The Guilt of the Video-Game Millionaires

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One night in March, 2013, Rami Ismail and his business partner Jan Willem released a game for mobile phones called Ridiculous Fishing. Ismail, who was twenty-four at the time and who lives in the Netherlands, woke the following morning to find that the game had made him tens of thousands of dollars overnight. His first reaction was not elation but guilt. His mother, who has a job in local government, had already left for work. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve watched my mom wake up at six in the morning, work all day, come home, make my brother and me dinner—maybe shout at me for too much ‘computering,’?” he said. “My first thought that day was that while I was asleep I’d made more money than she had all year. And I’d done it with a mobile-phone game about shooting fish with a machine gun.”

Ridiculous Fishing made a hundred thousand dollars in its first month on Apple’s App Store. It won the Design Award at the 2013 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and continued to sell well, passing a million dollars in sales within six months of its release. Ismail and Willem had begun making games together while in college, and to create Ridiculous Fishing they had worked in borrowed office space and subsisted on a diet of instant ramen. “Somewhere in the back of your head you know that you worked hard, that you sacrificed your stability and you took on the risk of financial ruin for a long while,” Ismail told me. “You did things that other people were not willing or capable of. And that paid off. But, even so, it feels awful. I couldn’t get rid of the image of my mother in her car, driving to work.”

Ismail is not the only game maker who, in recent years, has struggled to adjust to unexpected financial success. Today, makers of independent games can earn a windfall far more swiftly than their counterparts in film or music. A game developer is able to work alone, on a laptop in a public library or in a one-bedroom apartment. Then, when a game is finished, online stores such as the App Store or the digital PC-game store Steam make the work available to a global audience in an instant. Seventy per cent of every sale on Steam and the App Store goes directly to the developer. The stores release the income to developers at the end of the month.

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