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It cost us $2933.40 to develop our mobile game as a side project. Here's what we spent it on.

I'm always curious to learn how much other founders have spent during their development phase. I figured I'd share a breakdown of all of the things we've spent money on for our mobile game, https://hexiconapp.com.

In summary: we spent $2933.40 over the last three years of development. We were working on this project and and off since 2017, with the majority of development occurring in 2019-2020. We're a remote team of 3 doing this on the side. Here's a breakdown:

$800 --- Lawyer-drafted privacy policy + terms of service (for 2 games)
$625 --- Lawyer-drafted Trademark application
$425 --- Apple Developer Account 4x years
$300 --- Delaware Annual Franchise Tax
$250 --- Adobe After Effects (11 months, annual plan)
$193.50 --- 11 Domains (basically like crack when $8.99/year)
$99 --- DE registration of LLC
$90 --- 2 years of DE registered agent fees
$75 --- Digital conference ticket (Pocketgamer Digital)
$47 --- Facebook ads + handout business cards (for in-person events)
$25 --- Google Play Developer Account 1-time fee
$3.45 --- Database Fees (Firebase, 2016-2017)
$0.45 --- Database Fees (Firebase, Nov 2019-May 2020)

We have been fairly conservative with subscription softwares (paying for only Adobe AE for animations and videos) and have relied on free services/plans for managing the side project. We decided to spend more for legal to avoid the worry of doing it incorrectly. Some things like business and dev account fees were unavoidable, but we at least did biz setup DIY to avoid extra costs.

To date, we've made about $60 during open beta and are hoping to launch within the next month or so...maybe we will turn a profit this year : ^ )

Is this what you would have expected? Curious if there is something missing we should know about (besides ad spend which will come later). Thanks!

  1. 5

    Hey congrats on this! Seems like a cool puzzle game, which is right up my alley, so I'll definitely download and give it a play!

    A few thoughts come to mind as I'm reading through this:

    The legal and administrative costs are a surprising portion of this. Why set up an LLC in DE and not somewhere else? Aren't the real benefits of Delaware for C-corps? Does DE require a Registered Agent for LLCs? I've set up 3 LLC's in WA state, 1 in MI, and 1 in NY and the costs are way lower than this and have never been required to have a RA. C-corps are a different beast, though.

    Also curious about the investment in the privacy policy, TOC, and trademark... For bootstrapped small stuff like this, I've always just used boilerplate or a generator. For my larger startups (ie. with $10MM+ in VC money) I've done it the right way.

    Just overall curious as you seem to have really gone lean on the infrastructure side, but, in my opinion, way over the top on the admin side.

    EDIT: just downloaded from TestFlight and started playing. super cool gameplay. maybe a bit complicated, but I'm sure I'll figure it all out after a couple matches. great job!

    1. 1

      Thanks for the comments! Would love feedback on the app and gameplay as well if you do give that a try : )

      I'll explain our reasoning for these costs, but the real answer is that we didn't really have an idea of what we were doing (still barely do) and wanted to just go for it. We had previously burned out from over-playtesting and wanted to make a concerted effort to launch this time around.

      Business - Our reasoning was that an LLC seemed right for us at this stage, and if we ever needed to, converting from LLC to C-Corp in DE is more straightforward than in other states (from our own research at least). This was a consideration because we have plans for other non-game products down the road, and maybe that would require it...? DE does require a registered agent but $50 per year didn't seem too bad.

      PP/ToS - We discussed to do boilerplates or lawyer for a while. In the end, it was easier to justify the PP and TOS to be drafted by a lawyer. We have another game we are developing on a contract for another designer, and we wanted to avoid creating any privacy issues that could impact them. Additionally, games may be played by children under 13 and we wanted to make sure we did not screw that language up. The lawyers we worked with also have a lot of experience in the board game industry which we see as a good connection for our future products.

      Trademark - Harder to justify using a lawyer, but in the end we didn't want any chance of mistakes, especially due to the name Hexicon being used in other unrelated industries. I now understand the process well enough and could re-create the application for our future games/products DIY, which was another goal of mine.

      1. 2

        hey, those are all good answers! sometimes the path of least resistance costs money. you definitely didn't make any mistakes, so that's good.

