original creator of generals.io here (late to the party)

really cool to see people still having fun with this game I made in college! I sold the game a few years back because I didn't have time to properly maintain it, and I'm glad the new owners have kept it running.

Linking to some past HN threads on this:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145781 original generals.io post

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13562866 launch of the Bot API

How much does a game/IP like that sell for, if I may ask?

2-3x yearly net revenue, more if you're lucky.

Revenue is ultimately a function of DAU, either via ad RPMs or IAP / subscription conversion rate.

Also most sales agreements have a confidentiality covenant.

> 2-3x yearly net revenue, more if you're lucky.

And what is the yearly net revenue of a game like generals?

> Also most sales agreements have a confidentiality covenant

Yeah that's super annoying. I'm mainly just interested in the ballpark. $10k? $50k? $100k? $500k? >$1m?

Kind of rude to ask, if I had to guess less than $50k a year.

Kind of thing you put up and maintain because of the community you foster. Labor of love, not business.

To consider the act of asking rude depends totally on culture and milieu.

Just curious, how would that ballpark number be helpful?

This thread has inspired me to do further research and explore monetizing/selling some of my side projects. I am curious how a ballpark sales value is useful...

Because it's interesting to know if my hypothetical video game similar to this is worth a few beers on a night, a fancy dinner, a year's salary, or enough to set me for life a la Microsoft's purchase of Minecraft. Depending on that information, someone could choose to build a game as a labor of love, build a game as a for-profit venture (haha), or decide to go do something else with their life.

Largely due to Microsoft's strategic direction. I doubt Minecraft would have grown 10x under notch's leadership.

What big changes has Microsoft made? The whole Java/Bedrock split seems like a mess, and the updates have been enjoyable, but certainly nothing to write home about.

The only vaguely interesting thing I can point to is Minecraft Dungeons, which was fun for a month for my friend group, and then it wasn't.

Go walk around any toy section...

Merchandise

ballpark is $10k - $100k. Nothing too crazy but still nice to walk away from the project with something

+1 also curious

hi victor, good to see you here! hope you're well :)

wow took me a bit to remember your username (time flies) but great to see you here too! :)

Did you ever consider to make the game persistent and MMO?

If so what made you resign that?

my experience switching from disqus -> commento: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19555665

https://victorzhou.com for a mix of ML / web dev / other

shameless self plug: https://victorzhou.com has a mix of machine learning, web development, and other topics. You may have seen some posts from there on HN in the past

Definitely, and I was doing that, but everytime a new spam variant (with gmail period trick) of an email gets subscribed that same email gets ANOTHER double-opt-in email from me. This is my guess as to why I was getting reported as spam so much - people would literally be getting spammed by me (unintentionally).

EDIT: forgot to mention I'm the author of this post

Author here. My wording could probably be better b/c it makes it sound like I'm blaming Sendy, but I'm not trying to complain here - I agree they should NOT be special-casing this kind of thing.

Author of the post here - Happy to answer any questions. I'll be editing the post with responses/updates from Sendy. Hopefully this convinces them to release a patch!

Why would you willingly use such a garbage POS script? There's better services out there, or you could just roll your own.

Any suggestions?

Seeing as you asked, I’ll give my startup a shameless plug:

https://emailoctopus.com/amazon-ses

Thanks, appreciate that!

Past HN discussions of posts in this series:

- Neural Networks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19320217

- RNNs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20524543

- CNNs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19981736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064900

I do have similar articles for Neural Networks (MLP) and CNNs:

---

NN: https://victorzhou.com/blog/intro-to-neural-networks/

NN HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19320217

---

CNN: https://victorzhou.com/blog/intro-to-cnns-part-1/ https://victorzhou.com/blog/intro-to-cnns-part-2/

CNN HN discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19981736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064900

Awesome!