This discussion about current funding and how to get more got pretty long in the quick question thread so I’m splitting it out here.
I started the discussion by saying that any current game development speed predictions only hold if we have enough money to keep at least one fulltime developer working on the game.
I thought that you became a full-time developer sometime ago already? Did the inflow of money decrease since then?
Yes, the Steam sales have really gone down this year, and the Patreon hasn’t been growing either (instead even going down a bit most months recently).
Do you expect Thrive to receive some more money once the microbe stage is complete (AKA 1.0.0 is released)?
I would hope so but that’s kind of the last possible moment. We need to start to get increased financial support now. Anyone can help with this by talking about Thrive to new people who might be interested in checking out the game.
How much more money inflow from patreon do you need to stay as a full-time developer?
If we are purely talking about Patreon, then it would need to at least double to make up the “deficit” from falling Steam sales.
What do think caused this massive fall in steam sales?
It’s natural that games fall off in sales as the initial sales spike ends. To not have that happen you’d need a pretty gigantic advertising effort to constantly have new players discover your game.
And well that’s exactly what’s happening with Thrive, fewer new people per day discover the game than before and as a result there just aren’t many people buying Thrive.
It seems to me that the reason for this was that people are not very interested in the microbial stage; first of all, everyone is waiting for the macroscopic stage (analogous to the “creature” stage from spore), because it is at this stage that wide opportunities for creativity open up.
Which is pretty unfortunate for those people, because if we don’t have funding to complete the microbe stage, the development speed will fall down rapidly (and the project could fail, not that it is sure to do so). So by not supporting the game now, they may have to wait 10x as long (or in the worst case there never might be the version of the game they’ve been waiting for).
A lot of people have easily depletable patience.
Considering that Thrive is open-source, even if the project failed there is a good chance that after some time somebody else with a similar idea would pick it up again, as long as godot is still functional by that time.
As long as there is someone with write access still active.
By write access you mean the ability to do stuff with the code on github?
I hope the appearance of GOE and the planet editor will at least ignite the excitement a little, and then when the macroscopic stage finally begins to be developed, the excitement will increase until thrive becomes very famous
What about paying for each update? Something like 1 dollar for each update, a guarantee that each stage will at most have 10 updates and a 10 dollar price for all the past updates if more than 10 updates have happened so far?
Thrive is supposed to be a free game…
A paid Thrive is better than no Thrive.
I also secretly think that a Thrive that is always in the future is better than the completed game because if it isn’t completed yet then we can keep talking about it and make its design even better
You want that to happen? Why shouldn’t the current version be supported?
Why would people keep paying for the updates? I’d expect there to be extreme backlash to such a thing.
I don’t think there’s any successful game out there that nickel and dimes people for each update. The closest thing would be episodic games, but those manage expectations by announcing at the start that they will have episodic content. And even those, I think, usually have a buy all option at the start.
Also who would pay for releases that are mostly bugfixes? Would we just need to wait until the game is extremely unstable and buggy before people said they’d be fine with paying for just a more stable game experience? Or would we charge like 30-100$ per bug report that someone wants fixed (depending on the difficulty of the bug)?
Bugfixes can be free and the episodic updates may be announced after they are bugfixed? i don’t know. can the roadmap even be advertised as episodes.
because its just 1 dollar and they wouldn’t notice how much they give as they keep giving
netflix does it. though its not a game