
I’m tired. So I’m selling my game that just went viral - napsterbr
https://medium.com/@renatomassaro/99e525f99f65
======
masukomi
Re the emails / support / whatever being stressy... dude. It's been like no
time at all, and you had a spike. You don't have to reply to EVERYTHING ASAP.
All things in moderation. Set up an autoresponder politely telling folks that
you're a single person and the spike in requests is a bit overwhelming. ask
their forgiveness and let them know that you'll get to people as soon as you
can.

With that out of the way, congratulations on the spike in traffic.

After having been on the front page of multiple programmer sites I can tell
you it's just that. It's a good day. You _may_ even get a good week out of it.

Unless you are _incredibly atypical_ the spike in traffic _will not last_.
There's absolutely no basis for assuming that traffic will continue at the
spiked rate. It tells me your either naively optimistic (sorry to inject an
unpleasant reality) or trying to sell it quick to someone else who is naively
optimistic.

The upside is that the onslaught of requests is that since it's a spike, they
will die down and you'll be able to catch up. The longest, and hardest, i had
was a project that ended up with me stuffing envelopes every night and making
daily trips to the post office sending of letters to people around the world
because my offer started getting passed from message board to message board.
It lasted about a month.

I'm _very_ dubious of the belief that adding "more advantages" would get you a
10-15% conversion without _any_ evidence to back it up, especially when you
can't even be sure of the 1% conversion rate you _think_ you can get for the
current state of things.

You can't extrapolate an enduring income stream (or even an amount of work)
from a single _small_ spike.

~~~
downandout
_> Unless you are incredibly atypical the spike in traffic will not last._

The spike won't last, but it doesn't mean that it won't grow consistently from
where it is into something much larger than it is today.

 _> It tells me your either naively optimistic (sorry to inject an unpleasant
reality) or trying to sell it quick to someone else who is naively
optimistic._

That's pretty judgmental. This obviously has the _potential_ to grow. If he
doesn't want to deal with it or maybe needs the money now, he isn't doing
anything wrong by trying to sell it to someone that sees the same potential
that inspired him to spend 2 years creating it.

Maybe he won't get $60K, and maybe he'll get more. Maybe somebody will offer
to invest in it and allow him to draw a salary while he grows it. Maybe he'll
be hired by someone that has a use for the talent and dedication he displayed
by building this. Regardless of the outcome, it's clearly worth _something_ ,
and if he wants or needs to sell, I hope he gets a fair offer.

~~~
RogerL
> The spike won't last, but it doesn't mean that it won't grow consistently
> from where it is into something much larger than it is today.

That is absolutely true, but investors don't invest based on "doesn't mean".
The equation is discounted future free cash flow minus risk premium, and
usually, minus how desperate you are to sell. If you are big and threatening
(can take away Facebook's customers), then that adds some plus to the
equation.

If you are trying to sell Apple we can talk about projecting future growth -
the equation changes dramatically. A PHP game with a one day spike? No.

This could be the next minecraft, but more likely it'll make 1K this month,
$500 next month, and so on into obscurity, is the thinking. Disagree? Show us
the numbers. You'll get about 1x on those numbers, as others have ably pointed
out.

I think we all agree he has done extremely well to get to this point, and that
we hope he gets fair value. But I can't imagine spending that much money to
basically buy myself a job in the hopes of a revenue stream that the owner has
not generated for himself. I think the advice he has gotten to take a
breather, and take stock in a few weeks is extremely sound. If he can make a
case for his revenue #s he will get a nice price for his game. But he needs to
understand what investors are thinking about his pitch. That is not bashing
him or being judgemental, it is merely echoing what the market is going to be
thinking. How else will he get fair value? The goodness of the investor's
heart?

tl;dr - the things being written may be painful to read, but they come from
people with experience and a friendly desire to explain how to do business
valuation. It in no way implies an assumption of a limited upside in the
future of the game.

------
ddingus
Why not take the modest income and pay somebody to improve the game and or
it's traffic?

Seems to me, you could find another University student looking to grow traffic
as part of their studies. Collaborate on this.

Take another small share and pay somebody to do a little support for those
users worth responding to.

As others have said, you could potentially benefit from this in the future.

Right now, you are just a programmer. Continue that. Do well, grow.

But, a programmer who understands some business has serious potential. Seems
to me you just created the perfect lesson plan. This little project won't take
that much to treat like a business and if you make a couple of friends, who
knows where you all might go in the future?

You would be able to learn how to better execute on an idea, get a lot of very
interesting user metrics, have a following, show income, etc...

Consider this. I would in a second. A few hours here and there just isn't
going to impact your studies. However, those few hours here and there could
really educate you in ways you will find difficult to realize in a strictly
academic environment. This is worth more to you than you currently realize.

Nice work :)

~~~
napsterbr
Thanks, this is something that I should try.

~~~
jagermo
please do this. I just signed up (sorry for the additional load) and it looks
fantastic. Reminds me of Uplink in a modern setting.

Plus, as a dad of a 4 month old, this looks like the perfect pasttime when the
small one wakes up in early morning.

Please reach out. You have done an amazing job and should keep it up.

~~~
tux3
>Reminds me of Uplink in a modern setting.

You just made me sign up.

~~~
jagermo
well modern as in "web based". It's not really uplink (i loved the use of
different nodes to hide yourself) but it looks like a fun pasttime that take
the hacking scenario seriously.

------
zak_mc_kracken
First of all, congratulations for finishing your game and getting some success
with it.

A few thoughts:

\- 6000 registered users in a couple of days is hardly going viral. It's a
promising start but too early to use that adjective (and the numbers are also
pretty low).

\- The fact that you are trying to sell something you worked on for more than
a year just because you can't keep up with the email volume is... suspicious.
Especially if the income estimates you give in that article are accurate. Why
not just ignore your inbox for a few weeks and come back to it later?

\- I think the answer to the question above is obvious: you know your success
is temporary and you're trying to cash out while you can. Sorry for my
cynicism, just being honest.

~~~
napsterbr
Sorry for your honesty. OP here.

Some people don't think only on money. I created this game as a fun project,
for fun, without expecting any revenue. (If I did, it would be pay-to-win).

I tried to kill myself last year a few days after I gave a talk at a FOSS
conference. Some people can't handle pressure, email volume or too much social
contact, specially if they have something called social anxiety, depression,
and other things that I do.

I understand your suspicious.. However you are assuming I'm a crazy-for-money
guy like... many people.

If no one buys the game I'll probably shut it down. For my own mental sanity.

~~~
rmetzler
It's free to play, you don't owe anyone anything. If you get emails and don't
feel like answering, just ignore them. If you get praise, print it out so you
can look at it whenever you feel down.

~~~
jtheory
This is totally logical, but psychologically hard.

When I was a student I had totally-free online stuff I built lead to a stream
of requests for upgrades, additions, bugfixes, etc. -- and the unreasonable
ones are easy to discard, but some requests would be polite, friendly, and
include offers to help. I'd agree to make the seemingly-small tweak, or accept
the help, and then realize after a week that I didn't really have the time, or
that my TO-DO list was being pulled completely out of whack....

Better to not publish your email address at all, perhaps, or make very clear
that emails may be eventually read but very likely not responded to.

------
napsterbr
Hey, I'm Renato.

I really don't know what to do. Many people told me if I hire a team, or at
least one developer, this would help me get going with the game. This does
make sense.

However I've been extremely stressful for the last hours. I guess this really
is a bad decision, but one that would free myself for university and other
projects I have.

The problem is I can't stand to spend my whole day working only on Hacker
Experience anymore. I already have other projects that I want to work full
time with.

Happy to hear any advice from you. I have no experience at all with business,
marketing or even start-ups. I'm just a programmer.

Thanks!

