So, two "retired" indie devs woke up this morning (well, it's afternoon in Europe) and decide to go on some series of tweets.....

On one side: Notch gets the star depression syndrom and gets sad rethinking about his old days:
https://twitter.com/notch

On the other side, J-Blow do the trendy "indie market is flooded, we're doomed and blabla". A Frenchie comes to say that "Her Story" is a success and he replicates that the money earned is "to pay maybe 2 people for one year if you are not lavish. I hope u like games made by 2 people in one year!".
https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/637544226235023360

To make the estimation=> 100K copies x 5$(discounted launch price) => 500K $
=> minus VAT in EU and store cut thus around 60% remaining => 500K x 0.6 => 300K
Taking the worst annual tax ratio for business in EU (don't know in US) => 300K x 50% => 150K left for the dev (Sam Barlow)

Needless to say that a lot of common people would have their life completely changed by this amount...

Jonathan Blow is always moaning and complaining about something.

That's kind of how I felt about Jeff Vogel for a while there.

Notch's 'condition' reminds me of an interview with Ted Turner (I think it was in GQ) a few years ago. He was talking about being depressed and withdrawn, not being happy at all. I know he had lost some money on bad deals, but the dude is still one of the richest people alive. Notch seems to suffer from the same disease. Money + too much free time = sad panda.

Money might not buy happiness, but it sure seems to buy a lot of self-loathing.

Still less entertaining than Fish.

Never has there been so much moaning followed by so much laughter. I have no sympathy for the guy who cancelled Swat Kats.

This happened to the guy that found the gold that kicked off the Yukon Gold Rush. He was smart enough to sell his shares in the mind relatively early on and made a huge fortune before moving to Seattle. But, after spending so much time looking for gold, he had gotten kind of hooked on the quest and started over again. At that point, he had no need for more money, but he was a bit of an addict.

I'm guessing in these cases, they got hooked by their respective quests and having the money is no longer a particularly motivating factor as money isn't a life.

Why does the whole turnover gets taxed as earnings? There have been production cost before which can be booked as loss and deducted.

That's why the truly rich will always be the truly rich. The really RICH types like Buffet, Soros, or Rogers are always working, always building, always coming up with the next big project. They don't sleep, they just work. The millions turn to billions, the billions to trillions, it's just a bunch of zeroes after a while. The truly rich rich don't care about money. They care about power. After a while the money becomes a mean to an end. And for the ones who thought that the money would buy what they want, they end up drinking alone at cocktail parties... crying in their $900/bottle champagne.

Notch is just in the early stages of this disease. He's young. Give him another 10-15 years and you'll see his face splattered across a rocketship headed for Mars. That or he'll be smart and sink a few million in South American real estate and then retire to Colorado and become a potato farmer.

Nope, the main reason why the rich tend to stay rich is that they tend to have a "screw you I got mine" attitude and fix things so that people have a hard time following. The ones that stop being megawealthy usually had to make some rather colossal mistakes to lose the money.

You mean as in the John D. Rockefeller 'competition is a sin' mindset? Yeah, I see what you're saying. I still think there's more to it than just 'I got mine' syndrome... they have to be building some sort of rich people escape shuttle underneath the Sphinx in Egypt. Somewhere underwater or out in the desert there has to be some spaceship worthy of only the finest, richest asses to sit in. They kinda fucked this place up. They'd be fools not to build an exit strategy to the whole Earth problem.

Y U abandon us Notch T_T

It's most of it though. They advocate for things that they benefit from at the expense of everybody else under the deluded mindset that they worked hard to get what they got. The tax policies that they've demanded have resulted in the destruction of the educational system along with the supports that people used to use to move up in society. To make matters worse, there's fewer people holding more of the wealth, so there's fewer opportunities than there used to be. And they did generally work hard, but they didn't work _that_ much harder than anybody else. The CEOs of companies don't work hundreds of times harder than the workers do. And nobody is so productive that they earn billions of dollars without taking from other people.

Personally, I'm not wealthy, but I'd be more than happy to contribute for a rocket to launch those leeches into space. I don't even care where they end up.

For someone who's released a single game, and who's been trapped in development hell for six years, Blow sure talks big.

He's just blowing hot air.