        The game definitely needs a little polish, but overall it's really cool. I like the gameplay, although the different modes are kind of confusing and there seems to be A LOT of stuff going on (eg. special modes that are only available once a day, online playing, leaderboards, etc.) I guess this is all stuff I'd expect of a mature game, and with a little more polish and work on the UX I think you'll have something really impressive.

        1. 1

          Agreed about the path of least resistance. One big learning experience so far and it has been great!

          For the game, thanks for that feedback. We went on a spree of adding a lot of features during beta and I bet you're picking up on that. Could you elaborate a bit more on the confusing aspects? Is this more about distinguishing the solo modes from the online play, or between the solo modes themselves? Or is this more about the layout and how things are presented to a new player? Just want to know for sure so we can try to address it! Thanks

  2. 3

    Do you know how many hours of dev work you have put in?

    1. 1

      A ridiculous number, probably too many without releasing by now. Not something we have tracked but I can try to calculate it for the future. I can give a rough breakdown of the schedule we have followed though:

      Jan-July in 2017: First prototype + gameplay ideation (mostly dev work in Unity)
      July-Nov in 2017: Playtesting with friends (mostly feedback collection + tweaks)
      ---hiatus from burnout---
      Feb 2019 - present: Redesign of app using React Native, biz formation, marketing

      For two of us, it's all been on nights and weekends. Our lead dev has put in a lot of hours during the day while balancing freelancing/web dev as well.

      1. 1

        Hi, you remade the app from Unity to React Native?

        1. 2

          We did!

          We had 2 friends that were really good with Unity but they unfortunately had to stop working on the project (new company with a non-compete). When they left, we didn't have enough experience with Unity to continue that build on our own.

          Our lead dev has a web background and we realized that we build Hexicon with RN instead to achieve cross-platform support (including future web/FB). In the end, it worked out pretty well since Hexicon's design is pretty flat with minimal animations.

  3. 2

    Curious about the move from Unity to React Native, can you talk a bit about the motivation there?

    1. 3

      For sure! We had 2 friends that were very skilled with Unity and making games who did the original mobile prototype in Unity. They unfortunately couldn't work on the project any longer though due to a non-compete agreement with a company they both ended up joining. When they left, Unity was very difficult and confusing for us to continue working in without experience. Since the design of Hexicon is pretty flat and minimal, it also made less sense to use that platform which is more geared toward 3D environments. So we switched.

      Our lead dev @acburst has a strong background in web dev though, and React Native was a relatively small step from React. I have a bit of programming experience and was also able to pick up JS enough to contribute and support with programming, whereas in Unity I was having a really hard time. RN turned out to be a very nice platform for us given its simplicity and cross platform support as well.

      1. 1

        Very cool. Don't see too many games built in RN, looks great!

  4. 2

    Congratulations look like a great game, and I can clearly see you are going to make a lot more money that you put in.

    $800 --- Lawyer-drafted privacy policy + terms of service (for 2 games)
    $625 --- Lawyer-drafted Trademark application

    It sounds like a lot of money for lawyers! Isn't there a better cheaper way to do this? I remember an IH business that was offering the whole LLC setup with a bank account, etc... Can't remember their name. I think they also took care of such things, for a lower fee.

    1. 1

      It is by far our biggest expense! The cheaper way is to use legal zoom or rocket lawyer for $50 to $100. In summary, we just wanted to get this done 100% right and not have issues down the road. That was worth more to us than paying a small sum and being unsure or worried.

      We saved some money by doing the business DIY as well, though there are things like Stripe Atlas that cost $500 to do the whole package. Not worth it in my opinion. It was so ridiculously easy to start the business, it just took time to fill out forms and then wait for responses. Setting up the bank account was pretty damn annoying, but that was because we're a remote team and not all present in the same location. A solo founder will have way less trouble.

  5. 2

    Thanks for sharing @singlecolor. It's cool to get an insight into how this breaks down for app development.

  6. 2

    Hi Christan,

    Interesting share! I am not familiar with the gaming world, but do like learning about it. Do you mind if I ask why you decided to buy Apple Developer Account 4x years? Why not just 1x for starters?

    And a maybe more complicated question, how scalable is this? For example, if you sold for a $100.000 tomorrow, would that mean you have a $97.066,6 profit or do some costs scale exponential?

