Income Streams

At the moment, we’re getting the chance to work alongside two (and, soon, maybe three) very successful small businesses, and it’s deeply inspirational.  We’ve always maintained that the best thing for indies to do is to keep their mind on the money without losing their creative soul – this is very very difficult and I think that we’re only now just starting to go about it in the right way.

Like most small businesses, we’ve alternately committed the sins of not spending enough money and spending too much money.  Money should be invested where quality cannot be compromised and quality has a direct impact on ROI: it should be used to enable the impossible or facilitate the great.  You should only spend tiny, teeny amounts on gambles, but you should spend enough on investments so you don’t get trapped.

You should not spend money without having a clear idea of when and where it’s going to come back.  It’s that simple.

If you are an indie games company and you see a robust, fresh financial opportunity (you’ll get better at spotting these) run like fuck towards it because 1.) I promise you need it and 2.) real opportunities bring real benefits.  These are the real “work hard and be nice and it will pay you back” situations that proper businesses need.

OK rant over – now we blunder onwards into the big darkness to make more mistakes and live to talk about it!

Final footnote – my ruminations come from a place of massively reduced productivity due to an epic, epic man cold.  Thanks to everyone in my life for putting up with my current array of odd clothing choices and bizarre hacking noises.

Share this gibberish!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 12:18 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply