It's motivating from a hacker/programmer perspective, not so much from a business one. 8 months full-time effort for new car money? Unless he means a new Tesla Model S, it's not very encouraging, especially considering so few reach this level of success.
I don't want to put other developers off - when I talk about 'new car money' I'm not talking about earnings where I can afford a car and nothing else, just that I'm not out buying mansions in Beverly Hills (or Primrose Hill for those in the UK).
I didn't go in to this to make money, so the financial benefit has been a hugely pleasant surprise!
yep. what i want to read is an article about failure, or stats about rate of failures, where failure is not earning above average wage over the time it took to make the app.
Well, even he probably has only an imprecise idea how many hundreds of hours he spent on it, but I'll speculate it's comparable to how many hours he'd spend getting a master's degree in CS (at night, while working full time during the day). I don't know how the job market works in his specialty in his country, but in some job markets in the US, I estimate that being able to list that game and its sales performance on a resume is worth rather more than a master's degree. So from that side effect alone, this sounds at least as good as him taking a generous fellowship to get an exceedingly good master's degree. It's not vast wealth in one fell swoop, but it doesn't seem like a failure. And if he wants never to send out another resume in his life, instead writing and selling his own software, it's harder to quantify the benefits of business and tech experience on a first app, but ramen profitability on one's first less-than-a-year-in-development app sounds OK to me. The title oversells the achievement (top 25 ... in some smaller countries) but your term "failure" undersells it even more.
Hi, I'm Adam, the guy that made the game. I completely see where you're coming from, but in the article you'll read that my measure of success was making back the few hundred dollars I spent on art - so as far as I'm concerned I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams!
I understand that my success is another man's failure, and that's fine with me. The 'success' of Pumped 1 is funding the development of Pumped 2 - I actually have a budget this time! But it's definitely not a bootstrapped multi-million pound startup - just me making games about grown men on kids bikes! :)
