Dear Reader:
TumbleSeed devs share postmortem, sales did not reach expectations on any platform
Coming from the official TumbleSeed postmortem...
Sales did not live up to our expectations either. While things could have certainly gone much worse, our hopes were to recoup our costs within the first month or two. That didn’t happen, and it’s looking like it never will.
As it stands right now, calculating an average of 40hrs/week/person for the duration of the project, we’ve each made about $15/hr for the hours put in based on our revenue split. The trouble is that we worked many more hours than 40 per week. During the last 6 months of the project Benedict, David and I did little else but work day and night without weekends. Accounting for all that we likely earned something closer to $10/hr.
Our costs were fairly sizable for any project I’ve worked on. We spent about $25,000 on things like legal fees, our contest, expo booths, festivals, travel and anything else we might of needed along the way. Over years of development things start to add up.
These costs do not include our own living expenses, which of course, were the largest expense of all. While often overlooked in these kinds of calculations, I am including them in our concept of “recouping costs.” For us to get close to that, we’d need to sell a little over two times of what we have already sold.
Pretty unlikely.