~~~
bpizzi
Hey Renato, good job you did here, but I would honestly don't sell and I'll
definitely don't buy.

See, I've been wandering on HE a couple of hours yesterday, and your project
seems to have some serious execution flaws (bad ui, downtimes, social based
income, etc). Nothing serious for a side project but these are definite
blockers if you ask for a 50k something.

Not mentionning the stack: slackware (honestly?), php and python (why two
langages?), no framework. The last one could be the main reason you are
struggling to keep it afloat, and that at least throws a big red flag: "I'm
gonna head troubles if I'm gonna buy".

And the business side doesn't seems to be worth it.

My 2 cents on selling/buying webapps : I would be keen on paying 10K on a
website-based business with 10 long-time customers paying 100$ each month.
That's not the kind of deal you seems to be after, but I think this is somehow
the standard for serious buyers on the market. Why so low you may ask? Because
if I understand your project to the point I could buy it, then that means I
can replicate your little business. I'm only buying time, and I think it would
take ~10 months to build that webapp and gather some ~10 customers (maybe
yours, now I know your flaws...).

And that means buying a strong problem solving webapp, not a niche online
game. If the webapp is very well executed then I would maybe push to 15K per
10 recurring customers, not more. And I don't care the market size: it's for
the potential 100 recurring customers that I would be in, not for the seldom
social viralisation peak with an only 1 or 2% conversion.

In a nutshell: don't loose your time trying too hard to sell it. If it sells
then congrats, but you should spend your time fixing the UI to keep your
players onboard, writing a great FAQ that handle the tickets, and boosting
your infra so you that you're not needed around when it collapse.

Because after that you're done: let it live alone and enjoy your 1000$/month.
Based on my experience there's little chance you'll reproduce that for the
years coming.

But that's still a good feat for your age and experience, kuddos and congrats
to you ;)

~~~
jqm
Why not Slackware? Besides, does that matter? I'm sure one could easily run
the game on CentOS (or something else) if they chose.

Your point about maintainability might be more valid.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Slackware is a highly capable distro. It may not have the fancier things that
other distros have (or at least not as simple), but it's just as capable, and
it's highly more stable.

~~~
bpizzi
I was not trying to be mean on slackware users, nor implying that slackware
isn't a capable distro. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough.

I implied that, when a distro is missing dependency management, it should be
the last on your picking list. I'm an Arch guy myself, but my own servers run
on wheezy (because 'life').

~~~
giancarlostoro
Everything has its uses I suppose.

------
fsk
My advice - don't sell.

First, it's hard to put a value on it. It isn't clear than the buyer would
make enough revenue to keep up with the expense of keeping it running.

Second, you aren't obligated to respond to everyone who sent you an E-Mail or
message. Wait a couple of weeks, and then start looking at them.

Third, you aren't considering user retention. You had 6k unique visitors
today. There is no guarantee you will still have 6k unique visitors in a
month.

Fourth, as long as your income from ads and payments cover the expenses, leave
it running.

Finally, if you do retain an audience of 1k+, now you have a customer base for
whenever you launch your next project.

------
jliptzin
Congrats on the success. Allow me to give you some advice before you sell,
having been in almost your exact position at your age:

\- Lots of emails/press attention is a good sign and no reason to give up on a
project. Focus on improving the game and ignore the emails if you have to.
They don't matter

\- I too had a game go viral (0 to 3 million accounts in about 6 weeks). I was
getting multiple acquisition offers but up until that point it was the most
exciting and stressful time of my life. I got absolutely no sleep for days on
end. But it paid off and I learned more practical knowledge in those short few
weeks than my entire college career.

\- When the time was right I sold, not because I was tired, but because it was
the right time for the game and for my future

\- Shortly thereafter I developed another game which I considered selling
early on like you are doing now because I wanted to move on to something else.
I decided to continue improving it and it ended up lasting 5+ years and
grossing several million $s, far more than I ever thought was possible with
the initial version

\- This is your baby. You are by far the best person to nurture it and turn it
into something you're extremely proud of.

\- Your growth is promising but the traffic right now is too low for you to
get any serious offers in my opinion. Keep on grinding, it'll be worth it

~~~
DonHopkins
>This is your baby. You are by far the best person to nurture it and turn it
into something you're extremely proud of.

