{"id":4363,"date":"2009-08-07T11:16:40","date_gmt":"2009-08-07T15:16:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4363"},"modified":"2009-08-07T11:16:55","modified_gmt":"2009-08-07T15:16:55","slug":"stolen-pixels-114-so-you-want-to-be-an-indie-developer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=4363","title":{"rendered":"Stolen Pixels #114: So You Want to be an Indie Developer?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re an aspiring indie game developer, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/articles\/view\/comics\/stolen-pixels\/6351-Stolen-Pixels-114-So-You-Want-to-be-an-Indie-Developer\">Travis can help fill out the details of your business plan<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I heard about the 120 new iPhone games a day from <a href=\"http:\/\/rampantgames.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/utah-indie-game-night-summer-2009.html#comments\">Jay Barnson<\/a>.  That translates to 840 games a week.  If your 40-hour-a-week job required that you sample every single iPhone game, you&#8217;d have to play 21 games an hour to keep up.  That is, switch games every 2.8 minutes.  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m guessing that a lot of people suddenly realized at the exact same time that the iPhone was the Next Big Thing, and all of them dove into development.  If you read the post I linked above, you can see the long tail is in effect in a big way.  A minuscule group of people make a living, and a vast majority get something in the &#8220;couple hundred bucks&#8221; range.  Given the hundreds of hours that go into making even a simple game, this basically boils down to a lot of developers losing their shirts. Hopefully most of them kept their day jobs and made the games in their spare time. <\/p>\n<p>Things might actually get better once the glut is over.  A lot of those &#8220;120 games a day&#8221; are probably coming from people who thought they were taking part in a gold rush.  Once a good number of them go back to their day jobs, the marketplace might regain some sanity.  Here&#8217;s hoping, anyway. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re an aspiring indie game developer, Travis can help fill out the details of your business plan. I heard about the 120 new iPhone games a day from Jay Barnson. That translates to 840 games a week. If your 40-hour-a-week job required that you sample every single iPhone game, you&#8217;d have to play 21 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}