Is it worth the cost to do copyright preregistration for an indie game if you are going to hire people to work on it or if you release videos publicly?  It costs $140 to preregister (and still will cost $55 more to register upon finishing the game), when it is probably challenging to get much over $500 for a first game in revenue.

In my case I had a demo executable available for download for a while on my website and shared the source code with a few very trusted friends, and I wanted to make additional games based on some of the same code/concepts/art/music in a series eventually, which also correlate with the book I'm writing.  Thus I think it would make sense to preregister the first game, but I was not sure about preregistering each subsequent game.

I was planning on releasing the first game for free (or for as little charge as possible) anyways and taking a loss on it, in order to get it in front of more people.  For later games in the series, though, this would probably not be case generally.

References:

https://www.copyright.gov/prereg/

https://www.copyright.gov/docs/fees.html

7 hours ago, datahead8888 said:

Is it worth the cost to do copyright preregistration for an indie game if you are going to hire people to work on it or if you release videos publicly?

What exactly would "worth" look like to you? What are you balancing against what? Are you talking only about money? Are you asking if the risk of financial loss is outweighed by the potential of financial gain? Is that what you mean by "worth"?