Five Slices #4: The 45 million dollar game
Thousand true fans, domesticating zebras, the horror villa, and Shinise
Welcome to “Five Slices.” Every day, I’ll be sharing five stories and ideas from history, business, technology, culture, and art. Some will be fun, some will be useful, all will be interesting, and they’ll take you less than five minutes to read.
You can check out the complete list of issues here.
1. Stardew Valley
Eric Barone of Auburn, Washington, loved video games. He wanted to work as a game developer. He had no idea how to make one though, so he decided to learn by creating a clone of his favorite game “Harvest moon,” a relaxing farming simulator. Soon his learning project morphed into a vast game: Stardew Valley.
Single-handedly developing a game is a brave but somewhat naive task. Video games are complex projects combining a number of skills – storytelling, character art, worldbuilding, music, programming, and marketing. Eric had some experience with music but everything else, he had to learn from scratch. He didn’t have a job and for the five years he spent on the game, his girlfriend supported him financially.
The game was released in 2016. It costs just $5 on Steam, but it has sold over 41 million copies since then, and Eric’s net-worth could be anywhere from $45 million to $300 million!
If you’re into retro games, give Stardew Valley a shot. If you’re an entrepreneur or independent creator, you could learn a thing or two from its creation story.
Which segues into:
2. 1000 true fans
There exists a binary picture of the creator: as either a rockstar or a starving artist. But as Kevin Kelly says:
there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail.
He says you need only 1000 true fans to make a living. A true fan is somebody who will buy every book, album, T-shirt, mug, or poster you sell. They’ll tell their friends about you and bring in new fans. If each of these true fans pays you just $100 a year, you will make $100,000 a year, which is a decent amount of money. It removes the pressure of living in poverty for years hoping for a break. You don’t have to live at the ends of this graph, there’s a place at the middle:
This model works best for the “make once, sell multiple times” model i.e for products over services.1
We live in a time where you can have direct contact with all of your customers – the more people you reach, the less you need to charge. And the larger your network gets, the more valuable it is, because people with similar interests can connect through your community.
One caveat is that finding and monetizing true fans might not be so easy in reality, according to people who tried this. But most of those people earned at least $10,000 a year: If you live in a developing country and sell globally, this is great arbitrage.
Source: 1000 True Fans
3. Why can’t some animals be domesticated?
Here’s something to think about: Why do humans ride horses but not zebras?
The video below dives into this question. But the TLDR version is, domestic animals need to be:
Feedable – Ideally herbivores which eat grass.
Friendly – Not dangerous animals like tigers, bear, or bison.
Fecund – Have a quick reproductive cycle for breeding.
Family-friendly – They must follow a social structure.
A short breeding cycle and well-defined social structure are especially important: Friendly animals without these features can be tamed (captured from the wild and trained) but not domesticated (bred over generations to like humans). For example, elephants take too long to breed and cannot be domesticated. Also, horses and cattle follow a family structure – capture the head animal and the rest will follow. Zebras have no such tendencies and it’s impossible to round them up.
In theory, if you have the time, you can domesticate any animal by breeding selectively for a smaller skull and blunt teeth. The Russian scientist Belyayev demonstrated this by domesticating silver foxes. But without practical reason, this is a costly task.2
4. The villa of horror
1816, also known as “The year without a summer” was an extraordinarily cold year. Apart from causing the usual stuff like failing crops and economic distress, it also led to a bout of wet weather that canceled the holiday plans of a group of writers. Bummer. Stuck in Villa Diodati in Geneva with nothing else to do, the group started reading aloud horror stories from the German book Fantasmagoriana. One of them, Lord Byron, proposed that they each write a horror story as a challenge.
Mary Shelley was a part of the group and she struggled for days to find an idea. One day, the group discussed the possibility of scientists reanimating a corpse and soon after, Mary had a “waking dream” about the same idea. She turned her vision into a novel that won the contest. That novel was Frankenstein.
Meanwhile, Lord Byron wrote a fragment of a short story that another guest, Dr. John Polidori developed into a story called “The Vampyre.” It was the first English story in the vampire genre and influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula years later.
Thus a day of bad weather led to two of the greatest horror classics being written.
5. Shinise
Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan is a hotel in Japan. It has 37 rooms, a traditional restaurant, a moon-viewing platform, and free WiFi.
It also happens to be the oldest hotel in the world, operated by 52 generations of the same family over 1,300 years. It was founded in 705.
Japan is populated with at least 33,000 such businesses called shinise which have been in operation at least for a hundred years. 3,100 of these are older than 200 years and 19 claim to be more than a thousand years old. Shinise are run with a strong emphasis on tradition and core values of the business, while avoiding debt and risk that limit growth but help them weather crisis situations. They have strong brand loyalty and their products are usually luxury goods which sell for high prices.
Shinise are highly respected and heavily promoted in Japan.3 Rohit Krishnan explored this further to understand what it takes for companies to survive for hundreds of years. It’s a great article.
Which was your favorite story? Let me know in the comments.
If you found this fun, why not share it with a friend? Thanks for reading!
Yesterday, I wrote about David Lynch’s Interview Project and why people have a maddening need for control. I also write longer, more personal pieces like this one about my experience starting a company in India. You can also check out the complete list of issues here.
If you’re a doctor who sees patients individually or a consultant working on high-value projects, this is harder but still possible. For example, you could share your experiences through a book, blog, or YouTube channel. That’s your product.
Belyayev did this because he had a political point to prove after he was demoted for his scientific theories. His experiment proved that his theories were right.
The flip side is that startups and new ventures receive less respect in Japan.
Ofcourse Villa story is the most interesting one, how a group of people whose Holiday spoiled by the weather lead to famous stories which we still enjoy, fantastic!