Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: business

A longer perspective on the unity pricing fiasco

So everyone in the games industry by now is aware that unity, the company that makes a very popular game engine, announced a new pricing scheme, whereby as well as charging you monthly for everyone who you wanted to employ to use their software, they also felt that you should pay them every time anyone, anywhere installed any software that had been made using their engine.

LOL

There is a lot of online outrage, and justifiably so, and to be honest, there is not nearly enough outrage enough. My perspective on this is different, because I’ve never used unity (I tried once and despised it), and have nothing at stake here. Every game I have made has had its engine coded by me, and I pay nobody anything for the privilege. I thought it might be worth blogging my view, because I think its a different one to everybody else. I’ve been thinking it over, and reckon the best way to articulate my thoughts is a series of separate points

Point #1: You probably don’t even need a commercial engine

A lot of people who read this will be indie game developers like me. A lot of you probably make 2D games. 2D games are great, they sell well, they can be very commercially successful, and there is little to no stigma making a 2D game. Some of the most popular games you can buy are 2D. 3D games are harder to make, from an engine POV, but if you don’t want to pay for a commercial engine, then there is a lot of mileage in 2D gaming. I’ve had a 25 year indie gaming career doing entirely 2D games, sold millions of copies, made millions of dollars. Production Line was isometric, but still just a bunch of sprites. None of the games I have shipped needed a commercial engine. Prison architect was a smash hit without needing a commercial engine. If you are wondering how successful you can be before needing to license an engine, the answer is: Hugely fucking rich and successful.

Point #2: If you need an engine, lots of free ones exist

Unity costs money, but many other engines do not. A good friend of mine paid $80 for a simple 2D game making program and has shipped 10 games with it, and made a living doing so. He is not the only one. There are more game engines than would possibly fit in a normal blog post, and no shortage of reviews from developers to guide you in making a choice. Free engines also have the bonus of coming with source code, so if you don’t like something, you can just change it.

Point #3: Lock-in is always a nightmare for consumers. Why are you surprised?

Every time a company talks about walled gardens, what they mean is they want to screw their customers. Starbucks will blatantly open a dozen unprofitable coffee shops in one town to force every competitor out of business, then shut the excess ones down and milk that profitable local coffee monopoly. Its a known business strategy, and its evil as fuck. Apple HATE the idea of shipping a USB connector with their phone (a supra-national government had to force them to do it), because they want to keep their customers locked into their ‘ecosystem’. The same was true of itunes, which they deliberately made crash, and buggy and slow on anything that wasn’t apple hardware. Its all about the ‘ecosystem’. Let me help you recontextualize this. When someone in a suit (or a black turtleneck) talks about their ‘ecosystem’, they actually mean a different word: Prison.

The ideal for these predatory businesses is to make it impossible for you to leave. Governments always have to intervene to prevent big business acting this way. Unity was VERY keen to force you to be reliant on them for everything. You buy your art assets in the UNITY store. You use the UNITY engine and the UNITY editor, and sell ad space using the UNITY ad system. Steam is similar. Steamworks is not a charitable gift. They want you to lock your achievements, your stats, your community, your interactions with your players all within steam. This way you will never leave. You can’t, they have you. Unity owns all your tech, steam owns your community, youtube owns your video channel. What do you own? Your office chair maybe? Expect to see Herman Miller asking for a share of your game revenue soon.

The actual walled garden apple execs enjoy thanks to us.

Point #4: Engine coding isn’t that hard

I knew we were heading for an apocalypse the minute we started seeing job adverts for ‘Unity programmer’. Thats not a language, it a proprietary product by a single, private company. If you really want to be 100% dependent on the whims of a private company for your future employability, go work there! Do not pretend that you can ‘exist independently within the ecosystem’. Unity LOVED the idea that people would stop being AI programmers or C++ programmers. Unity programmers have no place else to go..

..but actually, when you look at game engines, especially 2D ones for indie games, they are really *not that hard*. Its not 1990 any more. We are not having to worry about makes of mouse or video card. Directx makes things very simple for you. Its just a few hundred lines of code, at most, to have access to the graphics card, to be able to load in textures, play sounds, and respond to user input. This stuff is super-well-documented and TONS of sample code exists. Reading user input is really, really easy. Creating a sprite, loading a texture from a folder, and drawing it onscreen is actually pretty simple stuff. Particle systems and multithreading are NOT simple, but also not rocket science. Do not underestimate how much FREE stuff there is out there explaining how it all works…

Point #5: Software subscriptions were the line we shouldn’t have crossed

I remember back when adobe started trying to get people to subscribe to photoshop, thinking that this must be an April fools joke, or the rambling of a delusional coke-fueled imbecile who staggered into the board room. The idea that SOFTWARE was something that had to be rented instead of purchased was a joke to me.