That comes through in all the meticulously detailed, earnest and honest
information you posted about it. It sounds kind of like you're trying to find
a good home and trustworthy owner for a beloved cat who you can't keep in your
apartment any longer. Just remember, your cat (i.e. your audience) loves you
too. Good luck whatever you do!

~~~
napsterbr
This is the best analogy someone could come with. It feels exactly like that.

------
gasping
I had to laugh at the revenue estimates based on the peak of a brief social
media buzz. Most of that traffic will disappear over the next few days.

~~~
mqsiuser
Yes it will. He tries to cash in now.

My "show HN" went peek on HN and then back to what it was before.

He is smart: Everything seems fine. From the media we know about all the
companies, which have established business models with such figures. But they
are the 1%.

Taking over (from him) is already so hard: If you were the inventor of [X],
you would have done [X]. Taking it over and going on: ~IMPOSSIBLE~

------
victorfigol
I doubt anyone will want to buy your game. It is not that it is not good but
without you in the price it is not worth it, they will not be able to improve
it or even maintain it. The learning curve in order to maintain that game will
be very expensive. Also success is not guaranteed yet, now is the time your
game is growing do not let go. Just take a trip somewhere to relax.

Also find a partner, if you were working on this with someone else, you would
have much less stress. Working alone is very unhealthy and extremely
stressful. Either partner with someone or balance life and work which might be
hard since you have to study too. Go to forums where other programmers that
love making games are and find someone to become your partner.

------
cypherpnks
I'll make an alternative suggestion. Hire management. You want to sit in a box
and code. You want someone to handle business, support, etc. People who can do
that are a dime a dozen.

That could be another student at the university; someone with an active
Twitter account, good charisma, etc. Offer 25% equity vesting over 4 years.
That's pretty generous. Keep hacking and plugging, and do as much or as little
of the interacting as you want. If the other person doesn't carry their weight
-- which is not uncommon -- dump them or swap them out for someone else. Be
very upfront about this when bringing them on (if you want, overly upfront --
pitch this as a short-term engagement, with possibility of going longer
depending on how business goes).

Give yourself the title of CEO and CTO. Give them the title interrim
president+COO.

Regarding depression, social anxiety, etc., this can help fix it. I've been
there. Depression gets better when you have meaning and purpose, and when
you're busy enough to not have time worrying about it. Social anxiety gets
better with status. When people are competing to talk to you (rather than the
other way around), and you're in a position to say yes or no, the dynamic is
just different. If this were to grow into a successful company, you might be
in a very different position. You've been playing with fixing this for a
while. Play with this as an opportunity to try a different approach to fixing
it.