    Good luck! Would you mind also sharing your thoughts on my idea here? I would appreciate it! https://www.indiehackers.com/post/validation-a-wireless-time-machine-backup-saas-3e3555e130

    1. 1

      Hi Marijn! Thanks for the questions.

      Apple Dev Account - We started development in 2017 and then took a break right after the 2nd year's charge unfortunately. We also had to transfer ownership at one point (before we became a business) and the timing worked poorly again, resulting in an additional annual charge for a new account. This is a $99 annual fee which is pretty annoying compared to Google's 1-time $25 charge.

      Scaling - I will naively say it's going to be nicely scalable from what we have seen so far. The database costs are the primary scaling costs, and so far the load has been very low for 300 MAU. We're still in the free tier of Firebase, but the actual amount of data we transfer per user is very low due to our word game being lightweight and asynchronous 1v1 multiplayer.

      I'll check out your project as well!

      1. 2

        Interesting! With a little bit of luck it is actually as scalable like you think it is, would be an epic business model. Good luck and thanks!

  7. 1

    The first game startup I ever worked at they spent 5K on lawyers just to get some documents drawn up that we never used. I now really carefully consider when I really need lawyers.

    1. 1

      That is quite steep...what type of game was it? I imagine some bigger multiplayer games have a lot of other scenarios to protect themselves from. Shame they didn't get used.

      1. 1

        They just got ripped off honestly, it was just a custom company incorporation document and some IP ownership documents.

        1. 1

          Ah, that's unfortunate. So many other entities that just want to take your money when starting out.

          I guess we'll find out if we overpaid down the road or not : D

  8. 1

    Why did you spend this much on a privacy policy? Isn't there an online generator?

    1. 1

      Definitely, an online generator like termly.io would have been $120/year, but we would not have had as much confidence in the result. We chose to pay for a lawyer to not take any risks due to mainly these reasons:

      1. children under 13 may play our game
      2. we have virtual currency and needed to distance ourselves from gambling
      3. we have a 2nd game in develop under contract with another publisher and did not want to take chances with a client. we included their game in our privacy policy and ToS, and now both parties have high confidence in the documents
  9. 1

    Wrote up a slightly more formal version on our game's blog with some more in-depth explanation of each category, if anyone is interested (friend link):

    https://medium.com/hexicon/it-cost-us-2-923-90-to-develop-our-mobile-game-heres-how-we-spent-it-d6b817414813?source=friends_link&sk=eddee94752749a991a568406d3f0750b

  10. 1

    Nice post @singlecolor thanks for this !

    But as a freelance developer persperctive I dont' agree with you.

    Let's say you worked on it 3 month a year that's

    100 day * 3 years * 650 $ (my daily rate as a React Native dev) = 195 000 $

    But still, keep going and good luck for the next :)

    1. 1

      Hey @flexbox, thanks for the comments.

      I wanted to clarify - which aspect are you disagreeing with? Are you discussing the tradeoff and opportunity cost of doing this game vs. working as a React Native dev?

      If that is the case - this is the first game of at least 2, and we have some other ideas for other products in the gaming industry down the road. We're hoping to build a business that has more to offer and ultimately become more profitable. We have to start somewhere.

      For the numbers though, we expect to make a decent return that may grow slowly but it will grow (we hope haha). If we scaled our 100 MAU by 100x, we would be making $2k MRR (assuming no other additions to monetization).

  11. 1

    Thanks for the info! One question. Is it strictly necessary that a Lawyer drafts the privacy policy and terms of service? Or can anyone do it?

    1. 2

      Where I landed with this is that it is not "strictly necessary," but every situation and case is different. We easily could have paid $50 on Rocket Lawyer or legalzoom, but I would not have been as comfortable with that due to the above reasons (client and children under 13 for a game).

      I would highly recommend getting a free consultation. I did this 4 separate times from 4 different lawyers (for biz formation, TM, privacy policy, general) and balanced their feedback against what I found online.

      It's just helpful to get an official opinion, even when you know they are also a businessperson and want to make you a client. 2 of the 4 lawyers offered great advice which we considered to be a separately good resource, before even deciding to use them for their services.

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