Heres the thing: Microsoft are actually pretty fucking good at their job. Windows 11 will still play a game I made in 1998, without errors, or compatibility screwups or grumbling. If there ARE any issues, there are tons of compatibility options to make it work. Why mention this? Because its evidence that its pretty clear that you can write software that just keeps working, and working and working.

Software subscriptions are a joke. This is a way to force you to continually pay, without limit, for a package of software that should have been an affordable on-time purchase. Photoshop is an image editor, its not doing protein folding. Microsoft word is a word processor, thats it. This is stuff that we, as a technological society, kinda worked out how to do 20 years ago. The overwhelming majority of ‘new features’ added to Microsoft office in the last TWENTY years are useless, and go completely ignored by everyone. Photoshop was done, finished. So was Excel, and Word. But they wanted to find a way to make you keep paying…

I have no problem with unity, or any game-development engine/IDE saying ‘Hey guys! We just finished a BRAND NEW version of our popular and much loved engine. If you want to upgrade from your current version to this one, its $500!’. Thats a perfectly viable, perfectly understandable business. But I guess if you are TERRIBLE at running your business, stupidly think you need 8,000 staff at unity, blow a bunch of money on an ad-monetization company, buy a movie SFX company, then suddenly realize you are losing money like crazy, then you have no choice but to try and squeeze more money from existing customers on a regular basis. Don’t expect Unity’s CEO to understand game dev BTW. He is a pure-management type with a background at pepsi and Hagen Daz ice-cream, A golf company and sara-lee, the donuts people. He neither gives a fuck about, or understands the games industry.

Final point #6: Unity’s dysfunctional management and terrible business is their problem not yours.

Its pretty clear that the top management at unity do not code, do not make games, never have, never will, don’t care, and here is the very worst bit: are absolutely fucking clueless at running a business. Its laughable. My company is way, way more profitable than unity, and I manage that with just me. The important point is: THIS IS THEIR FAULT. Its not yours. People saying ‘to be fair, unity do lose money’ are implying that somehow game devs made them lose money. Nope. Game devs have been paying these people through-the-nose for years for an engine that is so bad that even unity could not make a game with it.

I really, really hope that this is a turning point and people tell unity to get stuffed. This is a company that cannot be trusted, should not be relied on, that you should not deal with. Now I know that they have ‘tech we wont explain’ to ‘track installs’ which no doubt phones home to unity, I am not even going to have any unity games installed on any hardware I own. This is a casino and F2P ad-tech company LARPing as a game dev tech firm. I do not trust them one bit. Asking for a subscription fee should have had them laughed out of the industry. This latest madness is just proof they will never change, only get way, way worse.

Using Democracy 4 to teach politics and economics

I’ve been selling educational site licenses for the Democracy series of games pretty much since I started making them, after people who taught politics started to contact me. I’ve always been very proud of the fact that a long list of educational establishments around the world have been using the game to teach so many people. It feels like a sort of vindication of the game’s design that teaching professionals think its accurate and reliable enough, that they will use it in education.

I have to admit, that I don’t really put that much effort into promoting the game as an educational tool. I have made a few attempts to do so in the past, but I found it quite frustrating to make any progress. It reminds me a lot of the sort of bureaucracy that I have experienced in trying to build a solar farm. The amount of paperwork, accreditation, form-filling and documentation required to sell educational software is enough to put me off.

Its ironic that teaching establishments, which should ideally be very future-focused (after all, you are teaching people at the start of what could be very long lives), are in fact incredibly slow when it comes to adopting new things. The minute you add a ton of bureaucracy or process to a system, you make adopting new technology or ideas more trouble than it is worth, especially if there is no pressure on the people responsible to update their teaching methods.

When I studied at the London School of Economics, it was a very dry, and very boring process. The cutting edge technology at the time was for students to place their own mini tape recorders or dictaphones at the foot of a stage where an extremely bored tenured professor would drone on about IS/LM curves until we all fell asleep. Lectures were not put online, for the very simple reason that there was no online yet.