Again, I don't know you. This could not apply at all. Take this as what it is
-- an idea from a stranger.

~~~
tokai
>Depression gets better [...] when you're busy enough to not have time
worrying about it.

Very harmful advice potentially.

------
lsc
So... I can't advise you about selling. I've bought tiny companies, but have
never successfully sold them, and... yeah.

However... I do have a suggestion for your sanity now and in the future that
doesn't involve selling the company, or at least, not all of the company.

Assuming you want to keep releasing stuff direct to the public, I suggest
finding a friend that you can interact with, that can interact with the public
and other business partners. There are a lot of different ways to structure
that relationship; some people get a "business partner" and when the
relationship is described that way, usually the partner gets some control over
you. This relationship can also be structured as "hiring a secretary" \- if
that's what you call them, you are implying your partner has less power, and
often that you will compensate said partner regardless of revenue, but
compensate them less.

On your end, I think, the fact that this person can deal with your quirks and
protect you from the parts of the limelight you find unpleasant might be more
important than their raw talent as a business person, especially if you retain
more control over the business side of things. (Note, if I'm reading your
personality correctly, and I might not be, you probably want someone who is
willing to at least act in public like they made the decision in question.
Someone willing to take the blame even if it was actually your decision. These
people exist, but you need to be clear, if that is in fact what you need.)

I mean, you and your partner need to decide what your relationship looks like,
how the power dynamic works, and how remuneration works, and it doesn't have
to conform to either one of those models, but I've worked with people that
were really, really uncomfortable with social situations; I've been that
"human interface" person, and if you find a compatible person, I think it can
generate a whole lot of value for both people.

------
whocares
Hi Renato

I am very sorry to hear about your health problems. I don't have the same
challenges as you but I do have experience of when a side project explodes. I
have a piece of freemium software that has been downloaded about 700,000 times
and here is what i did to manage the emails:

\- set up a great FAQ and put all questions that are asked more than once in
there. \- if you use a mac get a copy of TextExpander ( or a similar product)
and automate all your email replies. Then you can answer support emails with
one command. \- use a Gmail label to sort out support, and batch send emails
once or twice a week. Don't be afraid to ignore whiners, complainers and the
people who cannot Google answers for themselves.

Take care of your health first and best of luck!

------
fishnchips
My €0.02.

This is somewhat similar to the situation where a FOSS developer feels the
pressure from the users of his software. The more successful their software
the more miserable and frustrated they become. I believe the best way of
preserving your sanity in this case is just pushing back and allow others to
take responsibility. Forks and pull requests exist for a reason. Chances are
you're using my open source library for your regular job in which case you
(unlike myself) will actually get paid for your contributions.

@napsterbr: you don't owe anyone anything. If there's any obligation it runs
the other way. Take a deep breath and enjoy the ride, long may it last. One
way of sharing the burden of support (which seems to be your main concern) is
creating a community and granting most eager and devoted users some
'superpowers'. Makes them happy and they do a lot of work for you. You only
get involved sporadically and on your own terms.

------
meh_master
Pretty good time to sell, given that all that traffic will be gone by next
week. But I think the dev and any potential buyers know that.

------
orasis
Get some sleep bro. Shelve the project for a while, work on something else,
then come back to it in a couple of months when you're feeling energized
again.

------
mikkom
> At the current stage of the game, one would be able to get about $1000 per
> month with both ads and user membership.

The current usage is a peak because of exposure. It will drop and the ad
profit will go way down in the coming few weeks.

------
foz
Please remember, that even if you don't do anything at all - ignore it, let it
fade, or whatever - you had a great success. Be proud, let yourself feel the
satisfaction. Working for years on something and having people connect with it
is an amazing accomplishment. If nothing else comes of it, that's OK. You won.

------
sheetjs
> There are two main ways to earn money with this game. One is using Google
> Adsense.

> These values are estimated, but I believe one can get at least $20–$25 per
> day. That’s about $750 per month.

Until you actually see your first payout, the estimate is meaningless. I've
heard of many cases where people saw significant estimates and google turned
around and shut down their accounts before the first payout.

There is an ongoing class action lawsuit against AdSense for this behavior.
Relevant discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7776282)

------
iSloth
I've been in a very similar position to what you're in now, at university in
England and a side project went viral and was making a decent amount of money.
In the end I sold it onto someone that gave me a decent offer.

Has to be one of my biggest regrets, I could have paid someone else to support
it while I was busy with my education. Perhaps the biggest kick was that the
person who bought it didn't really look after the site and it went into
decline anyway losing most of it's users.

Selling might be your best option, however be 100% sure before doing anything
:)

------
pouzy
Everybody's advising not to sell it, but looking at the game: Yes, it might
only be a spike. The game is long to get into, a lot of reading, etc. It's
like starting a complicated board game without somebody to explain it to you:
a lot of people will just drop it to play a game in which the rules are
explainable in 20 seconds.

There's a buzz going on around it right now, but don't expect it to be Flappy
Bird. So depending on what you want (you seem tired of that game), I don't
think it's a bad idea to sell it while it's hot

------
kngspook
Pretty cool that you made the forum automatically create account when the game
account is made. It's the small touches that make the difference between
something people will use and something people love to use.

Like other people commented, I don't think your user numbers will hold up in
the long run -- not because of the game, necessarily, but because people
naturally try stuff out and then never return.

Nonetheless, I'd consider buying it, but not at any price that would make you
feel good about spending two years coding the thing.

------
dsirijus
Find an understanding partner. Since you obviously don't have a clue about
anything besides programming (sorry, harsh words, but I don't have the time to
type out a list of mistakes you did here), it'll have to be business dude that
handles stress and load well.

Have him insulate you from the support, monetization, PR, and so on, and let
him assemble Terms of Use to be very generous towards you as a programmer in a
way that you don't have to respond to reported bugs (especially concerning
monetization) immediately but leisurely.

Agree with him on the priority of types of fixes/improvements and have him
deliver lists of tasks to you on a weekly/monthly basis.

Have that business partner on a probation period first, to see is he
supportive of your persona and then split profits with him 50/50\. It'll be a
great opportunity to learn from him strategems of handling stuff you cannot.

Aim long-term. These types of games are something people stick around for
quite some time. Adjust monetization model accordingly. These numbers you have
or project right now are meaningless from that context.

Do the right thing and good luck.

As a side note, an analogy to first-time parents is an appropriate one here. A
lot of them panic a lot when they find out baby is on its way. _But I 'm not
ready! I'll make mistakes during parenthood! Will I be able to support it!?_

And most kids still turn out just fine.

Cheer up. :)

------
presumeaway
Alternate title: how to sneak a For Sale listing to the top of HN.

