Loque wrote: ↑25 Sep 2018
Making JPs bill, 750 at 20 sale price means at least 40 sold license to get the costs back. Nothing you can live from.
Absolutely spot on.
In agreeing with a price for a coder, I try to base it what I feel is a realistic expectation of units that will sell.
So of course I never expected Steerpike 3 to sell an extra 100 units at full price, that'd be fantasy-land: but I figured 20-30 units wasn't an unreasonable estimate. So 25 full price units, coder is paid off, I defer my own income until maybe 50 units in the subsequent sales. That's how I've done it in the past and it's worked ok. I've sold enough at full price to pay Pitchblende or Scuzzy, and I get roughly the same amount back for myself a few months later in the next couple of discount periods.
But three units sold, though... now,
that I wasn't expecting even at this point in the RE lifetime.
I guess few users will now buy anything at full price ever because the PropShop is now effectively a year-round sale, what with DotW, Rewards, and four annual sales. Every day, there's a sale of something in the shop.
And it gets worse, as you rightly note, because it's now so bad I can't make up the shortfall in those later discounts either. Since my income effectively would have come from 40-60 half-price units down the line,
that income also now goes just to fulfill the original £750 outlay (and that only covers external coding; that doesn't include my time in updating the GUI, so the cost of Steepike 3 is effectively £1,500).
Of course I can't compare any other devs experiences here: others who have full-time work outside of REs and/or who can code C++ themselves are somewhat less sensitive to lower sales, so in some sense my situation is a little more particular, and perhaps this is why I'm a little more vocal.
As I wrote to a colleague recently, it was a lovely basket when it was new, but it's tatty now, my eggs keep falling out, and there's no-one else selling baskets I like.