It makes sense to me to have a revenue model, though. Otherwise,
aren’t we all essentially ‘interns’ in the project? If hosting is
$10 a month for an Internet-based game, and you have $50 a month, in
revenue, that’s $40 a month. Keep up the work for a year on a
steady rate and you’ve gotten almost $500 in profit. If you have
a team of 5, they’d get $100 over the course of the year. Now, if
they spent 20 hours on the project, they’re still below minimum wage,
so I can see where one could say, ‘Let’s just make it for fun.’
But imagine that the game takes off, and you pull in $300 a
month. That’s nearly $3500 in a year (after hosting), if the game
stays steadily popular without increase or decrease in
popularity. Now say it took 100 hours for 5 people to develop the
game. $3500 / ( 100 * 5) = $7 (/hr). Now, obviously, how
complex a game can you get with 500 work hours?
Ken, if you make it this far in the message, how far along when you
started ‘making games’ did you decide to do it for profit instead of
for fun? Did you start right away and say, ‘Let’s try to pick up
some extra money by making something cool’ or did you just try to see
what you could do with the technology, having a profit as an
afterthought?
–Dave