~~~
bertil
I believe that this particular post is more about what someone should look
into when facing unexpected success than driving a good sale price: so far, no
one has posted this was a good idea to sell.

My reaction is: pay a litt major to respond to e-mails for couple of hours a
day. Most reactions are: get a serious business partner. Debating that is a
lot more relevant than an ad -- hence the tolerance.

------
TallboyOne
That's not going viral... going viral is 8 million visitors in one day. What
you have is about the amount of traffic we get in ~10 minutes. You need to
chill out.

------
mrpickles
Cool project. It's nice to see someone put together something awesome while so
early in their education/career and have it work out for them. Shows you've
got potential.

If I could give you any advice, I'd say think about going to academia. Working
in the software industry is all about this kind of stress, and it really only
gets worse from here. It's why we get paid lots of money to sit in a chair all
day eating free snacks.

If this project has been stressful, the industry is going to chew you up and
spit you out. Projects follow the same trajectory: you work on a project in a
bubble for a long period of time (maybe a year or two). Then, there's a usage
spike the first day, the first week. Maybe it goes up (if you're lucky), but
it probably goes down. You have to fight to get usage.

And then things get harder. Bug reports. QA nitpicks about a million things
you didn't notice. Product Developer's decide to change something major and
you re-write 20% of your code base. Some of your junior team mates can't
handle stress, so their output drops. The senior folks on the team get
agitated and are suddenly unaccessible to help you with anything because they
have their own shit to do.

Oh, and btw now that it's already in the field with customers bitching about
it, so everything needs to be done yesterday. You think about leaving
sometimes, but you can't afford to be out of a job for a month, and thinking
about studying for an interview yet again while working sounds even more
stressful (since you haven't really used big-O notation or graph algorithms in
your last 2.5 years as a web developer).

