Follow Your Dreams, Developers, They Could Be Worth $250

Okay, fine, your dreams are worth a lot.

I see it’s been more than seven years since I released my indie educational game, Letter Taps, on mobile app stores. Society has since moved on, as it does, to the point that it’s no longer financially sensible to continue updates to comply with the ever-changing rules, laws, and device operating systems.

The game (and the experience of creating it) has had a bit of an odd legacy in my life. It was far from a hit, though people close to me were beautifully supportive. Thanks to some pleasant interactions during my early journalism days, famed kids TV creator Mitchell Kriegman (Clarissa Explains It All, Bear in the Big Blue House) even helped promote it. Most importantly, it helped my kid learn his alphabet and numbers way ahead of schedule. That’s all the success I needed—though we were working on paying to build a house, and peripheral financial success would have been welcome.

But the experience led to other interesting opportunities, too. A number of teachers reached out to me through Code.org inviting me to speak to their students after my game’s release. Kids are still obsessed with games the same way I was at that age, and educators appreciated that I was able to come connect the dots between working hard in math, science, and every other school subject and huge advantages when designing and creating games. I accepted every invitation, and I discovered I loved talking to kids about following nerdy dreams, because I suspect following those dreams probably saved my life.

The way I went about making the game also turned some heads. I’m still one of a relatively small number of devs who’s released a commercial project made with the Love2D framework, and I’m part of an even smaller group that managed to port one to mobile. The most famous Love2D developer these days is known as LocalThunk. He made a small card game called Balatro. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

That’s a joke, of course, but back when I had not heard of Balatro, a producer from a publisher called PlayStack saw my Love2D experience on LinkedIn and asked if I was interested in working on a port of a Love game from PC to consoles. I enthusiastically replied less than sixty seconds later and several more times in the coming weeks, but no one at PlayStack ever spoke to me again. This hurt, and watching the game go on to set the world ablaze hurt worse.

PlayStack doesn’t know anything about me, and they didn’t set out to make me miserable, but they reopened an old wound I’ve been trying to shut for 20 years beginning with the first time I applied to a game studio at age 17. I’ve never been hired, and I’ve rarely even scored an interview.

But here we are, Balatro has been out for six months without a mobile release while knock-offs soak up its potential revenue. My Love2D game was mobile multiplatform-ready on Day 1. I find it difficult to believe that I wouldn’t have been valuable to that team, and I would have done it for literally any form of compensation whatsoever, considering the opportunity is all I have ever professionally wanted. It’s a little unfair to me, but it’s very unfair to their developer.

No one has ever taken me seriously in this industry, and finally releasing my own commercial game was very personally satisfying in the sense that it let me send back a small message to the industry of my own: No problem, I don’t need any of you to succeed, either. I earned my developer badge the hard way, and I’ll keep pushing my skillset long after the point that the PlayStacks of the world look at what I’ve created and wish they’d treated me like a human being—not that you should need a stellar resume to be treated with respect and professionalism.

But it was always a bummer that Letter Taps never even quite earned back the fees to join both mobile platforms as a publisher. Luckily, that changed today–more than seven years later, at a time when the game isn’t even available for sale.

This was thanks to developers much further along than me. While I was experimenting to see if I could rustle up some downloads, they challenged Google about what they classified as unnecessary fees and restrictions.

This back-and-forth with Google apparently led to a settlement of $26 million to the class attorneys and a whopping $90 million to “Android software developers” as a class. While that’s clearly not going to hurt Google, it also can’t feel great following other big judgments in favor of Epic Games regarding Fortnite and “states and consumers” also regarding the Play store.

I can certainly recall receiving a couple of notices about the developer class action after Google presumably turned over records that included my qualifying release in 2017. I didn’t think anything of it. Everyone is probably curious and a little excited the first time they’re part of a class action settlement. That adrenaline dries up quick the first time you jump through a couple of hoops and receive a check for 34 cents because your personal information was sold without your consent or a coupon for more ham that recently contained scraps of metal.

That’s why I barely bothered to open the envelope I received today mentioning the same class action, figuring it was one more invitation to fill out a form for a chance to be awarded a fraction of a percent on the twenty-odd dollars I earned on that particular platform in the first place.

What I found instead was a check for $250, the minimum payment established for members of the class. If qualifying developers took no action and didn’t opt out before the deadline, an administrator would attempt to mail them a check. Mine apparently showed up yesterday.

So follow your dreams, kids. Even if your projects flop, you never know what damages you’ll accidentally sustain in the process.

Jokes aside, I’m not too bent out of shape to see Google held accountable every once in a while. While this fee issue isn’t single-handedly responsible for Letter Taps underperforming, Google has absolutely cost me untold amounts of money by banning me personally from the AdSense program for life the first time I’d earned a $100 payout because someone else clicked on ads too many times at a website I was managing for a friend. This has also kept me from pursuing momentum at YouTube as Google manages its monetization through the same program. As I told one reporter for The National, Google won’t speak to me about the ban, but they’ll still let me use Gmail, create for YouTube, and place orders in their store. Do they actually believe I’m the bad guy or not?

I suppose it’s paid for now either way.

I’ve been blessed with hilariously satisfying resolutions to many professional grudges in my career. I believe that’s what refusing to quit can do for you.