I think the most important part is that donations are unreliable. People might give money when not required to - we have seen it happen, of course - but you are explicitly giving them the choice to not do it, and it is up to them. I assume there are also ways to market your stuff to make people more likely to donate, and kinds of product that people value more, and target audiences that donate more... but mostly it is a gamble, and not a good one by all accounts.

Donations are basically "give away for free, if someone wants they can give you money anyway". I'd say that pay-what-you-want implies the expectation of payment (with the possibility of payment being zero, sometimes) in a way that donations don't... but many people treat it the same. Just putting a price tag on it and selling it (despite being FOSS, or creative commons, or distributed for free elsewhere) is probably the best way to get people to pay - just because of how people see the product - but of course you are still leaving the possibility open for people to choose not to do it.

Quoting: skinmarqueeI've been serving games on the internet for over 25 years now and I've had no more than 3 donations in 25 years (a few dollars each.)

25 years later my games are still downloaded daily. People say they'd pay for free or open source games, but they absolutely don't. I've had several million downloads.

Last year my donations to FOSS projects and developers totalled $899.97 CAD. This year i'm on pace for $1470.48. Veloren has raised over $16,000. Warzone 2100 has raised over $7500. There can be success. Now i'll agree that many gamers don't put their money where there mouth is but not all of us fall into that mould.

I see the link to your site by your user name. Are your games FOSS or just free of charge ?

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI see the link to your site by your user name. Are your games FOSS or just free of charge ?

They have all been on GitHub and you might still find copies there.

So i'll list some issues I have found.

I downloaded two of your games, Monster RPG and Tower to Heaven, and neither launched for me on my Trisquel machine or my Manjaro machine. I am sure that I could troubleshoot the issues given some time, it seems to be a missing library for Lua, but many gamers won't care. Many will not even vent to you, they'll just move onto another game. It could be that many people that downloaded your games found they wouldn't launch and that could be why they didn't donate. I know you mention that you test them on Debian and that not every distro will work but you're limiting your audience that way. Looking at this site's stats less than 5% of the people who provide their info use Debian. Perhaps packaging as a Flatpak or App Image could alleviate some of the launch issues.

Another issue I found is that any way I tried to load any Github page associated with you or your games it wouldn't load. Also for the two games I downloaded it didn't include a license or source code. For those who care about that stuff it will be a turn off for them.

So here we have launch issues that will turn off the casual crowd, and license/source code issues that will turn off the FOSS crowd and that covers a lot of the market between the two.

One other thing I would mention is I had never heard of you. If I were trying to get more people playing my games, and by extension more donations, I would be putting my games on a platform like Itch.io which gives the option to pay what you want and has a built in user base. I would be having a presense on the Fediverse. I would have many ways for people to give me money. Have a Stripe as well as your Paypal. Have an account at Ko-fi, Liberapay, Patreon, Open Collective, etc.

I'm not trying to belittle you or to be mean. I'm providing some issues and possible solutions. You have a valid gripe in that many Linux gamers don't support projects they use but at the same time there is more you could be doing to help yourself and market yourself to those that do.

Yeah, I've been through all of the above many times over and had no support anyway, so what I've settled on is I'm compiling my games on Debian stable and it'll be up to you to install the reqs from package manager. I've had fully static builds in the past, licenses, github pages, Ko-fi, itch.io, Steam and you name it, but I'm not catering to anyone anymore most especially not since I have received nothing.

I also founded the engine Factorio uses by the way, but there was a mutiny and some of the lesser contributors took it over. I worked for 11 years and nobody at Wubi or whatever they're called gave me a cent, although one of the developers told me everyone else got paid, even people who did nothing on the project. I did ALL of the hard stuff (debugging) and wrote half of all the drivers.

Free games do work, if well advertised and people actually want to play them and support them. A lot of free games are junk though. Same as everything: marketing. You can't just put small free games online on some random site and expect people to donate for it.

Just as a reminder, plenty of non-free indie games also fail to make much money. Even some that are relatively quite good. They don't let people play for free, but turns out people really don't want to (or are able to) pay for all that many games anyway.

So the cited success stories... 7500 CAD since 2000. That's 85 cents a day... you'd literally make a lot more begging for change.

Last edited by skinmarquee on 5 April 2024 at 9:08 pm UTC

Quoting: skinmarqueeI've been serving games on the internet for over 25 years now and I've had no more than 3 donations in 25 years (a few dollars each.)

25 years later my games are still downloaded daily. People say they'd pay for free or open source games, but they absolutely don't. I've had several million downloads.

Those numbers disregard the other avenues of payment that you offered.

As someone who has both contributed to Monster RPG 2's indiegogo and purchased crystal picnic over at itch before you abandoned that shop, and would not have done so without you liberating your software (I wouldn't even have heard of nooskewl in that case), I severely resent not being counted merely because my payments were not "donations".

Last edited by emphy on 6 April 2024 at 12:50 am UTC

I apologize if it sounded like that. I do greatly value every contribution I've got, probably moreso than other developers since they are few and far between. I don't count it as a total loss, since I'm proud of my games, but I've lost a significant amount of money counting all donations, purchases and otherwise. In the tens of thousands in losses and I have never counted hardware toward that so it would be quite huge with it, since I purchased probably a few thousand worth of hardware for debugging Allegro alone.