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