PERSONAL

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Languishing in Poverty

5 years ago3,092 words

I have neither fame nor fortune, and I'm worried for the future.

I know this keeps happening, but I've had yet another period of darkly wallowing in worries about the future - and despair at the present - rather than actually getting things done. These thoughts have been swirling around distractingly for days, so here's another vent to get them out. That's why I keep a personal blog, etc, etc.

I did a whole lot on Belief in about a week, and I really loved that! I felt so alive when making it, and I was so excited to show it off at the end. But I suppose that enthusiasm was killed by the meagre response, and I've not really touched it since then. Not because I don't like it or want to give up - I do like it and I want to continue with it - but it's more of a depressive slump, just sapped of motivation to do anything. As I'm writing this, the blog post about the Belief demo has just over 400 views, and the video itself has under 300 views.

The majority of the feedback was positive, and that's at least somewhat encouraging, but I feel concerned about numbers. It's not because I want to be super popular - I couldn't cope with that - but because I feel like my life's stuck on hold until I can actually make a decent amount of money. And for that, I'd need a certain number of sales.

I always used to assume that because things were on sale, then they were being sold in substantial enough numbers for whoever was making them to get by. I see now that's naive; a lot of things that exist to be bought probably aren't, at least not in significant numbers.

How well Sindrel Song will do on Steam remains to be seen, but I'm not expecting miracles. On Kartridge, it has a grand total of 22 sales, a profit of around $200 for me. Wow. Amazing. Totally worth the months of effort. I know (now) that Kartridge is small and Steam's a different animal entirely, but I wonder if the figure on there will be much higher. I've been told it's oversaturated, I'm self-publishing, and I don't know what hope I have of rallying interest, especially since I feel so insecure about it, like I shouldn't inflict something 'weird' on people, which they'll hate and criticise and find political issues with, and should instead just let it fail.

Here are some statistics. This is a graph of the number of views on posts on this blog. The horizontal lines mark increments of 500, and obviously it's graphed over time and divided by year.



Obviously it's fizzling out over time, not growing at all. It's very spiky, though; some posts do a lot better than others. That's to be expected. Most of the spikes are posts that have been pinned a while, and the ones with the most views are related to my old games. (There's also a weird anomaly at the start on a completely unremarkable post; I've always assumed someone linked to it somewhere for people to mock me or something. Or maybe it was a bug. The other highest spike is ∞ a short post about nostalgia with a MARDEK screenshot as the preview image ∞. Even that has an amount of views that'd be embarrassing on a YouTube video.)

I think the more I'm posting, the fewer views each post is getting. It's overwhelming to people, I suppose, especially since the posts themselves are long. Though I also suspect that people are just moving on, especially if they took an interest in this thing due to lingering fondness for MARDEK, and see that I'm working on new and different things instead. I can only speculate.

Perhaps personal sites and blogs and things just aren't ever going to get much attention though, when most of what people see comes to them through social media feeds?

While I'm looking at graphs about my site(s), here's another, this time relating to income from the Google AdSense adverts, which is the only way my sites earn anything:



As you can see, there was a period where I was making more than a few pennies from my sites. But never all that much, relative to what you'd earn from an actual job. Still, it's been my primary form of passive income for a while, as the money came in without me actually having to do anything. It's only been around £24000 in total for a decade of internet presence (still more than I've ever earned from games development), but having over £300 just appear in my bank account each month was nice while it lasted, and gave me a vague sense of security beyond having absolutely nothing to fall back on.

Most of that money came, oddly, from ∞ this site I made about the Four Temperaments ∞ forever ago. That was the first personality type system I got into, and while I know now it's nonsense, I suppose it's an obscure topic some people have been curious enough about to search for, and there aren't exactly a ton of competing sites about it so mine came up on the first page of results.

The decline could have been for a bunch of reasons. I drastically changed the layout, and how adverts work on the site, thinking they might help, but they probably had the opposite effect. Or maybe algorithmic whims relegated my site to a lower rank for a bunch of obscure reasons. I don't know. It's not something I actively maintained or tried to maximise SEO or whatever with.

I've been wondering though, due to the ""success"" of that, whether to make another site about the Big Five traits, which are more scientific and which I'd enjoy researching and writing about just as a hobby for my own benefit. Maybe I'll do that at some point. There's probably more competition because of the validity of the concept, though. (I've been thinking about this for ages, so maybe I've mentioned the idea before.)

