OK, so this is 5 months late. I only just noticed that Pyrogon had bit the dust, so to to speak.
But I think it’s extremely relevant for anyone here doing commercial work on games - there are some salient lessons in the failure of Hook’s first games company. (NB: for those that don’t know, Brian Hook is one of the ex-id guys who worked on several of the Quake games).
http://bookofhook.com/Article/GameDevelopment/APyrogonPostmortem.html
Hook had been talking about his plans on some lists I’m on before Pyrogon was founded, and I’d expected it to do pretty well. With hindsight, I think I’d underestimated his understanding of the business side of things; I certainly wouldn’t recommend the above postmortem as an example of “how to go about starting an indie”, but there is plenty of food for thought in there.
Personally, I think the reasoning given here is a bit closer to the truth:
http://www.asharewarelife.com/2004_04_18_archive.html
but then again without actually seeing how the company was being run it’s hard to tell; if Hook’s own descriptions of what happened were inaccurate (due to personal misconceptions), then any conclusions we draw from that are fundamentally flawed (several times I’ve heard company founders speak about their failures, and having seen the company in action have known that they were completely blind to their real biggest problems - problems that you would never have guessed from their own talk, because they didn’t even hint at the existence of that which they’d never seen).