Not every job is going to be stressful, but the really good ones will. You'll
work with people smarter than you doing things a lot of people haven't done
before.

~~~
mareofnight
This is a good point. Though there do seem to be a few lower-stress workplaces
out there - Vanguard seems to be one of them, in terms of not having much
crunch time or overly-long hours. They're pretty sociable people, though, but
it might still be something to consider.

(I'm a former intern and not currently working there, and not a recruiter;
pretty sure their hiring managers don't read Hacker News.)

------
sdnguyen90
I think selling it would be more stressful than just keeping it running. Lots
of buyers flake and lots of things could go wrong.

Also, how much time do you really need to put into this project to keep it
running?

This is also a reason why I prefer working on PaaS's for solo projects.. For
the most part I can do other things and not put too much mental effort towards
it.

------
danielrhodes
Stress can really drive people to make bad decisions.

He should step back, take a breath of fresh air, and then get back to work.

------
arjie
Don't make a decision either way until you're less excited about this. Sit
back, take a deep breath, and then go through with it tomorrow after a good
night's sleep.

You know the rule: Don't make any decisions hungry, angry, or sleepy.

I wish you luck and happiness. Nice work.

------
nanofortnight
Suggestion:

Ignore it for a week, don't think about it.

I would hardly call that going viral, plus it's only been two days. You're too
optimistic, thinking too big.

If this is anything average you'll find that most of the traffic will die off
after a month.

------
korzun
TLDR: I received a single traffic spike for a game I just released and looking
to make a quick buck, take everything and make me an offer before traffic goes
away.

There are so many things wrong with that blog post.

------
pitchups
Kudos on your success!

This may be a bit off-topic but reading your post, was struck by the low cost
of your dedicated servers at OVH : $116 per month, for a server with "64GB ECC
RAM, Xeon E5 3.7 Ghz, 360 GB of SSD (at RAID 1) and 500 Mbit of networking."
seems like a really great deal - drastically cheaper than Rackspace or
Softlayer for similar configurations. How good / reliable is their customer
service and responsivemess in case you have a problem?

------
elwell
> There are about 60kLOC in PHP, and 2kLOC in Python. We do not use any
> framework. The PHP code was written completely from scratch. This give us
> some performance boost, however it might be a little more difficult to
> understand the code.

60kLOC in PHP from scratch. When I hear that, I just hear that it probably
will need to be rewritten. If the buyer isn't hiring you, then that's a pretty
hefty amount of code; unless it is written very well.

------
mrchess
If only it was as simple as using personal time and emotion invested as a
large part of the equation that determined a softwares value... we would all
be rich :)

------
adir1
Just set up something like GetSatisfaction and let community try to help
itself, while you rest and get your sanity back. Take as long as you need - a
week, or a month, whatever.

You are probably in the best position to fix/improve it going forward, so
selling it is not an option IMHO. Instead, look around campus for a partner-
dev. Even with just one partner developer, to bounce ideas and priorities off,
things will become clear for you long term.

Good Luck!

------
paul9290
This seems ridiculous, yet and maybe unintentionally smart too.

As it makes for a good story press outlets will probably pick up and write
about. It's semi-similar to the Flappy Bird's creator decision to remove it
from the app store and all the press that followed.

Though maybe it's creator just want to cash out on it quickly and go relax on
a beach with nice looking people (who doesn't?).

Good luck!

------
curt
Have you thought about placing it on third party gaming sites? Kongregate.com
is a great example (disclaimer I work there), they have a built in audience,
handle marketing, payments, customer support, etc so you can focus on
development. Solo game development, even in small teams, can be quite the
struggle and there are communities that are happy to help.

------
natch
This post feels like spam. I'd hate to see more of this kind of thing taking
over the HN front page.

------
adam74
I'm tired? I don't understand this. It's like climbing a mountain and then
closing your eyes. Of course you are tired from all the hard work, but now is
the fun part. Relax and enjoy the view. I guess the view for this developer is
selling the product.

------
alegrn
Here is some math:

The formular for the present value of a perpetuity is just

    
    
      present_value :=  cashflow / discount_rate
    

Given 750$ per month (9000$ per year) and a 3% annual discount rate, then an
infinite stream of 750$ monthly payments is worth today 300.000$.

