That’s my entire point that Thrive cannot be reasonably split up into any other way than like stages. Splitting into episodes wouldn’t make sense.
Also if bugfixes were unpaid, the paid releases would have to be increased in price to compensate anyway so that there’s money to pay for the development of bugfixes.
I’d argue the opposite would be much more likely: people would get annoyed when they’d constantly be asked for more money. Like “hmm, maybe I’ll play Thrive today”, “oh look a new update with cool new stuff”, “oh, I have to pay 1$ dollar for this, but I just paid 2$ last month to play”.
Which is different. Thrive already has a Patreon so anyone who wants to subscribe to Thrive updates can do so through Patreon. It wouldn’t make sense for Thrive to be a liveservice garbage game (like most gamers online call them), use a subscription model like an MMO, or to like a release a battle pass or something each year to compel people to spend more money.
I am just saying that if thrive was to ever enter a “dark age” again (which I ABSOLUTELY do not want to happen), then perhaps some people would like to continue from where the last dev team left off.
Again, Thrive has always officially been (to my knowledge) promised to be a free game.
That would require too much money and would only return it after a too long time.
Isn’t that like how private funding is (and not a government style grant)? Government funding can be just for art projects that don’t expect to get any returns from it.
Any country grants are probably only for work to be done in the country. So currently only like EU or Finland grants would be valid. But theoretically any country would be fine if we could find a game developer from that country who could work on Thrive.
I don’t even know what grants exist so I can’t say anything with any certainty. But I would expect that there’d be a lot of competition for the type of grants Thrive would be eligible for. So I expect there to be a ton of competition meaning that while a good application would help it still would have a huge luck component whether Thrive was selected as the recipient of the grant.
So we have inviting more people, and with lots of luck, funds as ways to gain more money for the project.
Thrive / RG probably should not be ever sold to any other major company due to them possibly influencing what the game promised to be, unless they promise to not impact this game’s goals.
An option which would be less radical than what 50gens proposed would be putting ads of some sort into the game (and/or thrive media) for some money. Could that ever happen?
That’s literally not how it works. There’s plenty of art grants that don’t take ownership of the created works. Of course that depends on the exact terms of the grant.
Our daily active player count is so low that I’d think that at most we would get 20 bucks a month. Which is almost the same as one VIP patron. So just one person could easily support the project more and save everyone from annoying ads.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve said this before, but legally Revolutionary Games Studio is formed as an association. An association can have only natural persons as members who have voting rights. There is no stock to be sold. And to majorly change the course or dissolve the association (and passing on the copyright parts of the game that I’ve worked on) needs a big majority vote in an association general assembly.
I guess that the best option at present would be to try and get the players of this game to invite their friends who do not know about it.
From my own experience with an another game this is a pretty unique way of getting new players, as it usually requires various strategies to just get the fresh eyes interested. Then we’d have to convince as many of these newcomers to become patrons or even just buy the game on Steam. It’s hard to predict what results may this bring, and it’s heavily dependant on using good wording and other strats for the best results.
Here’s a fun and non-awkward question for our own audience: what would actually make us get more money out of you, and what would feel like we’re exploiting you with predatory practices? Thrive has been blessed with a very loyal (if not huge) fanbase, and I don’t think that milking them dry before they leave is a sustainable (or nice) strategy. That said, I had once suggested just raising the price of the game, even though it’s free. Does that feel like a scam to people? What kind of “extras”, if any, would feel like a fair thing to sell and not get for free with the game?
Or do people prefer giving money directly with patreon subscriptions? Is anyone holding back because they want to see some kind of “proof” that we’re getting your money’s worth of development?
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StrategyGameR
(Your friendly neighborhood menace to society.)
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This has probably already been answered but I’m cannot find the answer,
where do the donations actually go?
I have seen talk about paying devs in the future but also some stuff about open source things have trouble with that. and if not used for paying devs is it in some savings account or spent on advertisements or something else.
This will only help with new sales, because increasing the price doesn’t require people to buy it again. I’ve been suggesting we hold off on increasing the price of the game until we have more of the game complete. I think a price increase once multicellular stage is in a pretty good shape would be a good point to do that.
The last time we accepted donations was in 2021. Those donations were all used on our online servers cost (for example this forum) and to pay part of my salary for like two months (the donations were pretty insignificant in amount). I make this distinction because it is illegal to collect donations in Finland without a permit. And getting such a permit is a pretty big hassle and the costs are pretty high, so we’d need to get thousands in donations in a year before the fee percentage would be on a reasonable level.
All of the money from the Patreon page, and Steam and itch sales go to the association Revolutionary Games Studio ry. The money then goes towards paying for the running costs of the association (accountant, official registry fees, mail), and our web presence (these forums, and other online services we host), and finally the biggest cost item are salary costs. I’m currently the only employee for the association. I currently work fulltime but the association income is not enough to cover the monthly expenses of the association, so this is not sustainable forever.
Yes. I’m not sure it’s a good idea, mind you, but I have the feeling that we’re losing sales because of lack of people interested in trying out the game, not because people no longer think it’s worth 5 USD. I could explain in terms of supply and demand curves, but I doubt that people will think, “well I would have bought Thrive for five, but seven is not worth it man!”
Then again, maybe people will see RG raising a price because “we need more money!” and decide to get it free instead.
Do we want to try to double-dip with people who already bought it fair and square?