I find economics, and Politics to be fascinating topics, but the way they were taught in the early 1990s was far from exciting or interesting. The topics were presented mostly as maths, and mostly as equations drawn literally in chalk on a board. There was no excitement, no attempt to make the subject matter appealling, interesting or memorable.

This is something that modern teachers like Scott Galloway are doing a lot to change. Its perfectly possible to make subjects exciting, interesting, even hilarious. I would LOVE to trade in my education back then, for learning science and business from scott galloway’s youtube videos, or veritasium and similar science channels. Youtube is the new lecture theater, and its way, way better.

Democracy 4 takes all this a stage further, because not only does the game present the topics of politics and economics in a much more accessible way than a textbook, its interactive. Its one thing to read a dry textbook description of hyperinflation, or sovereign debt crisis throughout history, but its another thing (and I suspect far more memorable), to experience them as disastrous events in a computer game you are playing, as they upset and derail all your plans for your country!

In general, its far better to learn things in a multi-sensory and personal way, than to have facts book-splained to you in a dry and academic environment. Interactive learning is orders-of-magnitude better than just expecting people to read dry descriptions and memorize theories and principles purely because they might come up in an exam, and that might have some impact on some future job interview that you might reluctantly apply for…

I didn’t set out to make edutainment, and I would definitely not describe Democracy 4 as an educational game. Its a game about a topic that is often taught in schools, and its as accurate as I can make it, while still being fun. I absolutely believe that this is the best way to about creating software that can be used in schools. Make something interesting and entertaining and fun, and then also make it accurate where it matters, and that way students will WANT to engage with it, and will take a real interest.

One of the most boring topics in economics is interest rates. What makes it worse is that a HUGE swathe of macroeconomic theory is about interest rates. I studied it for year and still found it boring. However, when you wrap the topic up in a video game where government debt interest becomes a variable that the player has to keep an eye on, in order to ‘win’, the topic suddenly becomes much more interesting.

I suspect we are heading towards a future where physics lessons are more like playing kerbal space program, where art classes are like using VR sculpting tools, where astronomy is taught using universe sandbox and where yes, economics is taught with Democracy 4. The only barriers to making education like this, is getting past the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome that has historically kept ‘games’ out of schools. Both teachers and parents still seem resistant to the idea that games can teach, and probably fear looking like they are slacking their ‘serious’ responsibilities by introducing something marketed as a game into a classroom.

I suspect I do not have the time, or the patience to work my way around the school-boards and educational departments all over the world to persuade them to buy Democracy 4 site licenses, although I would love it to be more widespread. If you are a teacher, or work in education in any capacity, I urge you to give it some thought. Ideally I’d do some deal with a country’s department of education to make it usable in every school, but my mind just recoils in horror at the number of meetings that would require :D.

Democracy 4 DLC now available to add to wishlist!

All the cool kids these days are trying to get people to add their upcoming games to their wishlist. Its literally the coolest game in town. You wouldn’t want to not be cool right?

In all seriousness, the reason indie devs do all that is because its widely believed that steams algorithm internally keeps track of what new games are ‘hot’ by how many people are following them or adding them to their wishlists, and this helps to determine how much visibility those games get at launch. I suspect the effect is much reduced with DLC because it sells to a smaller audience anyway, and perhaps steam prioritizes new IP over expansions and DLC anyway. We have no way of knowing.

But you DO get notified by steam when a pre-release game you wishlist has been released, so if nothing else, its just a handy reminder to people that they were interested in X a while back, and its out now…

So here is the store page for the new expansion so you can do this right now:

This DLC has actually been really hard to make, and in many ways was tons harder than doing the voting systems expansion. I can imagine many people might think it is the other way around, given that the voting systems DLC added some new core functionality to the base game whereas this expansion ‘is just a few new countries’. There are two reasons why this was not the case…

Firstly its SIX new countries, which was a bit silly of me. It should have been 4 max. I had totally blanked out that part of my memory where we did all the research and balancing for all the countries in the base game, and also forgotten that many of the base game countries had been modelled before, so we already had a lot of the data. Secondly, I massively forgot how much research is needed to do a proper job of just ONE country. The game has all of its usual policies, plus a bunch of new ones, plus all the content that used to be in 3 expansion packs for D3, plus some new stuff that is specific to the previous expansion pack on voting systems.

