What I Learned From Going Bankrupt in My 20s That Proves to Be Immensely Valuable in My 30s
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt
It’s so easy for us to fall into the pattern of working really hard on goals that we picked up through social conditioning but never really consciously chose. However, when we work on such goals, we often hit nothing but roadblocks until we figure out what it is we truly want.
A major shift in my personal growth occurred when I reached the point of letting go of socially conditioned ideas regarding what I should want and finally got clear about what I really did want.
A Personal Failure Story
During my mid-20s I decided I wanted to build a business and get rich. That seemed like something very important to accomplish. I was inspired by Think and Grow Rich and other books of a similar nature. I’d visualize myself having lots of money. I thought about how great my life would be if I had lots of money and a successful business.
For a while I seemed to be making progress. When I was 25 years old, I landed a publishing deal for one of my computer game prototypes. I was pretty excited to receive the first advance payment of $50,000. The total advance was to be $675,000, paid out over several months. That was a reasonable advance for the type of game my small studio was developing, especially since I had to hire other team members and acquire certain software licenses. Compared to other retail game budgets at the time, this project was fairly inexpensive title, definitely not something that was striving to be a major retail hit. Today that level of funding would be ridiculously cheap for a serious retail PC game.
Almost from day one, things were problematic with this publisher. They were unresponsive to communication requests, they tried changing the terms of the deal after we started working together, and they failed to send my team what we needed in a timely manner. After a couple of months trying to work with them, they missed making the next advance payment. Then they unilaterally pulled out of the deal, breaching our signed agreement. To top it all off, they filed a lawsuit against me to get the first advance payment back, filling it with false accusations that had absolutely no basis in reality. It was a ridiculous bullying strategy.
Their actions made little business sense to me unless they were simply trying to tie up our project to get it off the market and prevent a timely release. Unfortunately some publishers have been known to employ this tactic when they have a competing title in the works. I don’t know if that was the motivation — I don’t recall this publisher developing any games in the same genre at the time. I suspect we were simply victims of crazed corporate-level decision making. I have no other good explanation for why they handled this relationship the way they did. I’m certainly not the only developer to have a bad experience working with this publisher. One involved a very messy, very public battle that went on for years. Read more:
