Your Time is Valuable
October 31st, 2010
I’m back! If you’re a regular iDevBlogADay reader, you may have noticed that I was off the last two weeks. My wife and I had our first baby almost three weeks ago, and the other members of iDBAD were nice enough to let me have some “paternity leave” to get used to life with a new member of the family.
Now that I’m starting to learn to cope with very little sleep, and our new son is starting to find what might be described as the beginnings of a routine, I thought it was time to get back into the saddle and write up a post. Since I haven’t done any work in the last two weeks, a technical post seemed out of the question. And given that my life has been turned upside down, and I’m learning what it means to have no free time, I thought I’d talk about the value of our time as indie developers.
There seem to be three kinds of indie developers: those who treat games as a creative endeavour first and business second; those who treat games as a business first and a creative endeavour second; and those who think about both the art and the business carefully when building games. I’ll admit, I’m one who thinks about the creative aspect first and the business second, but I do think of this as a business. I’m not a hobbyist. I need to make money to be able to keep making games.
A year and half ago I wrote up a controversial blog post that talked about the relatively slow start that my first game, Dapple, got off to in a post called “The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)“. The post was meant to show another side to all the Instant Millionaire stories that were running about the App Store at the time. However, one thing that surprised me was that I received a lot of angry mail (some of it extremely angry) in response to the post. One of the things that people got most upset about was my calculation of the budget for the game.
In my breakdown I had called out my own time as part of the budget for the game. This upset a lot of people. But let’s consider this first. How many times have you been at a conference or an iPhone dev meetup and heard a conversation like this:
Dev 1: “So how much did your game cost to make?”
Dev 2: “Well, I paid $200 for sound effects from WebsiteX, but I did the art and programming myself, so that was free.”
I know I’ve heard that a lot. Hell, I think I’ve even said that at one point or another. What bothers is me is that so many of us have this attitude that our time isn’t worth anything. Why are the two months you spent programming and drawing “free”? It’s not. Your time is valuable. Your time is money.
Let’s think about it this way. If you had hired a programmer and an artist to build the game for you, how much would it have cost you? Would it have been free? If you had taken on a two month contract instead of building your own game, would you have done it for free? No. We are professional developers. Yes, we’re indie. Yes, we work for ourselves. But our time is not free. We need to start thinking about the cost of our time when we’re considering the cost of making a game.
Now, I’m not advocating avoiding a game you desperately want to make because you know it will lose money. What I’m trying to get at is that you should at least be aware that it’s going to lose money. If you still need to make the game, make it. We’re professionals. Our time is valuable. Let’s make informed decisions. Let’s take ourselves seriously.
Owen
P.S. Happy Halloween, everyone!
i don’t think it’s coincidence that a man who just had a baby is posting an article about how is time is worth money. You don’t really start valuing your time until it’s all taken away from you.
- Ryan
Owen,
First of all, congrats again on your growing family. Sleep is overrated anyway
When I fall into the trap of treating my time as “free”, my decision process ends up skewed, and my expectations of what I can get done in a given month end up too high.
On the other hand, it is also a trap to think purely in terms of my billing rate for that same time. That sort of thinking quenches my passion for the task, and breeds frustration.
As in all things, balance and perspective rule the day and your post is a good reminder of that.
Doug
Great post Owen. Our time as indies definitely isn’t free. It’s easy to think of it that way. It’s very easy to put 400-600 man-hours of programming time into a relatively simple game. That’s a lot of time not spent with the family or doing other things!
Great blog post Owen. I have an 8 month old daughter and your words ring so true. Another factor for indie parents is that the vast majority only have the one income too. While I do make some money from my indie adventures, i’m still running around a third of what my salary should be, and that’s on a good month! The trade-off here is that I get to spend so much time with my daughter in her early years which is worth so much more.
Excellent post! It’s surprising so many indies are against counting time. For one, if you don’t count it, and you hope to one day go indie for a living, how will you know when that’s possible? By ignoring the value of time, you also ignore the opportunity to find flaws in your workflow; the faster you get, the more polish you can squeeze in, and the more games you can get done.
I agree with Doug’s comment about when I think free, I overestimate what I can do in say a month. At the same time though, I can’t get on board the whole I’d be billing at x per hour either.
I think, for me, it has to do with how I approach business. I think that technology has come far enough that you don’t have to quit your day job right off the bat. I’ll agree that success may come faster if you do quit it, but I no longer think it’s required to do so.
As we saw with @mattrix’s success with Trainyard, what’s more important than being full time is being fully dedicated. What I find amazing about Matt’s story is he did it all alone. I find that partners are almost a necessity to keep my going when I get down about the lack of time that life will sometimes present.
Now, just because I think you don’t *need* to be full time indie, that doesn’t mean I look down on those that are. More the opposite actually, I’m impressed by the leap of faith indies, like you Owen, make. However, as the sole bread winner with a wife, two kids and some debt, I know I can’t afford to drop down to 1/3 of my salary. Same with my Area 161 biz partner, he’s in the same boat.
All in all, I think that’s what makes all of this so exciting. There’s no right way or wrong way to do this indie dev thing. That’s what makes #iDevBlogADay so great too, you get to hear all this varied perspectives.
There are two ways to calculate the value of time spent doing an entrepreneurial effort that I see a lot:
1) what one would have earned if they’d spent the time working for someone else earning a wage.
2) what it costs one to not have to work during that time (how much money must be moved out of savings to cover the bills for that period of time). If one is borrowing money to pay bills so as to not work for money, then the cost of the interest must be factored in as well.
Some people would use item 1 above because this is effectively what they are “investing” in their indie project by putting their time into it instead of working for immediate money in. That’s an interesting idea and I can see the rationale behind such an approach.
But I don’t calculate how much I’m investing in a two week vacation this way, so it doesn’t feel right to me.
Item 1 is also dangerous because it can lead to workaholism with every second given a $ value which misses the point of living in my opinion.
I prefer to use Item 2 above (but no borrowing!) because it’s the actual money I have to take out of my savings account to pay my bills for each month that I’m not earning money. This is the direct net reduction in my assets. Also note that as soon as I have any kind of revenue it starts reducing this amount which is good motivational feedback to keep going
Another thing I like about item 2 is that it takes into account that one can make the time one spends on an indie project “cost” less if one finds ways to reduce expenses (avoid expenses that aren’t actually necessary).
Identifying those unnecessary expenses is a good thing to do anyway since even the employed never know when they might lose their jobs.
The other thing about valuing time is to be careful that the time one uses for entrepreneurial ventures doesn’t come entirely out of ‘family time’ (if one has a family). The kids grow up and leave home. The stages of growth go by fast and are easy to miss in a 6 month 80hr/wk work binge. Also, none of us know how long we or our kids will live so taking no pleasure in today and spending all one’s time working towards some future time that may or may not happen is not a choice to be made lightly.
best of fortune to you all.
- Dad