Because no economic/political model can EVER really model the reality of a single country in all possible states, let alone model 10, and certainly not 16, there are bound to be a bunch of weird anomalies and inaccuracies in any new countries that get added to the game. Perhaps its REALLY easy if you play Poland as a super-religious libertarian who loves carbon taxes? Maybe Greece is unwinnable for people who want to play Environmentalist-Capitalists if you start with a global economic boom? The problem is…there are too many permutations to test.

I did actually code some AI that plays the game automatically, but the trouble is in extracting any useful data from it. The game does a lot of processing, and even if I get each turn down to under a second (I can get it below 2 seconds already, and thats without multithreading), that means a 5 year term with 5 terms is around 2 minutes of AI-modelling. This might sound quick, but if I can only do 30 playthroughs an hour (720 a day) then thats nowhere close to the number of playthroughs needed to accurately build up a statistical model of imbalance…

I’m not saying that I will not revisit that experiment later…just that the sheer number of combinations of decision in the game mean you really need several million games to be played and analyzed to detect any issues. In other words several years of dedicated processing…

Anyway… I do have a bunch of time set aside between now and release which is basically just me playing each country a LOT, and tweaking all the numbers so they are playable. Democracy 4 is more of a sandbox than a conventional game, so I’m not aiming to get every permutation perfectly balanced anyway. Thats an impossible dream. I do have to ensure nothing crashes or goes super weird in a normal playthrough on each of these six countries though…

That brings me to the price. I’ve set it at $9.99. I did a lot of agonizing about this, and talked to some fellow devs a lot about pricing. Both urged me to price it higher than this. One urged me to double that. Its a really difficult thing to get right, and a decision that I find really interesting.

We all know that the marginal cost of each copy is zero, so in a way, it doesn’t matter if I charge $0.01 or $100, its just a matter of picking the number that maximizes total revenue. This depends a lot on who I think the target market is, what they can afford, and how much value I think the DLC represents… All very difficult things to be exact on. Eventually I figured that given that the base game is $26.99 and has 10 countries….6 countries for $9.99 is a good deal. Its also worth considering that anybody even considering buying some DLC clearly already likes the base game, and has played it enough that they want some extra content. That implies that their play hours are high enough that their cost-per-hour for Democracy 4 is low, and thus are willing to consider any new content favorably with regards to expected play time.

I see this a lot in my daily multiplayer Battlefield V games with friends. I am a serious Battlefield V addict. I have over 1,200 hours in BFV and thousand more in the earlier games. My cost per hour for BFV is about £0.05. Thats insane for something I enjoy that much. Its like going to see a new Hollywood movie and paying £0.15 for it. Madness.

The irony is, that as your perceived playtime cost per hour falls, the value proposition of new content shoots up. If they added one new map to Battlefield V, thats maybe a 5% playtime bonus for me, or 60 hours of entertainment. Even if I will only pay £0.50 an hour, that map should be a good deal to me for £30. A 3-map pack should be £99.

Obviously not all Battlefield players are so obsessed, but with DLC *you are selling to the hardcore*, so the value proposition is way better than it seems to the casual player. This is why it makes sense in F2P games to have some really expensive stuff. There are definitely people who will not only buy a lot of it, but they will consider it a good deal. Thats assuming you aren’t tricking/exploiting people with dark patterns and other horrible business practices obviously…

So…Yup, this DLC will be $9.99 and I think its actually a pretty good deal for people who have played at least all of the maps in the base game once. Its also probably an attractive proposition for anybody who is actually living in one of those six new countries (Ireland, Poland, Switzerland, Turkey, Brazil and Greece). I guess I’ll find out if people agree with me on that in about a months time :D

Officially announcing the next Democracy 4 expansion

In the old days, I used to send press releases to news websites etc…and maybe I’ll still do that once I’m testing this and have some screenshots to show. Not that screenshots of Democracy 4 are exactly a visual feast that makes people’s jaws drop as they gasp at the photorealism…but there ya go.

