What this property was
BunBandit is a free browser game. A bunny, some thieving, instant play — no download, no signup, no app store between a bored person and thirty seconds of fun. Technically it's a Vite build with React 19 and Three.js, compiled to a static bundle and served by the simplest process in my PM2 fleet: a static file server pointing at the dist folder. There's an Express backend sitting in the repo that the live game doesn't even use, because the whole thing runs client-side.…
Evidence recorded in the manuscript
Revenue: effectively zero. Display ads on a low-traffic game pay nothing worth typing into a spreadsheet, and there's no checkout because there's nothing to buy. Traffic: small and organic; I never gave it a real promotion push, so I never got a clean read on the question the experiment was designed to answer. Costs: a domain renewal and a rounding error of server resources — static files are nearly free to serve. Time invested: modest by my standards, and a decent chunk of it was honestly recreation that produced a deployable artifact.
The lesson recorded after launch
A traffic experiment without a distribution plan is just a hobby with analytics installed. Games genuinely can be cheap top-of-funnel assets — they're shareable in a way utility software never is — but the game is only half the experiment; the other half is the deliberate, slightly tedious work of putting it where players already are. I built the half that was fun and skipped the half that was the actual test.…