Let's just pretend we went viral, not that it has .l....

... how have other people handled this? Being indy devs... we don't know a lot of people.... but going viral has basically screwed us.... we don't know who to hire.... where do we go from here?

 

Details? How would going viral screw you? You should be taking in the cash from sales or advertising money. You are now left with a set of interesting choices, do you work on improvements to the game or start a new game? But either way you are far from screwed.

 

Try not to run before being born.

 

Or conceived.

 

I assume he means screwed as in having to learn and run a bigger business. Accounting, pay roll, benefits, contracts, office space, hiring process, etc... It can be a burden for someone who just wants to develop, but it needs to be done. So where you start?

 

if your game is multiplayer or relies on a backend... scalability. One of our early games suffered from this. There were a a couple of articles on Gamasutra and the like that sploded our traffic and tipped our servers. We had a plan in place to add servers, but our backend/balancers couldn't handle the traffic. We had cull features and rewrite the backend. It took about four days to recover, but by that time we had burned all the viral traffic.... the articles linked to the game, which more often not, down. People lose interest very quick when they can't actually play the game.

But, yea, really this:

Have a plan to make ensure your game doesn't break, but otherwise not much to worry about.