There is to be another expansion pack for my latest game Democracy 4. It will be a straight data-only expansion, which will add six new countries to the game. Those countries are:

  • Greece
  • Ireland
  • Poland
  • Turkey
  • Switzerland
  • Brazil

I think this represents a pretty good mixture. Greece and Ireland are fairly similar to some of the other countries in the game, but we have a fair bunch of players in those countries and people like to play their home country. Plus Ireland is a bit interesting because it is basically an economic disaster due to geography, which is able to work mostly because it has ludicrously good rates for companies to base their HQ there for tax purposes. Its basically the largest respectable country that serves as a tax haven.

Brazil is obviously interesting because of its size, and its rainforest, and its status as a relatively poor country with relation to the existing game countries. Switzerland has its own unique properties, such as being super mountainous, fanatically neutral in diplomatic terms, and its hyper-democratized system of voting. Its also famous for nuclear shelters everywhere and a high level of gun ownership, but low gun crime.

Turkey is a fascinating country, as it sits between two continents and has influences from both. There are obviously some unusual positions regarding democracy and religion there, that are not really explored in the existing countries.

Poland is also interesting, sitting between western Europe and Russia, one of the last green countries in terms of energy use, and a country very nervous (with good reason) about its borders.

Its going to be hard to really capture the flavor of all these different countries, and I expect at least one major post-release revision as I collate feedback from players. It should be interesting though, and hopefully widen the appeal of the game a bit.

I don’t have a final release date yet, or pricing, but here is the status of the current todo list:

  • Initial statistics for each country 100% DONE
  • Country descriptions 100% DONE
  • Map icon and flag icons 100% DONE
  • Initial policy positions: 55% DONE
  • Extra dilemmas TODO
  • Extra Events TODO
  • Extra Situations TODO
  • Country specific simulation overrides TODO
  • Translation of all text into all languages TODO
  • Testing TODO

…so still lots to do…

In unrelated news, I got covid, and omg it was horrible. I basically suffered badly for a week, but am feeling much better. I have also been avoiding social media, which I increasingly view as a mistake, a dumpster fire which anybody who values their sanity should run screaming from. I might use it in future only as a way of linking to my blog.

In even less related news, I finally moved positech’s entire online presence away from a dedicated physical server (a hangover from days long gone when I had a lot of direct traffic, and hosted forums on the server, as well as a site dedicated to indiegames), and to a simple VPS. Like any hosting company, I was recommended a server package that was stupidly overspecced for my needs, but politely declined that. As a result I managed to cut my hosting bill by more than 50% which is very welcome.

There is still the ongoing saga of the solar farm BTW. Its not abandoned, we are still hoping to get it done, but its going to be at least another 3 months of bureaucracy (don’t get me started on this…) plus a likely extra year of waiting for a grid connection even if we get it. If there is ever anything to report, I’ll blog about it…

What income can you get from your old indie PC games?

There are a whole lot of different strategies for running a pc games business. I know people trying a bunch of different strategies and here are a few:

  • Publisher-funding model. Get publishing deals, and charge enough for the development milestones that you make a profit regardless of whether the final game makes a profit or not.
  • Patron model. Using patreon, or kickstarter or other methods, build up a loyal fanbase that pays you money to make games, regardless of whether they play them, or buy them in any quantity.
  • Straight sales model. Self-fund games, release them to the world as self published titles and hope the royalties exceed the development costs on a continual basis.
  • The big hit model. Go all-in, on a big title you bet your entire financial resources on, including remortgaging house/car etc. Assume that scale brings its own bonuses, and that the huge payoff outweighs the risk.
  • The continual release model. Release multiple games each year, maybe one a month, hoping that over time, the long tail builds up a relatively stable income.
  • The searching-for-a-hit model. Similar to continual release, but in this case the aim is to hope to strike it big with a sudden hit. Always be poised to drop everything and ramp up any game that gains initial traction.

Unless you didn’t already know, my method is the straight sale model. I’m pretty conventional in that I think the model where you just make the best games you feel comfortable with, from a risk POV, and aim to have them sell enough to result in a profit… is the most ‘normal’ and sensible way to do things. This plays to my strengths, because I’m not scared of risk, but not nuts, and also not a people-person as you need to be with patreons etc, and as a self-code-engine guy, I’m not churning out quick asset flips hoping for a hit.

However…

Because of the sheer bloody-minded determination to stick around, it turns out I have been making commercial aimed games since 1997, and therefore I have ended up with a big bunch of older titles that still run on most PCs, and can still generate revenue. have I perhaps become the ‘long-tail-indie’ just out of sheer hanging around? Could it be that actually positech games is self-sustaining on the basis of really old games, that although they do not sell much each, combined they add up to a tidy sum?

