Ask HN: How much passive income do you generate, and from what? - franca
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trykondev
A few months ago I launched my first commercial video game, Omnicube. It's a
really hard puzzle game set on a talking cube in space.

After the initial launch sales bump, we've been earning about $400/month.

We launched the game on Steam, Windows Store, and itch.io.

I'd be happy to discuss any aspect of the project in more detail. Here are the
links to the store pages for anyone who is interested:

Steam:
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/800860/Omnicube/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/800860/Omnicube/)

Windows Store: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/store/p/omnicube/9njcwkrx4mm...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/store/p/omnicube/9njcwkrx4mmh)

Itch.io: [https://trykon.itch.io/omnicube](https://trykon.itch.io/omnicube)

~~~
eb0la
Great game :-) Reminds me Sokoban with an evil twist on it.

I guess it would do great on mobile; but I am not sure how easy to port would
it be since the screen area is quite big.

Just for curiosity, how many effort did you need to do the levels? I always
tought this kind of games were 20% coding, 80% model design. Am I right?

~~~
trykondev
Thank you! I appreciate the kind words :)

A lot of people have mentioned wanting to see the game on mobile, and I do
plan to port it later on this year. You are very much correct in assessing the
main issue, which is the fact that it's hard to fit a 14x14 grid (plus the
surrounding art) onto a small screen. We're considering things like zooming
the camera all the way in on the grid itself, and then re-arranging the
buttons to the top and bottom of the screen, or maybe giving the user a
control to zoom in and out, but we haven't committed to a solution quite yet.

As far as distribution of effort, I certainly thought the same when I started
the game -- I thought I'd just write the code for the mechanics in a few weeks
and then spend most of the time refining the puzzles and level balance. To be
honest, though, I found the exact opposite to be true -- I spent probably 3-4
weeks designing and perfecting the puzzles, but all the implementation of the
mechanics/UI tweaks/transitions took several months. This was probably partly
due to the visual style we decided on, though.

The project I'm working on now is much, much simpler visually. Since Omnicube
was our first commercial game, we felt a lot of pressure to make it "look like
a real game". My thinking now is more biased toward focusing on the content
quality and worrying less about what people will think about the professional-
ness of the visuals.

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ghosterrific
Own 2 triplexes.

Generating $500/month net positive cashflow after all expenses, mortgages and
get to live for free.

Can retire today and literally be a bum with a $500/month paycheck where the
buildings will pay themselves down and be worth over 1.5 million within 20
years.

Instead, I'm choosing to continue working and buy a larger farm/acreage to go
off grid and raise animals.

Other passive income:

\- small app subscription business making $250/month

\- dividend yielding stocks producing about $40/month

\- solar array equipment that produces $200/month

My net worth is only about $150k today.... but will steadily climb to about
1.5 Million within 20 years from doing basically nothing.

This is the difference between Rich vs. Wealth.

The Rich spend and have no systems in place to generate income (ie: they have
money)

The Wealthy do not have to work, and have systems in place to generate passive
income.

I like to think that I'm well on my way to being Wealthy as opposed to my
little 'w' wealthy today.

Ps.

\- I drive 10+ year old cars in entire life (never spend more than $4k on a
car)

\- Buy everything on sale, if not used

\- wear basic clothes

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mtmail
The question comes up regularly but rarely gets traction. And unless it's
specific to apps/websites/side-projects half the usual answers are stock
market, interest, real-estate.

See 3 months ago (90 comments)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16815842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16815842)

~~~
sfkjlkfagfj
I think most people here are expecting to see passive income from side
projects.

Unless you are withdrawing dividends and selling shares for income, it is not
passive income. Just good ole regular investing.

And I don't how anyone can consider real estate passive income. It is a
business with a lot of downtime but also some serious headaches. I have few
properties, most of my tenets are nice. But when you get one bad tenet, it
wipes all your goodwill towards any tenet. Then unexpected expenses wipe out
years of profit in an instant. Finally, you hope one day the building will be
paid off and you will live off rent checks, then you do some calculations and
realize that you would have made almost same rent check if you had just
invested your down payment in stock market.

~~~
stealthcat
Could depends on what country you live in

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olgamilevska
Referral or Partner Program is one of the options of the passive income. In
most cases, you get a share from a commision that a person you've referred a
product/service to has paid. One of the examples is
[https://www.crazycall.com/partners?source=news.ycombinator](https://www.crazycall.com/partners?source=news.ycombinator).
Your could also do blogging or create youtube videos.

------
marssaxman
None. I'm not rich. Is this a normal thing people expect to do now?

~~~
HiroshiSan
What does you being rich have to do with generating passive income?

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marssaxman
How else would you do it? Don't you need to own some asset from which you can
extract rent?

~~~
scott-smith_us
Royalties from a book or patent or software?

