[wnewman]

Well, even he probably has only an imprecise idea how many hundreds of hours he spent on it, but I'll speculate it's comparable to how many hours he'd spend getting a master's degree in CS (at night, while working full time during the day). I don't know how the job market works in his specialty in his country, but in some job markets in the US, I estimate that being able to list that game and its sales performance on a resume is worth rather more than a master's degree. So from that side effect alone, this sounds at least as good as him taking a generous fellowship to get an exceedingly good master's degree. It's not vast wealth in one fell swoop, but it doesn't seem like a failure. And if he wants never to send out another resume in his life, instead writing and selling his own software, it's harder to quantify the benefits of business and tech experience on a first app, but ramen profitability on one's first less-than-a-year-in-development app sounds OK to me. The title oversells the achievement (top 25 ... in some smaller countries) but your term "failure" undersells it even more.