Monetizing Your Game Outside of Sponsorship

I’m currently doing some debugging on Golemizer. Some very boring debugging but that needs to be done.

I suspect that too many handled errors are causing some instability on the server (damn you Try Catch!!!) so the code is running on my development machine with debugging set to break on all exceptions and I’m doing everything I can to make it crash. Caught half a dozen bugs that way so far related to NPCs (imagine a single bug in a try catch that happens 30 times per seconds … that can’t be good). It’s always related to NPCs … There’s so many things going on at the same time with tons of various events that can happen (character logout while issuing an order, NPC die while being used in another part of the code, …) that it’s really not easy. Good thing is that for the last 45 minutes I haven’t been able to crash the server.

So no I’m not using try catch in stupid ways but I underestimated the fact that hundreds of NPCs could be running and going through the same exception at the same time each second. I’m not sure if this is actually the source of the problem but exceptions going through try catch do cause some performance decrease. Repeat some thousands times and I guess it can’t be good.

Again if someone ever tells you it’s easy to code an MMO, just walk away and don’t bother with them. There’s nothing easy about it specially when you don’t have that database specialist or Windows specialist to turn to when everything’s going to hell.

So I need a break and saw this interesting post in my RSS reader: Monetizing Your Game Outside of Sponsorship

There’s some interesting stuff in there, at least for me. Most interesting thing is to read a bit about issues other people are having that I’ve come to know quite well myself.

The first thing that tics me is “Whirled is at $300K revenue, $5M invested. Abject failure.” … really? It is just me not understanding some kind of English second degree here or it’s true? Tried to find more info but the best I could found were these slides.

How do you define success?

“I want to do something I like and I don’t want a boss” is probably my favorite answer. I’d add I don’t want a ton of papers to take care everyday so I guess that it slows down the whole process a bit. Even though I’m aching to get to this goal I’m really not sure I’d be ready to get huge money through funding only to make proportional money as I’m doing right now. Instead of making $200 per month with no trouble like currently (besides occasional nerve breaking) I could make thousands per month with a debt of 2-3 millions and even worse nerves breaking. From my point of view the debt then becomes your boss and that’s because I’m not a business person. Others are probably better to handle that kind of pressure but not me. The only question would be is it possible to still pull it off without that debt?

Attaining critical mass is the key challenge to selling a game. Did you do anything specific to create that?

“Our first press release went to Jayisgames.com and that was huge traffic.” … sigh … My horse for some exposure! Yeah I know I should say “my kingdom” but I can’t afford that yet so I’ll stick with horse.

The most depressing part of it all is to always have to fight so hard to try to get your name somewhere. Trying doesn’t mean to succeed. There’s a bit of sweat in every visitor I brought to Golemizer (no blood yet). That’s the exhausting part. If even comes before trying to fix huge server bugs.

What about advertising?

Good to see that my experience seems the same for everyone. Advertising cost a lot for little results. The good thing now is that I don’t have any money left to run more ads so I won’t tell myself again “maybe if I try there …“. Nope! Not going to happen as I don’t have anything left to spend anyway! It’s actually a relief in some way as I can now forget about it and focus on smarter ways to get exposure.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs has self-actualization at its top… despite not having reliability of steady job, has it been worth it?

Tricky one. I keep complaining about how I’m bored at my job but this boring job still allows me to sleep well at night without fearing to not make any sales this month in Golemizer.

“Hell yeah. Easily yes. I do think that having an incredibly boring day job is a fantastic way to make a great game.”

Yeah, I guess but for how long one can keep up doing that. Getting up in the morning with that awful taste in your mouth when you think of that new boring day ahead of you isn’t always eclipsed by that night of excitement you’ll get from working on your game. I still haven’t decided to dive head first with no strings attached into game development so I guess I’m still able to get through it.

For how long is a question I try to not to ask myself right now. I’m still learning how to slow down my pace and lower my expectations a bit. Easier said than done so I’m giving myself some time. Not that I’m giving up (as you could see tonight I was debugging Golemizer) but I won’t put my health at stake either as my life is more than just game development and a boring day job.

What is it that you’re going to do on this next project that will make it that much more successful?

Simpler. Not going to try to do the promotion myself. More familiar theme. More familiar gameplay. Less risky from the technological point of view.

What about scalability issues – how did you overcome that?

That’s something I think I don’t need to worry about if I get rid of those bits that stick on the server and give some problems.

“Puzzle Pirates gets 2000 concurrent players on a single piece of hardware.”

Tonight I have created 5,000 NPCs in a single zone and the CPU was barely reaching 4% (that 5,000 independent AI that were attacking each other at the same time). Of course that much activity just freeze the client but server-wise there’s no problem there. I can always split up the SQL Server from the game to gain a performance boost in case of trouble. So if I can just get rid of the garbage adding up and slowing the server it’s just fine.

Besides I don’t think I have to worry about having 2,000 players online at the same time so I think my homemade server will do just fine.