Editorial: Release Day Nerves

If you only got sales reports once a week, you could forget about them for six days and just code, but like all indie devs, the first thing I check in the morning is the sales emails, and it's the last thing I check at night too. My mood, and how disposed I am to spending money has become directly hard-wired into the sales emails. I'm pretty sure I could chart endorphin levels alongside sales and see a scary correlation over time. If I meet a mate for lunch and order steak, he knows sales are good. A baguette though is a bad sign.

If you think I'm over-dramatizing it, think of it like this. Imagine you haven't been paid a penny by your employer for the last year. You have been living off your savings. On Wednesday, he will put your entire salary on a random stock on the stock market. You will start getting paid dividends from that day onwards. Will he pick the next Google? Or the next Lehman Brothers?

If you actually have a physical job like I used to, the earnings fear isn't so bad. A boat that's been nailed together is a boat that's been nailed together. It might sell for a lot, or it might sell for a bit less. A game that isn't fun though isn't just slightly less valuable than a fun one, it's worth nothing. Zero. Some games really do sell fifty times or a hundred times better than others with the same budget. It's pretty much all fixed costs, and the amount recouped could go from zero to a billion dollars.