I would say that there has already been one, Notch and Minecraft. Though he did hire people and step down as dev lead, he was pretty solo and already on the 1 billion dollar trajectory.
Has ConcernedApe ever talked about how much he's made from Stardew Valley before? I've seen estimates from $50M to $300M. Certainly shy of the $1B mark, but, especially if his next project is another solo coded one and does well, he's well on his way.
This seems the closest you are going to get, but Mojang had dozens of employees at the time of the sale. One Reddit post claims there were 40 people there.
Yes, but I think the point the parent comment was making is that the value was created by one person. He didn’t HAVE to hire those people and it still would have eventually made a billion dollars.
This isn’t to say that the other people who worked on Minecraft provided no value, they definitely accelerated the game’s success.
I do not think you can assume the guaranteed success of Minecraft. Sure, it bottled lightning, but to go from an indie hit to a Microsoft buyout has a lot of work in between.
Early development of Minecraft had a recurring joke about how Notch did not want to work too hard. If development had stumbled because it was still all on one guy, some mechanically identical competitor game could have grown into the cultural zeitgeist.
A single founder and a one-person company aren't the same thing. Oculus had about 100 employees when they were acquired; they had about 10 at the time of their Kickstarter campaign.
This is kind of obvious because the internal incentives for employees (who make lots of product decisions) are based on stock being more than half of staff compensation comes via RSUs.
I've heard that many of the big tech layoffs where actually just moved / converting them to contracting groups, so they lose the direct head count but kept the developer via the intermediary. Have others heard this too and could this have been a way to label contractors differently so they don't fall under this tax code?
Some firms use proprietary software to run their business. The development costs of that development may be eligible to be capitalized under Section 174. The idea is to make it similar to if they simply bought software off the shelf which they would be allowed to capitalize.
Before someone mentions Excel, most firms have a threshold the expense has to clear before it is considered for capitalization. Excel is under most firm’s threshold.
I had similar experience with everything missing that final attention to detail and polish and having to write issues and ask other how they got past certain problems. I ended up switching to Pocketbase, and while it is not a complete or drop in replacement hosted service, it is light weight and approachable to feel comfortable that it can scale and be more stable long term.
Wow glad to see there were other fans of MSPaint, can't believe I built my open source version with wxWidgets 16 years ago https://github.com/murdockq/OpenPaint
I'm guessing this can be the new bot that could play competitively at GeoGuesser. It would be interesting if Google trained a similar model and released it using all the Street Map data, I sure hope they do.
Has anyone done something similar with the geolocated WIFI MAC addresses, to have small model for predicting location from those.
I believe I read somewhere that geoguesser AI based on street view data was mostly classifying based on the camera/vehicle set up. As in, a smudge on the lens in this corner means its from Paris.
This crowdsourced approach probably eliminates that issue.
Dice Device is a touch screen puck computer that can naturally fit into many board games allowing use as dice roll or other board game functions and custom apps. Open source and hackable to simplify the board game experience.
One of the most important aspects that doesn't seem to be covered here is data retention and ownership. Looking through the settings page I don't see any ways to eject and backup all the documentation that was invested into the project. Downloading the data as markdown or as a git repo is pretty important to be able to trust it won't be lost if you disappear or out grow the features of the service.
Great point! Adding this to the list. I agree that it’s very important to have this functionality in, so users can be free to move away at any time without feeling tied to the tool.
