[akrotkov]

Set your expectations accordingly.

Coding is the fun part, but it's less than 5% of actually launching and making a successful product. If you don't think you want to spend most of your time not coding, don't try to make it a business!

Marketing is more important than making something. You will get a small boost from things like this (I was always too embarrassed to post here!), but it's an endless pit of time and money! To do it right, I've heard all sorts of numbers, but a good rule of thumb is every dollar/hour you put to making your game, put a dollar/hour to marketing it as well.

From a technical perspective, your stack is fine. You want to make sure you host all your assets behind cloudflare/s3 or similar, the $5 server is fine for gameplay but if you also try to make it send all the stuff, it's gonna die. (As evidenced today!)

Most of my other experience and advice is about how to run a team and set budgets and goals. If you're going about it as a hobby (and that's probably the best way to go!) then just keep doing what you're doing, write some blogs and foster a community instead.

[muzani]

I don't think marketing is too hard honestly. It's just that many people make a game that doesn't look amazing on the surface. The hits come with a different structure. If you can't hook someone in the first 3 seconds, it's going to be very difficult. That means name, screenshots, etc too.

I could do a little analysis, but Genfanad is probably hard to sell because... what's the name mean? It seems rather niche and artsy. I'm not sure what's going on from the site. Reconquest is quite obvious from the name and going into the screen, it seems... woah, maybe I have a lot of agency here? Then you look at comments and read of people getting ganked without moderator interference. That's likely why it took off.

Many games are fun to build and play, but they'll never ever be hits and have to be fixed from a structural level. Names are easy to fix. Steam is also very much hit and miss; if you don't have a certain level of wishlists, it's just going to be a waste of time doing any marketing.

[boesboes]

Then I think you underestimate your marketing prowess; because these are not obvious things to everyone.

For me building cloud infrastructure is easy, the choices and tradeoffs are obvious to me. To all my colleagues in the past 16 years it's been some sort of magic. They are smart people, mostly, but lack the experience and make 'obivous' mistakes all the time.

[kevinsync]

FWIW I've had great experiences recently with Bunny [0] to deploy content to a very affordable, very configurable CDN. Integration is also dead simple (you deploy normally to your regular site and then just replace hostname in all URLs with the CDN hostname, it handles the rest automatically)

Different than industrial CDNs but my new go-to for small-to-mid and indie sites.

[0] https://bunny.net

[onemandevteam]

Thank you!

I think, like you said, a good strategy will be to keep it fun and hobby-like as long as possible. I can definitely see the business-side of it sucking all my time and energy.

I think doing some educational materials will be a worthwhile way to market and gain interest. Community building with something like a Discord server will also help. Competing as a business with something like Jagex is 100x harder than just making a good game.

[akrotkov]

To be clear, it's not Jagex you're competing with. It's the 20+ other indie MMO solo developers who are trying to do the same thing as you, including but not limited to: RetroMMO, New Eden, Valorbound, Carth, Eterspire, Omuri, Shadefell, Cookie Dragon, Cinis, Cinderstone, Legends of Etherell, Legendarium, Mirage Realms, Aether Story, Ethyrial, and so on. There's more that come and go every month.

Unfortunately, the #1 lesson that I've learned is that while nostalgia gets some reception, there's a reason no big companies are really making MMOs, even at a smaller scale. There's just not that large a viable market for them.