[forrestthewoods]

It's not that you should get rich from such an investment. It's that basically no one is getting rich from the Mac App Store. The desktop app store is a failure in many respects. It did not take off the same way mobile app stores have.

As for Monument Valley, that's a pretty poor example. They invested 1.5m and made 5.8m. For a core team of 8 people it's not fuck you money. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/527b69fbe4b0febeee4fc...

They didn't even make 10x their investment. There is a strong argument to made that a 10x project is the minimum you need just to have a sustainable company. Sustainable! That's a long, long way from rich. http://www.lostgarden.com/2015/04/minimum-sustainable-succes...

[emsy]

I've read the second article and I think you should take it with a grain of salt. I don't want to elaborate much but I think it's targeted at the "quantity developers" which pump out low to mid quality games, hoping for a hit. On the other end of the spectrum you have quality developers like ustwo who don't need to finance 9 unsucessful games. Of course in reality it's much more complex than that but I don't think that "you need to make 10x your investment" is a hard rule to measure success.

[forrestthewoods]

The designer who wrote that article is behind the wildly popular Triple Town. It speaks to the reality of development for small development teams.

[emsy]

That doesn't contradict my point that ustwo might not need to make ten times more money than they spent developing the game to run the company (and to be considered succesful).

[forrestthewoods]

I was specifically referring to the statement "and it DID make them rich". That statement I think is provably false. Depending on how one defines rich of course.

There are many ways to define success. ustwo is a 300+ person design company. Their mobile games could lose money but still be considered a success.