Good luck, man. I already did that, and it really paid off. I did it mostly alone, with my brother as musician, with no investment. But it isn't easy. I gone for ensuring success, which meant making a complicated piece of software that is unique and for which i can be certain there is some market without having to second-guess the audience or compete with anyone.
Going the path well walked, gets you competing with all the 99.9% remakes that are entirely invisible. The most profitable game may be cow clicker, but there's thousands upon thousands of other cow clickers that are not profitable, and which you don't see. When you say you look at 'success rate' of X, don't be looking at the % of the successes which are X, that's your basic application of rationality to this decision right here. The simple toy games are not even exercises in game programming. They are exercises in marketing (and blind luck). If you had 10 000 hours of marketing experience, then you totally should go for them.
Your company plan sounds very much like how Valve is structured. You may find it challenging to maintain your desired organizational structure, given that you also plan to be dependent on external investment. Also, starting a company with the express goal of selling it as quickly as possible conflicts with several ways you might operate your company to achieve a high degree of success. Many of the recent small studios that have gone on to generate large amounts of revenue (relative to their size) (Terraria / Minecraft / etc) are independently owned and bui...
Two pieces of advice.
Firstly, write a formal business plan with the numbers as accurate as you can make them, not to show other people, but for your own consumption. How much equity do you want to have at the various stages? What skill sets or experience will the VCs be looking to see in your first 2 hires? What pay structure will you need to offer them to secure that? What skills don't you have, that you'll need your co-founder to have? Once you've got a few variant plans that seem plausible to you, apply your rationality training to them. (For exam...
Given the high failure rate of video game start-ups, you'd probably be better off going to work for a company.
The amount of money I can make working for a company isn't even close to how much money I want to donate. There are multiple reasons to believe I will succeed, some of which I've listed above. Another reason for doing a game startup comes from Michael Vassar's advice: "Find something that inside view says you'll definitely succeed at, and outside view says you'll definitely fail it. Do it and see what caused the discrepancy." This is the fastest way to fix your perception of the world.
Starting a successful company is not magic. There is a set of skills, and I'm planning to learn and master them. Will my first startup be successful? May be not, but there is no reason to stop after the first failure, especially since I'll have so much more experience after it.
Start-up founders are hardly insane. From my perspective, it's the intersection between video games and start-ups that is the problem.
The things that make video games good (good writing, good graphics, good sound effects, good gameplay, etc.) are easier to accomplish when you have a decent amount of staff and enough money to throw at the problem. The video game market is horrendously saturated, with a large segment of the population not even finishing games once. (I don't have any hard statistics for this, but it's a trope that is well-attested on r/gaming and the game blogosphere, e.g. "You Gonna Finish That?").
To make matters worse, the market is also infamously critical of everything -- fail in one category, and you basically get panned. For example, Mass Effect 3 is getting a lot of flack for having a "bad" ending, despite being otherwise a well-polished game with a budget the size of Missouri.
One could subvert some of this by developing for phones, but the iOS market has notoriously finicky gatekeepers. Android, perhaps -- I don't know much about them.
Is anything known about the success rate of people who mostly design games which fascinate them vs. the success rate of people who mostly follow what's known about the gaming market? How about success magnitude?
Please re-read _Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately_.
If you want to reduce X-Risk, go for it.
If you want to make games, go for it.
If you want to make lots of money, great! Go for it, it's great doing what you love and you can always buy some of the other two later.
Choose what's most important for you, because I fail to see how these three goals converge. Game development has awful ROI. Look at venture capitalists: who is backing game startups? Noone. Game development, like show business, is very hit-or miss and the fact that many successful studios hav...
Do you plan to make it known either to investors or to customers your intent to donate to X-risk reduction?
I've had an idea that tried to tie together game development and X-Risk reduction.
Alas, I stumbled on stage 1. But I think it could work. Eliezer is known to love writing, anime and I think visual novels too; and I think money plus the chance of advancing the cause could have seduced him into this project.
This was before Eliezer started Methods of Rationality. It turned out to be more successful that ...
I have a company, I even have the product and customers. What I need are more of the latter, worldwide.
It is a geek business, contact me if you feel to.
EDIT: former-->later (thanks to CronoDAS)
EDIT: later-->latter (thanks to CronoDAS)
I'm not attached to any particular game genre or game idea. Whatever gives the most ROI is good.
To take a line from Avenue Q, "the only stable investment is porn." Just sayin'.
Actually, porn has gotten a lot less profitable recently. There are lots of sites on which you can see lots of different clips without paying anything. It's also dirt cheap to make; all you need is a camera, someone to hold the camera, and a woman who's willing to do sex acts on camera. All the competition makes it very hard to make a living in the porn business these days; demand hasn't fallen, but supply is way up, pushing the price down.