From Hobby to Business: Embracing the Business Side of Game Development
summary
A browser game called Horse Reality grows from a solo hobby project into a running business: a realistic horse-breeding simulator with a genetic system, 430,000 registered players and 24,000 monthly active users. Launching early access in October 2018 brings €6K in the first three weeks, repeated scaling pains, and a switch from coding to management to lead a 12-person remote team. Development uses web tech (PHP/JavaScript), adopts KPI tracking, and becomes data-informed with retention focused beyond the first two weeks.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Welcome
- 1:09Hobbyist to CEO
- 12:38Building Horse Reality
- 23:18First month success
- 30:06Hiring a team and going international
- 33:23Engineer to CEO
- 36:53Using data and KPIs
- 43:08Community vs vision
- 48:05Six years of learnings
- 51:59Q&A
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