hey guys, i agree, great chat here:
@david @roberto, some good points about moving to cut living costs in order to live a more free life. i am also in a relatively cheap-to-live country (Spain), after giving up on a quite a lucrative corporate career in Asia+USA, and I never ever regretted my decision.
@Shizapp, I assume from your post and couple of others you posted in the forum that you are exactly at the same place I was a couple of weeks ago when i published my game Spin Up. Its a lonely, depressing place when one starts questioning was it all worth it, as after many hours of hard work has been put, the world just don’t seem to care at all. There are quite a few people that will tap your back saying you’ve done a great work, but at large it’s just another drop in a vast ocean of noise that is AppStore.
It happened to me and I assume it happens to almost every other game developer. The most difficult part of the process is not actually making the game, it’s dealing with the days after the game is done and struggling on the market. Just the other day I’ve seen this GREAT interview with Edward MacMillan of Super Meat Boy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDDSYnZfxTM. A 1.5 hours, but worth seeing especially the part about emotional stress that comes AFTER the game is published.
You have proved with Nightlings that you are a great artist and a game designer, and you should be proud of that. Is the fact that you made such a great game enough for success? Not really. AppStore is very much like a lottery. If you make a game you get a lottery ticket. If you make a GREAT game, you get like TEN lottery tickets. You have ten times better chance of winning, but the odds are still against you (and all of us).
From my experience, after feeling quite down about my game release, I decided I was not going to let this ruin my mood (meditation really does help there). The next morning, I realized my game has just gone from nowhere to a front page of AppStore in like 50 countries! I felt I won the lottery, because I couldn’t imagine any better exposure I could wish for, except for maybe being the AppStore’s game of the week… Did it help the sales? You bet, but not like many success stories one can see on internet. I still managed to get some steady 400-500 downloads a day for about a week, and more than anything else, after been featured by Apple, I have been approached by several influential media outlets to review my game, the same ones that were never responding my emails before.
So this is all great, but the point I want to make with all this that even after winning the lottery with Apple doesn’t mean great financial success. Sure, I will probably be able to buy a new laptop or something in that range with this money, but its still nothing >>even close<< to support myself through making another game.
Which brings me to a final conclusion that as with any other industry, the gold rush of AppStore is long gone and no small-scale developer/studio can bet on one game only as it was possible a year or two ago. To be able to make a living from this now takes a long-term dedication and consistently hard effort to produce a range of at least several apps/games in the store and living off their combined long tail.
These are the same conclusions as the ones inside the article I posted, but somehow our brains are so much more receptive to exceptional success stories and tend to overlook the real-life stories because these are the ones that reveal that the road to success is much harder than we want to imagine it.
Even Edward MacMillan says:
“Everybody talks now about how we made a hit and earned millions, but nobody is interested to know that I made like 38 games before this while living in poverty for 10 years”
So I made up my own “Guide To Survive A Game Launch”, which will help me maintain my mental health through my future stress-inducing game-design endeavors. Hope it might help others too:
- After you launch a game, step away from computer or any internet device and stay offline as long as you can.
- Check your email at most 2 times a day (unless you have other urgent business to attend). That email that you are waiting for that will change your life for better will never come.
- Try not to connect to Itunes Connect for at least two days. It really doesn’t matter if it sells or not. If it doesn’t sell you’ll feel like shit. If it starts selling, you’ll feel on the top of the world, only to feel even worse than shit on the day it stops selling. You don’t really need this emotional roller-coaster. It’s just money and if you wanted it so badly, you wouldn’t be making games in a first place.
- Do NOT search for your game on Google every 10 minutes.
- Do NOT open websites like toucharcade.com or similar and see another N-th clone of XYZ game being reviewed instead of your own fruit of work.
- Do NOT send promo codes to media unless they explicitly ask you first. You will never get a response if you call first.
- DO send promo codes to real gamers. Forums are good place. Better to use promo codes for people who actually want to play your game than let them sit in a junk mail of some reviewer’s computer.
- Do not expect to win the lottery with Apple. Even if you win it, it might not mean as much as you expect. And if you don’t win it, you’ll feel lousy because the world is so unfair.
- Hang out with friends. Don’t talk about your game, listen to their stories instead.
- Think about your next project. Get inspired again. Always make your NEXT project the best one.
Cheers 
N.
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