PostiveNoise

I’d give a separate extra upvote for the cat participating, if I could!

This will bring in a FLOOD of new money for the developer. I had a really hard time enjoying the game when I bought it about a year and a half ago, and the rather lame graphics was the biggest letdown. The non-artist solo developer luckily realized the obvious solution to this issue (hire 1 or more actual artists), and now I really look forward to playing this some more. It’s a cool game, and should be a lot more enjoyable to me, partially because I’m a game artist myself.

I’m the sure this update has cost the developer well under a million dollars, and will result in several million dollars or more income, and a nice reputation boost for the game and the developer overall. Good for them!

Sure. He made many millions of dollars within the first couple years of releasing it. That’s why he can pretty much do whatever he wants, including continuing to work on the game without charging additional money for it. And of course, it keeps selling more copies, and will for many years to come, so he has tons of money continuing to flood in.

He certainly seems like a pretty grounded guy, and it’s nice that he tries to be cool about stuff, including not gouging the player base for more money. Being an individual has huge advantages compared to being a corporation, in some ways. A corporation would pretty much be obligated to maximize profit. He can just be pleased that he brings joy to millions of players, and has already made a fortune.

This article has some elements of truth, but skips over some important stuff. In particular, the odds of making a living writing books when on salary, writing the books for a big company or celebrities etc, are vastly higher than just writing your own books. You don’t have to beat insane odds if someone hires you for 70k/year to write books…you simply make that 70k/year. It’s the same as e.g. people working in the video game industry. The odds of earning a middle class income as an Indie Game developer are super bad, but there are many thousands of people working salaried jobs in the mainstream AAA game industry who are definitely ‘making a living’.

Also, this is nothing new. There is a reason ‘starving artist’ is a common term. For centuries, a lot of the most well known people in all creative fields were people who already had money when they started e.g. nobility, and some of those people were able to become famous, largely because they didn’t have financial pressures that the vast majority of people had.