~~~
empressplay
It's so totally not suspicious that an account that hasn't posted for over a
year all of a sudden pops up to make a post in support of the author?

~~~
alegrn
Nope, my post was just meant as some random fact. You can easily put a price
on an infinite stream of constant payments. I don't believe the project is
able to generate an infinite stream of 750$ payments. But if it could, that
would be roughly it's value.

By the way, for an investor it does not matter how much effort (1 year, 5
years, 100 years) the author did put into the project. For the present value
of the project only matters what monthly payements there will be. If someone
can forecast these payments, he can also put a price tag on the project.

So it might also be, that there is no more interest in the game in one or two
months ... then it would be roughly worth 0$ to 750$ (even if it took much
effort to implement it).

~~~
punee
You probably also want to revise your discount rate assumption.

~~~
alegrn
Sure. The given assumed discount rate of 3% was just meant as an example.

------
ethana
I too advice you not to sell it. Branding is a hard commodity to come by. Give
it a week or two before doing anything hasty.

The Flappy Bird guy ran into similar situation, but he kept it running.
Perhaps there are some lessons to take away from that.

~~~
nbevans
He didn't. He didn't even sell it. He freaked out big time and just removed it
from the app stores, never to be seen again.

~~~
photorized
He's back promoting a new game.

------
misulicus
Just sent you an email few minutes ago. Let me know what you think :)

------
NicoJuicy
Fyi, the wiki doesn't contain any content.. If you want to get someone else on
board. It wouldn't be a bad idea to fix this (depending on the amount of work
required)

------
wavesum
I think many commenters here have been watching too much shark tank. The old
ways of valuing a business based on past revenue work very badly for seed-
stage software startups.

------
tuananh
This is like the peak of your game right now. You can't take it into
calculation just yet. Let it cool off and see. If you get stressed from it,
just leave it for awhile.

------
nerdbeere
I'm not sure if I this is a sign that I should stop working on my realtime
multiplayer hacker game or if it means that there is a huge market for this
genre out there.

------
torbit
lol what? using medium to sale a product. I was expecting some great insight
on why, but it quickly turned into a pitch and then an action to sell.

------
volume
Are you open to different structures of the deal? Like:

* some upfront fee

* you remain onboard for X months

* each time period is a certain % of equity

* some monthly fee paid to you until X total

------
realrocker
Don't sell! Hire someone who will take salary as a profit cut. If I had any
money I would have totally bought it though.

------
Donzo
Flippa.com if you are serious about selling.

------
yazaddaruvala
Does the code have an automated a test suite? It would be really hard for
someone to take over for you without one.

------
andyidsinga
the Op might consider building some nice sales pitches to different types of
customers. for instance, someone in the movie industry might be able to use
his for a more realistic production asset!! please, for the love of mitnick,
we need better hacker production assets in entertainment!

------
hrrsn
Nice game. Looks to me like a modern slavehack. Keen to give it a try.

------
argntnspc
Hope all goes well.. I would be glad to help. Let me know.

------
sideproject
Want to put it up on Sideprojectors?
[http://sideprojectors.com](http://sideprojectors.com) \- I'm sure there will
be plenty of people who would be interested in your project!

------
nbevans
I lol'd when I saw "[the codebase use classes but in an unconventional way]"
followed by "[i can offer programming support]"

Down-votes accepted but let's face it this guy is extraordinarily naive.

------
tux3
Well, the site just went completely down apparently.

------
ForFreedom
Selling this game or an application when there is high traffic is not the way
to handle things. Invest about 2-3 hours daily to respond and resolve any
bugs.

------
minusSeven
meh this is very early days and so making and comments about the future of the
game is very stupid.

------
asdz
you sell your game. now I should quit

------
eridal
OT, but the correct term should be `cracker`

------
biomimic
Is this an episode of "Silicon Valley" in the works?

------
telltherello
This is a slavehack clone

------
telltherell
This is a clone of slavehack

------
telltherello
This is a clone of slavehack

