alt Hacker NewsGood post. I'd argue this is very similar to solo game development. There's a lot of extra administrative stuff that simply has nothing to do with actually making games and a lot more to do with making a real business. So the framing there is accurate.
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this resonates a lot. i'm building an indie mobile game right now and the ratio of "actual game dev" to "everything else" is probably 30/70 at this point. marketing, aso, community management, influencer outreach, accounting, support.
the bit about testing what sells vs what you love is real too. we ended up testing three completely different positioning angles simultaneously with different audience segments, just to figure out which one actually sticks. feels less like art and more like running experiments, but honestly that's what keeps you from burning cash on the wrong audience for months.
the Beatles analogy in the post is interesting but i think the better framing for indie creators is: you need a tight feedback loop. not "make 600 things and hope 50 land," more like "ship, measure retention at day 7, iterate." the constraint of small budgets actually forces better product thinking imo.
One difference is that video games often take a lot more investment - at least a full-size, not-a-game-jam one. That is, the risk and upfront investment can be a lot higher. But then I'm sure that with artists it's also years of slowly building up skills, reputation, contacts, etc - the author himself seems to imply he basically got lucky with the honey bear, and I feel it's the same with e.g. video games. Quality wise a lot of games are fine, but despite the hours / years invested they may never be successful. This is an issue in high-budget games too, with several high profile failures in recent years even though they did everything right. On paper.