jvrossb

I think the comment you replied to is trying to point out that it's not representative of the millions of redditors out there.

Simplified, we own the art and music, the developer owns all the code. We get a license to the code and can publish it across multiple platforms, we owe the developer their share no matter what platform their game ends up on. The developer gets a license for our art only valid if published through us. So if the game is ported by us to Android, we still take royalties.

The developer can strip out all of our assets and republish on any platform without giving us a rev share if they want.

YC changed a lot for us and we're still going strong on the startup we did with YC. Perhaps that'll be next week's blog post :)

EDIT: And it'll be full of more silly things we did that probably didn't matter and that you should also not do.

You summarized it exactly as we experienced it.

Thanks! It occurred to us that had we been reading HN before applying we'd have gotten a little demoralized once we found out that all YC companies had apparently "hacked" their way in with some generally non-reproducible gimmick. We figured we should point out that this probably isn't the case.

I use this to browse HN, it's great.

Downloading it now :) Let us know if you're ever interested in making another game!

I don't think that's what he was asking. I think he was asking about how to structure his corporation so as to be legally out of reach of patent trolls.

Touché. We'll make sure the screenshots all look great for the next update.

I'd like to think that the visual/art side is significant in all the games we've helped produce! Check out the one we released right before The Deeps: http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/killah-killah-whale/id5320424...

The thing is so far, none the developers of the 20+ games that we are currently producing knew Objective-C before they started, so the learning side of what we do is important too for many developers.

We'll definitely explain this in a clearer way as we move out of beta. Out of 99c Apple takes 29c and we take 20c leaving the developer with 50c, so slightly over half :)

The App has been out for a couple of days. Apple's sales reports are delayed for yesterday so we're not sure how much Chris has made yet. While it was free it made top 25 puzzle and arcade games in 3 stores and top 100 puzzle and arcade in a couple more including the US!

We'd love nothing more than to make iOS development available to non-Mac users and/or have our games be cross-platform. We're working on ways to achieve this but we probably won't be going there for at least a year. In the mean time where there's a will there's a way to get OS X running on your machine.

Hey, we'll make art for your games too! Drop me a line at jeremy@makegameswith.us if you're interested.

MakeGamesWithUs (http://makegameswith.us) co-founder here - to clarify, Chris wrote the entire game himself. We just taught him Objective C and did the art (that's what we do). Chris is a rockstar.

How do you suspect all the great game studios/media empires got started? Disney was just a few cartoons once...

We compete by offering a better work environment (from the perspectives of some), better problems to work on, equity in the company, and more control over the purpose and outcome of your work.

What you're arguing is empirically false. I know tons of startups in the valley that are founded by people who started elsewhere and moved here. Hardly any move back. Those that do have to because of our moronic visa system or move to Boston, Seattle, or New York.

They are almost all hiring, and they manage to find good people (not without a good amount of effort), if they can't afford offices they work out of their living rooms and that's just fine, they don't travel during rush hour so traffic is a non-issue, and if past performance is any indication of future results (which may not be true, is that what you're arguing?) they will make up a disproportionately large portion of the successful (in the admittedly uniquely SV sense) tech companies of the next few years.

Not entirely true. MIT students are required to take, on average, at least one humanities course a semester even if they are doing a purely tech degree. I was a comparative media studies major there and the faculty was incredible. A lot of the professors are poached or borrowed from Ivy league schools. The linguistics department in particular is amazing. You can also cross register for courses at Harvard or Wellesley, which is awesome. About a quarter of the folks in my dorm were music majors (along with something else of course.) Humanities majors are common, humanities-only majors are rare, but I don't think any of us felt like the humanities education there was anything but world class.

How did this become such a big deal? Raising money, especially for the first time, is a stressful experience full of uncertainty. When we did it, one investor (not Google Ventures actually) low balled us and a lot of our peers. We were first timers and it freaked us out.

PG would have no problem with writing "avoid Google Ventures". He didn't because that's not what he meant. It's simply about saying hey I heard that Google Ventures lowballs, if they do it to you don't freak out.

We've had a very positive experience integrating Hipmob in Killah Killah Whale and as a result we're on our way towards integrating it into all of our games.

Every time I've called PayPal I get connected to a real person. Once they even proactively called me to warn me of suspicious behaviour on my account. My account (which I've used to make thousands of dollars in payments for years now) has been blocked by them several times and every time a quick call sorts things out. I wonder if I am the norm and OP is the exception or vice versa?

I wonder if this will make hiring easier or harder in the valley?

Why can't it both be true that the students cheated and deserve to be punished and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the course that drove half the students to cheat?

If I had to guess it was a basic requirement students had to take whether interested or not and cheating seemed like the easiest way to pass while devoting more time to other pursuits perceived to be more intellectually stimulating. Pure conjecture though.

The point of those 2 minutes is not to explain the product. It's to get you to want to talk to the company presenting. Deals don't get closed based on the substance of a 2 minute presentation, but meetings can and do get scheduled based on one. The booth idea is not a bad one but it doesn't allow the companies to blast their message to everyone at once.

Noted. Check out http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/elemental-fury/id532042459?mt..., we just released it, is this the type of game you mean when you say xblig like games? It's an honest question I'm not particularly familiar with xblig.

MGWU founder here - one more bullet point to add, we promote the games as well. We've found students want to write great games, get great art, and then have people play their games - it is of value to them to have someone offer the whole package and worry about promoting the game. We don't take ownership of the code so the developer is free to reuse and/all their code in a different game as long as its not with our art/title.

Also - analytics have been incredibly useful in spotting steps in tutorials that have been too hard or levels that need to be tweaked or reordered.

That's a great point. We've worked hands on with quite a few high school students developing games. You should see the notes they scribble while coding. Even if their game isn't physics based there's usually a good amount of trig and I guarantee it feels like much less of a chore than math homework.

We have a game that's currently in review by Apple that hopefully will give a sense of just how good these games can be:) The median for games on the App Store is also a lot higher than $200 - in the thousands of dollars. I think we'll break even fine on plenty of games and by virtue of opening up iOS game development to so many potential talented developers we'll have the opportunity to publish real gems.

Only time will tell whether the model works. I'm curious - what cut would you say we should take?

We'd gladly skin and publish it! MakeGamesWithUs is also for kids at heart :)

Hey! We're pretty proud of Elemental Fury ;) http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/elemental-fury/id532040551?mt...

It turns out that high school and college students make games they want to play, so the quality of games in our pipeline has been quite good so far :)