Jeff Vogel, who runs the indie studio Spiderweb Software, writes about making a living selling old-school RPGs and the economics of indie games.
HN commenters recommend his blog as a great source on indie game development and cite him as an example of building a living by serving an underserved market.
His point makes a lot more sense in the context it was originally intended. He's not making a point about programming or debugging in general; he's specifically discussing tech support as a one-man indie game shop. In particular, it's all about the cost-benefit tradeoff. In his words (taken from the first post in the series - http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/06/seven-tips-for-giving-good-tech-support.html):
But at the same time, as a small developer, you have very little time to spare for support. Time spent getting the game working for one person is time not spent making a new game for everyone. You will need to develop a sense of when the time lost helping a person is not worth it, either because you won't be able to solve their problem or because they will not able to implement the fix you provide.
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Remember: It's only worth the time to do tech support if you have the chance to, in a reasonable amount of time, fix a problem and make a loyal customer. If you realize that, at the end of the road, you aren't going to end with a happy person and a working product, end the conversation as quickly and pleasantly as possible.
In that context, I think his approach is very rational. If you pushed him, he'd probably agree that more often than not the issue is in his code (even if it's just a question of inadequate error handling). However, if the problem is only seen by a single user and will be a significant investment to try and fix, then it's simply not worth the…
It's obviously not going to be a huge source of income, but if it a few percent of revenue or something, depending on the amount of work necessary to make it happen, it might be worthwhile.
Example: I've been a fan of the Warcraft universe and lore, and I own a pile of Warcraft merchandise: action figures, posters, t-shirts, and collector's editions of every Blizzard has made a collector's edition for (I don't even play the new WotLK, but I like having the collector's editions for the art and soundtracks).
If he's got some customers are as rabid about his games as I am about the Warcraft universe, he could at least increase his revenue by a few points, even if it's just simple stuff like cloth maps, t-shirts, and soundtracks included with a Collector's edition of a game.
I don't think that's unreasonable. Obviously it's not going to overtake the rest of his business, but it could be an additional source of revenue, and even advertising (T-shirts are walking billboards), people talking about the "awesome" inclusions in collector's editions. Stuff like that.
Edit: He actually does do some special purchase stuff: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-games-i-sell.html
Total Copies Sold of Geneforge 4 as of March 13, 2009: 3979.
Total Gross Sales Geneforge 4 as of March 13, 2009: $111412.
Total Geneforge 4 Hint Books Sold as of March 13, 2009: 807.
Total Gross Sales Geneforge 4 Hint Books as of March 13, 2009: $5649.
The books served for around 5%…
My view is that it isn't the nature of the people on that site it's the nature of the frame of mind those people are in on that site. There's a link that was posted here a while ago which I think explains it.
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/whittling-part-of-brain.html
"The human brain just seems to have a need for resting, for passing some time in a low-energy state. Computer role-playing games are perfect for that. When I fight fifty basically identical combats against darkspawn in Dragon Age or spend five hours finally getting my level 13 druid in World of Warcraft to level 14 or piled a hundred bricks on top of other bricks in Minecraft, I’ve done more than waste my time. I’ve given by brain rest that, for reasons I can’t begin to understand, it craved."
This rings incredibly true to me and I think many of the people who are reading this comment and who have read reddit & HN today are doing exactly this, they're putting their brain into a low(ish) energy state to give it a rest. I'm not implying that we're in that state all the time, if something of particular interest pops up we can be jolted out of it into something much more productive but for the most part people are grazing over the news and seeing what's going on in the particular corner of the internet they're interested in. All while not having to think too hard.
So what irritates me is people who look down on others because they like to watch reality tv, or read bad vampire romance novels or play…
This is a really interesting approach. I've been reading http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/ for a while now and the whole DRM argument there has been that there's realistically a threshold on how much you make on a game before it pretty much becomes readily available to pirates and/or the initial sales interest is just gone anyway and the rest is not a reliable source of income. Something like that. So an approach which provides an incentive to maximize early sales during a brief period with a statistical understanding of what the target sales are and a reward to the public for getting there is really cool. It sort of embraces the piracy constraint and optimizes for being profitable in light of that.
Imagine if the maker of some new, high-budget PC game called "DRM GoreShooter" decides that they will be in good shape if they make $5 million in the first three weeks of sales and past that point they won't really be profitable anyway (DRM or not). They want a profit better strategy than trying to use DRM to extend the window of pre-piracy sales out to week four or five, which might or might not work anyway. So they sell the game with something physically in the package that's really cool and you can only get in the first few weeks and they let you report in your product code, one time, for credit on Facebook or wherever for you having sponsored the development of the next game and been a generally cool person paying for quality entertainment. Would that be a better…
Yeah, this guy is making a stack of profit but the problem for everyone else is that there can be very few, if only one indy game in this class at a time to get this much attention and be top of mind for such a diverse group of people.
This feels like even more luck than hitting the top lists in the app store. One particular example relevant to hacker news would be Jeff Vogel (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/), I'd wager that in the long years he has been in the indy game industry nothing has taken off like this, sure hes games aren't really aimed at these type of novel concepts that have to potential to take off but it somewhat illustrates the different between a successful indy games producer and something on the level of success of minecraft currently.
Seconded.
This is a guy whose total sales of games were low enough under his original model that one of them sold about 4,000 copies total since its release (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-games-i-sell.html).
Later, when he actually dropped the prices to something that average people might feel like actually paying for games built on such retro foundations, he sold 33,000 bundles in one week (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/07/17/interview-jeff-vogel-on-bundles-graphics-and-pessimism/)... while misunderstanding the effects of lower pricing on his target audience enough that he thought he'd sell "less than a third of that".