How NOT to make an indie game

A full post-mortem for our Great Little War Game is currently featuring on VentureBeat right now: http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/13/gr...budget-and-pr/

It has numbers. And lots of gory bits. Hopefully a warning to new startups about getting your shit together before you start, just like we didn't!

Thanks for a good read! I must say I'm with you on the whole marketing thing - trying to stay away from it and wishing it would be just the game's quality that counts... Yeah : )

Yeah, that would good huh.

Good luck with your project. If we made it with all that against us, it should be a source of optimism for anybody!

Very informative read, thank you. Even knowing about some of the budget and pr pitfalls mentioned, I still find it difficult to side-step them!

Aye, I hear that.

It's very easy to mistake "knowing we have a problem" for "knowing how to fix it"

Fantastic read. AS GLWG and GBWG being some of my favorite iOS games I am very glad to see that post and the trials you went through and even the income. I hope they GBWG was a lot smoother for you guys.

Well, maybe a little smoother. :s

Thanks for this, I feel the more I see articles like this the more I'm worried once my group's first app launches we may not have done enough pre-work.

I know there is no exact formula, but more thorough pre-release development and marketing can make all the difference I suppose

I think it's more important than the quality of the game in all honesty. There's so much competition about that getting people to try your game has become the #1 challenge. Only after they try does it matter if its any good, iyswim.

Maybe you didn't make it big, but you didn't go into the red.

You spent: $190,000
You made: $500,184

So, between the 5 of you (if split equally) would have $62K each in bonus (because it said tech was included in the $190K).

Also, was this the only project this particular team was working on?

Plus the bump you'll get from being on the front page of VB.