I’ll be honest, I have no idea how much those older games make without digging into the data, but I thought either way it might be interesting, so here goes.

Kudos 2 (2008)

This was the first game I made that made proper ‘omgz’ money. I got a cheqck one month for $20,000 and it was on the basis of that game, selling on about 15 different casual games portals. This was amazing. It was however, a long time ago now… 2008 apparently. This was certainly not my first game, mobygames catalogs a bunch of earlier ones, but it was the first one to make enough money that its worth even looking at the numbers.

Kudos 2 is unusual in that its not on steam. I also actually made it free on itch last year, but people tend to follow old buy links, and I still sell copies through BMT micro. Lets look at the last 365 days income from Kudos 2 for BMTMicro:

269 copies for a total of $1,463.69

Not bad, but this is pretty much the only income for the game. I accept donations on itch for it, and earned another $49

Gratuitous Space Battles (2009)

I always think of this as the game that was released on steam the day I moved house. That was a stressful day. Anyway… its old now (2009), and its on steam, and sold through BMT Micro, and also sold through apple on various devices. Lets check the last 365 days data:

Steam net income: ~$8,700 Apple sales: $0 BMT sales: ~$120

I actually forgot that apple sales were zero now because apple decided anybody who wanted to play 32bit games on devices they bought and paid for could go fuck themselves and revoked that ability, so there you go. Just one of many reasons I despise the company. But anyway… its about nine thousand dollars in the last year. Which for a game released 13 years ago is… pretty amazing?

Gratuitous Tank Battles (2011)

This is a game I often consider a flop, but its not really because it made a decent return at the time. However, its a game I have kind of forgotten about, after I made a single expansion pack. Its now 11 years old, so how is it doing?

Steam net income ~$550 BMT sales: ~$14

Whoah what the hell? Are those number correct? Yes they are! pretty bad. But why? I think its because the total peak sales of Gratuitous Tank Battles never managed to hit a real escape velocity. When it comes to long-tails for games, I get the impression that there are basically two scenarios:

The ‘Meh’ game.

This sort of game sells some copies, and maybe makes a profit, but it never really ‘takes off’. You don’t see dozens of youtubers covering it, there are not more reviews on websites than you can count. The community for the game never really gets going. Its not a watercooler discussion topic. People see its released…some buy it. And then its over. Gone. Done. The end.

The ‘Hit’ Game.

This doesn’t have to be Minecraft. It can just be a game that hit a certain threshold. I don’t know what that threshold is, but my best guess is $1-1.5million gross sales on steam. Once you hit that sort of level, you have a ‘community’. There are people posting online about the game every day. People who ask questions get community answers. People make mods, and the game thus expands. There is justification for DLC, which leads to more news, more coverage and more players, and you get a flywheel effect.

GSB and Kudos 2 hit the ‘hit game’ level. Kudos 2 is now so old its become irrelevant, but amazingly GSB still sells a non trivial number of units each year, and makes comfortably more than beer or coffee money.

Conclusion?

I think a lot of developers get frustrated that they are constantly in a grind, always having to desperately work on a new game to hopefully release it in time to survive the drop in royalties from the last one. Residual income from old games is almost zero, so you are constantly working away like a developer on a production line, never getting to relax.

I suspect many of these developers are at 90% between ‘meh’ and hit, but the problem is, being 90% of the way is not enough. Its pushing really hard on that flywheel, and feeling absolutely despondent, because you simply cannot see that point in the future where the momentum takes over. Its very, very easy to think things will never change, and that extra effort on a ‘failed’ game is simply not worth it. I totally understand why people do not push things that extra mile, when it feels like you have been pushing for the last 99 miles and got nowhere.

FWIW I think this applies to almost all endeavors, but especially creative ones that require popularity. I used to be in struggling heavy rock bands, and the constant putting up of posters and handing out of flyers for gigs, in the seemingly futile, pointless effort to get a few people to show up is soul-crushing and demotivating.

But in a sense, that explains why so many fail. Only dumb optimism or sheer bloodyminded obsession with success can possibly explain why some people still go out every single night and stick up those posters or give out those flyers, or keep tweeting and blogging about their video game. It always looks hopeless, totally and utterly futile, and impossible odds, and never gets you anywhere…until it does.