Development For Fun Or Profit

My diversion into game development has been extremely fun. However there are a few problems with this.

One, the number of indie developers out there is vast, and the competition is fierce. Two, even if you have the time and skills to release a unique, polished, attractive game, the realm of indie games has become saturated – especially for mobile games. Your awesome game gets lost in a vast crowd. And three, even if you get noticed, and have an awesome game, it’s very, very hard to get people to actually pay for it. Comments are full of people whining about even a couple of dollars for an excellent game.

As you can imagine, making games may be fun and rewarding… but a sure way to pay the bills it is not. So while I’m still tinkering with games for the fun, creativity of it, it’s been mostly on the backburner in favour of projects that pay. And for me that has been business-focused web applications. Business clients have budgets vs gamers who seem to want everything for free.

What does this mean for Roboid, and my other game projects? Not abandoned, but the timeline will be long indeed. I have 3 sons these days and that’s a lot of mouths to feed! However, my oldest is in school, and a year from now, another will be in school. Three years from now I’ll have them all in school and hope to combine business projects and game projects as my schedule opens up.