Apparently making 'niche sites' is something you can do to make a fairly impressive amount of money, if you do it with enough sense and devotion. I've seen posts by people who maintain hundreds of websites dedicated to topics so obscure they'll have next to no competition, and they bring in many thousands of dollars per month. But I've also seen posts by those people where an issue on one of those sites gets their AdSense account shut down, cutting off revenue for them all. And it seems like they spend all their time researching these niche topics, and it takes years for any of them to show any results. Still, it's something I've thought about trying if the games thing doesn't work out.

Though perhaps the internet will change dramatically in the next decade or two, who knows. Anything in tech seems built on sand.



I've seen a few things recently that seem relevant to the DESPAIR I've been having about my trajectory. The creative path is fraught with failure, and success isn't at all guaranteed. Unlike with 'honest work' jobs where you have work to do, do it, and get paid at the end, reliably, if you look into creators' stories, you typically find long bouts of going without, with maybe some sparks of success that don't necessarily repeat.

Undertale was a hit. What of Toby Fox's projects beyond that? I've heard about one called Deltarune, but was that successful? Not enough to be seen without looking, or at least it seems to me. I suspect a part of Undertale's success was his involvement in the Homestuck community, because that was a phenomenon. But what's Andrew Hussie doing these days? I know I could look him up, but the fact that I'd have to means whatever it is, it's hardly on the same level.

I wonder often whether MARDEK was my one hit. I hope not.

If you work a 'normal' job and get promoted enough, your income and respect will grow fairly gradually, up and up until you retire at the end (though I know this is a very naive interpretation). But this seems more like rising and subsequently falling, nothing really sticking. Maybe the troughs following peaks aren't quite as deep as before, but I suppose we have to hope those peaks are profitable enough to endure what comes after. You see this with bands and actors and everything as well. Tastes change more quickly than careers last.

I've talked about the website Cracked in the past. I've still got it bookmarked, and I check it occasionally, but I get the impression that it's dying, or even undead. It's sad. Or maybe I'm wrong, projecting? I mention it because I saw this thing on there the other day: ∞ Celebrity Vanity Projects That Gloriously Imploded ∞. It's interesting that even big name stars with an enormous amount of clout can be met with failure by pursuing personal passions that don't exactly speak to a wider audience. Though it's also interesting that what counts as a 'flop' in that domain is making only a few million dollars. I'd be over the moon to make that kind of money! But I'm only one person, not an enormous team who all need paying.

One of the things on that list that particularly piqued my interest was a surprisingly recent (2015) animated film by George Lucas called "Strange Magic", which I'd never heard of. Apparently it was received badly, and earned little, despite him working on and off on it for 15 years and hoping it'd be a "Star Wars for girls". Must have been crushing on a personal level (but I suppose he's had to endure much worse).

I also saw a couple of videos about creators of well-regarded newspaper comics. ∞ One was about the creator of Calvin and Hobbes ∞, who deliberately ended the comic after ten years before it had a chance to grow stale, vehemently resisted any merchandising offers (to his enormous financial detriment), and seems to have faded into obscurity since then. By contrast, ∞ Jim Davis, creator of Garfield ∞, deliberately made his cat comic to be bland, repetitive, and vaguely, inoffensively relatable, and focused greatly on marketing and merchandising, as such now probably has a net worth of almost a billion dollars (and the franchise is still going). What's notable to me about how they were described in those videos is how they had several comic series that just didn't take off, but which they stuck with for sometimes years regardless, before they finally struck gold with the next idea in the chain. We don't know either of them for multiple projects. Just the one.

And so much of it is about presenting the right idea at the right time. There's no chance Garfield would become anything if released new today. MARDEK made enough of an impact for me to feel like I was at least slightly notable, but could that happen with anything I quietly throw onto the heaving Steam junkpile?

I don't know... I know I should be just sticking with it, working on things, until something does stick, but I suppose these dark periods are just unavoidable when there's so much uncertainty in the process, no security at all.

Another thing that came up on my radar (again) recently was the art of Rob Liefeld. You might have seen it before, even if you've never read comics; ∞ I think this article might have made the rounds, at least in certain circles ∞.



I'm not sure if it's obvious to a non-artist, but his art is not good. Very remarkably - in some cases horrifyingly - not good. And yet despite that, he became an enormous success and influence and made a ton of money from his drawings. I saw a video with artists talking about other artists' success, and they talked about him with both mocking frustration and palpable jealousy. Feelings of injustice, I suppose. "Why is it that I pour my heart into getting good at what I do, but someone like that - who clearly doesn't even care about a lot of fairly fundamental things - succeeds and I don't??"

