sad news, an Indie closing down

[jankoM]

I just came over reflected games today and saw the bad news.. http://www.reflectedgames.com/news.html ... I can understand him deeply as I am not sure I won't be in a similar situation in about a year. I mean... I believe I (and many of us here) are running only on steam of optimism and one day the wind may blow that steam away for a moment and I will realize that the fire beneath has burned all the wood long time ago.
It's perfectly ok if you have a god job and you do this just because you love it, but it's hard if you are trying to make a living of it and if as Richard said don't have "excellent skills in many different areas". I for example know I don't (I am am not being negative, just realistic)

I wish richard best luck in future and I hope he won't tottaly remove Sunny Ball from net because it's one of the rare nice breakouts for kids.

[soniCron]

You know, that's a shame. The difference in quality between Storm and Sunny Ball was astounding. He looked like he was on his way up. A couple more releases and he could have had something substancial. If I ever consider quitting, I'll take a long, hard look at what Nexic has achieved, and you can bet your butt I'd reconsider.

[lakibuk]

Strange that he's totally shutting down his site.

[Jack Norton]

Well clearly someone bought the right to sell his games. He would be crazy to just shutdown his site. A site like that on Powweb cost 7$/month. I HOPE he sells more than 7$ a month!!! :eek:

[princec]

Not necessarily... we only just break even ourselves.

Cas :)

[ggambett]

Not necessarily... we only just break even ourselves.
Have you tried not driving a Porsche? ;)

[princec]

Heh, I've got a truck actually ;) But yes - we spend about as much on hosting and so on as we earn from our games. I can see why Reflected shut down but we do the games thing for the love of it and glory, and besides, we know one day we'll have a hit.

Cas :)

[Bmc]

thats what happens when you spend more time worrying about the "art" than the business.

[Herko Lategan]

Does this mean you guys only make 7$ a month!?

[Phil Steinmeyer]

PrinceC - I'm really curious about your statement. How much does your hosting cost?

I think you need to raise the prices of your games (especially the forthcoming Titan Attacks), and try to get broader distribution for your games.

[Anthony Flack]

thats what happens when you spend more time worrying about the "art" than the business.

I think most of us appreciate Puppygames' output, regardless of the current state of their "business".

But while we're putting words in quotes, I'm very interested to see the "quality" games you've been making easily in less than a month each. While I'd like to believe that it's possible to make a good game in less than a month, I do have my doubts, especially if you're going to go and put words like art inside quote marks. What's your website address?

[princec]

Hosting's $69 a month at the moment, plus Adwords fees on occasion and occasional domain renewals and at the end of the day I ought to have factored in the hardware I buy... etc. etc. So as I say, we barely break even.

Cas :)

[Savant]

Maybe I'm out of touch but that seems insanely expensive. Dreamhost costs $7.95/month and you get 1 TB of transfer each month.

[Bmc]

I think most of us appreciate Puppygames' output, regardless of the current state of their "business".

was refering to reflected games closing down, not cas

[GBGames]

Maybe I'm out of touch but that seems insanely expensive. Dreamhost costs $7.95/month and you get 1 TB of transfer each month.

I'd also like to know the reasoning for $69/month. What benefits are you looking at to justify the cost?

[Leper]

I'd also like to know the reasoning for $69/month. What benefits are you looking at to justify the cost?

I'm not 100% sure but.. I'm willing to wager that Cas is using a dedicated server or shared dedicated server. This lets him have more control over his website, gives him more reliability (as shared hosting shares cpu) and also allows him to build custom servers that can increase the value of his games. Online scoring, etc, with the addition to, adding multiplayer (if he does in teh future). etc etc etc

[happymonster]

Hello there,

I was only just shown this thread in a kind email. Yes, I am sorry to stop making shareware games but there are a number of reasons for it:

I have had a full time job for the last year and spending most of my free time developing shareware had become a stressful thing for me. I found I was losing my love of games and programming due to this. Now while this may be acceptable for an end reward (like a financial one) I can't say that it seemed that my games would sell well enough to make it a worthwhile one.

Add to this the stress of tax and support issues and I decided for my health and mood it was better to focus fully on my full time job before I burnt out.

I'm afraid I never found it profitable to use my skills to make games and some of that is due to my own lack of experience as a game designer. But being a shareware author now depends skills from programming to art to business and for one person that is very difficult.

Perhaps as part of an experienced team I would have had better luck, but I have no regrets! :)

I wish you all the best with your own work and games, and I thank you for all the kind words and support. I have set up a personal site which I will use for my free games (Chaos Funk, Dynamite) as well as my tutorial at some point in the future. I am also working on a free open source new Chaos game and I am enjoying making this very much. If you are interested, please visit:

http://www.zunked.org

[Storm]

Best of luck to you, I fully understand your need to avoid the stress. I've only just seen your freeware games today and they look great by the way!
:)

[Teq]

Not necessarily... we only just break even ourselves.

Cas :)

Run @ at $99 a month loss right now (and thats with free developers + artists), luckily my code monkey job pays well, but scares me ever so slightly

edit: admittedly we've yet to put a product on sale yet, we keep changing our mind on technologies to use :p

[Escapee]

FunPCGames (http://www.funpcgame.com) make a "double digits cash" flow this month by placing google ads all over the place and also selling some copies of games. Without those google ads FunPCGames (http://www.funpcgame.com) would be making a loss of about 2.2 bucks (webhosting fee + domain) and added much boredom and stress to my already uninspiring day job.

Best wishes of luck Richard , i can understand your reason for shutting the site down because i almost did that :(

[mahlzeit]

FunPCGames make a "double digits cash" flow this month by placing google ads all over the place
You know, that small AdSense bar below your in-site links is really sneaky. On first glance it seems like these are in-site links too. I think a lot of people are tempted to click on those, only to find to their surprise they end up somewhere else. (Or not to their surprise, but to yours, since they have left your site and most likely aren't coming back.) Just an observation of a phenomenon I've been seeing more and more lately. (I haven't made my mind up yet whether it is smart or stupid/dishonest.)

[Escapee]

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/2005-traffic-adsense-revenue-growth/

Personal development guru Steve makes above 3K/mth by putting those so called " sneaky " ads on his personal developement website. But ppl will just keep coming back (i'm one of them) after clicking those ads on his site because of the good quality of the articles he writes .

In the case of FunPCGames , i would have to admit that most ppl wouldnt come back after clicking those "sneaky" ads.:)

You have tons of "sneaky" ads on your sites too:D

[dmikesell]

I'd like to know what $69/month gets you as well. I pay $240/year for a reseller account at Page-Zone, which means I can resell (or use myself) up to 256 accounts/sites.

[GBGames]

edit: admittedly we've yet to put a product on sale yet, we keep changing our mind on technologies to use :p

Ah, so you're working on Duke Nukem Forever then?

[dxgame]

$69.00 per month seems awfully cheap for a indie developer website. Am I missing something??

[cliffski]

what? I pay less than $20 i think.

[dxgame]

I'll post in another thread, not to hijack this thread anymore, sorry.