fifty year old guy running his own company with some decent savings… what more is there? Global domination? a super-yacht? why?

When I look at the things I’ve done in my life that I’m really happy about, or remember fondly, or proudly, very few of them are related to any form of conventional ‘success’. I was very pleased with a talk I gave at GDC once, mostly because it went well by the standards I had set for it (people laughed), I have no idea if it helped me sell any games or made money. The charity stuff I’ve done has given me a huge amount of happiness, disproportionate to the money spent. I do miss going to games events in the US, mostly because I miss some friends I have made over there, not really because of any business reasons.

Realizing you are at least half way to death is a strange experience. You start thinking in concrete terms about what else you really have time for. You also think about your youth and how wasted a lot of it seems. I spent a CRAZY amount of time in pubs getting very drunk and talking about…god knows what. Certainly nothing interesting. I have spent a phenomenal amount of hours just playing scales to a metronome on my guitar.

I have come to the realisation that one of the best things in life is to be good at a thing, and to do that thing. Whether or not that leads to huge success, critically or financially, is almost irrelevant as long as you can pay the bills. There is a sense of calm, happiness and ‘flow’ that comes from being skilled, and using that skill, that gives you a zen-like experience of inner-joy that no rolex watch of ferrari can replicate.

…which is kind of why I am working on Democracy 4. I am good at this. In theory, I don’t have to do it. Unless the stock market suddenly crumbles, I could just take a few years off, play golf, and argue about thing on the local village council. I could mow the lawn, very often (god it needs it…). I could sunbathe in the garden, and read novels. But, this is just not me.

This is also a year in which I’ve come to realize that yeah, I’m definitely on the autistic spectrum. Thats cool, I don’t mind. I was once told that I was ‘probably a high functioning autistic’, and I think thats true. Rather than let it bother me, I’m happy to lean into it a bit. If I want to spend time optimizing the rendering code in a game where 99% of player-votes say ‘the framerate is fine’, then thats fine. I can write C++ to relax, no point in fighting that, or denying it.

It seems crazy that it takes 50 years to learn to just be yourself, but we are surrounded by so much social pressure to behave/act/desire one thing or another, that it can be really hard top just sit and think about what you actually want. Its definitely worth doing.