I suppose the world's full of things like that. They mentioned that 90% of successful artists got to where they are not (just) because of skill, but because of hard-headed persistence, even denial of their faults and inflated boasting about their value. They slammed their heads into the same wall so many times that it finally broke down. Perhaps that's just how it works in this field. Or the world in general?

Though of course how you present yourself and who you know are everything, and I err on the side of self-deprecation and social avoidance, which isn't the way to succeed...



I've been wondering what kind of money actual real people earn. I have a vague idea, but nothing solid since obviously I don't live that life. And I feel I've talked about it on this blog before, but I can't remember (maybe I do have memory issues?). I've seen Americans online bemoaning their to-them-unimpressive $50k/year incomes, which seems bizarre since my parents don't seem to earn anything like that (currency adjusted, obviously).

Googling it, most of the figures for what constitutes poverty are relative; 60% of the median income counts as poverty. One thing mentions a threshold of "£195 a week for a lone parent with two children". I don't know if that's the median, or the poverty line. What's that, £780 a month, £9360 a year? I'm assuming that's the poverty line then.

I've been told I need to earn 'at least £1000 a month' to secure at least a meagre living, so I've been hoping or aiming for that. £12,000, or $15,551. Let's say I get to the point where I can make between 1 and 2 games per year, and I sold them for $10(US) each. I only get 70% of the income on Steam (I think?), so let's make that $7 per game. I'd need to make over 2222 sales on a single game to get £12,000 for it. And that's not even accounting for extra things like taxes...

Hmm.

That's not an enormous amount relative to some of the huge numbers we see online, but considering how little attention I get currently, it's daunting. Even if every regular reader of this blog bought it twice, it wouldn't get me over the poverty line.

I'm not interested in living in luxury or anything... I don't need more than the bare minimum, really. I'm content to live in a little single room studio without much in the way of possessions. But even that's out of my reach at the moment.

I know I need to get better at getting out there and promoting myself... Perhaps next year's big challenge will be to reinvent myself enough to get to that point. That feels more daunting than anything, though.



I've been thinking for a while about Patreon, and I do technically have an account on there and some supporters, though honestly I avoid even thinking about it so I don't even know what's going on with it. So many negative feelings surrounding it. On the one hand, not feeling like I deserve anyone's money, so I don't want to push it in anyone's faces, but on the other hand I'm terrified of the poverty so I accept what donations have come in. So conflicted.

I feel I need to have something up and running before I dare ask for supporters on that more publicly...



I'm almost ready to release Sindrel Song on Steam; I just need to wait a bit longer for approval of my store page, then I should, I think, be able to link to that and people can add it to wishlists and stuff. That should be sometime this week. Then there's a necessary two-week period before release. I'm aiming for the 6th still, as I think I said before.

I suppose I need to work on Belief. I've got the mechanics down and have a vague idea of the story in terms of big events, but I need to plan it out more specifically. Specific areas, characters, conversations, things like that, which is harder to do, and more time-consuming than coming up with the big picture.



I haven't bought a PS4 or any new games since the recent post about that, by the way. I made a list of things, at least. I've also been playing Pokemon Sword since it came out, but my favourite thing about the Pokemon games - and this has been true since generation II came out - is blocking out all information about them so then I can discover it myself in the game world. My favourite moments are encountering a strange new Pokemon (and so many of them are fascinatingly strange!) I've never seen before, or grinding for hours to discover what an evolution looks like through my own efforts. Some people play differently and learn all they can before they begin, so everything's familiar to them and they know what to expect ("I'll choose this starter because its final form has the best movepool!"), but I wouldn't enjoy that at all myself. I'll probably talk about it once I'm done, but for now I'll be keeping that to myself (and don't want to hear anything about it either!).

I know I repeat myself, and there are probably a lot of inaccuracies here. These are the thoughts that have been going around my head for days though. I suppose they'll continue to do so until I actually start making money, if that day ever even comes...

For now, writing this out does seem to have redirected my train of thought a bit. I feel that 2019 was a year in which I recovered from brain surgery, and made a single game. Figured out how to do that. In 2020, I should aim to break out of this rut I'm in in whatever way I can. I'll have that in mind in the weeks leading up until new year, planning something I can act on when the calendar changes...