0 A.D. running indiegogo fundraiser

[H-Hour]

Open-source, rather pretty 0 A.D. is running an indiegogo fundraiser. They're seeking $160,000.

[Julius]

Steep goal
Call me a pessimist, but I have my doubts that they will even come close.
But I will for sure contribute.

Edit: It is important to note that this is a flexi-funding campaign. So any money donated will go directly to the team. The goal is thus only symbolic so to say (unlike with Kickstarter where they would get no money if they fail to reach the goal).

[jcantero]

Update 4:

Join the Wildfire Games team and play the 0 A.D. - Empires Ascendant alpha demo with us! Saturday 14th of September, 6:00 PM (1700) GMT.

A list of local times:
London, UK 7:00 PM (GMT+1)
New York, US 2:00 PM (GMT-4)
Los Angeles, US 11:00 AM (GMT-7)
Chicago, US 1:00 PM (GMT-5)
Athens, GR 9:00 PM (GMT+3)
Mumbai, IND 11:30 PM (GMT+5:30)
Sydney, AUS 4:00 AM Sunday (GMT+10)

Our IRC channel is #0ad on Quakenet.org.

Link for Webchat users (launches in Web browser).
http://webchat.quakenet.org/?channels=0ad

Download our latest alpha demo here if you haven't already!
http://play0ad.com/download/

In the fundraising front, they almost got $15,000. It would be nice if at least they can achieve $40,000 (1 person job for a year).

[rogerdv]

I havent played the game yet (waiting for a decent AI), but I would contribute if I could. But the goal is too high, I think.

[Julius]

The goal doesn't matter, all money donated goes directly to the creators. This isn't like a typical kickstarter campaign.
I think they just put the goal to show what they would need to implement all the proposed features in the suggested timeframe.

[jcantero]

Lets keep this running.

Update 6

Part 6 of Omri Lahav's music blog is up!

The Music of the Mauryan Indians!

http://www.omrilahav.com/1/post/2013/09/the-music-of-0-ad-vi-mauryan-indians.html

28 days left and $17,700 already funded.

[jcantero]

Update 8: subgoals (first at $40,000)

Hi gamers! We're halfway through our fundraiser and we've raised nearly $20,000. This is more than we've ever raised in all of our previous fundraisers combined. A huge thanks to everyone who has donated their hard-earned cash toward making Free Open-Source gaming a player in the indie games scene. And for those who are on the fence about donating, we've revamped our pitch page to showcase the game's features and utterly awesome potential and to answer a lot of questions we've had about the fundraiser

We've also listed some sub-goals for the campaign, because even if we don't hit our "ideal" goal of $160,000 we'll be using the money raised in order to make 0 A.D. - Empires Ascendant the best open-source RTS game we possibly can. Every dollar helps!

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/support-0-a-d-an-open-source-strategy-game?c=activity

Thank you for your support so far! Spread the word!

(I can't link a particular update, so I've linked the activity (updates) page instead)

[charlie]

Perhaps not want they'll want to hear but this needs to be an ongoing thing and not a 1-off fundraiser. If they raise 30k now, that's 1/6 of the money they want to work for 2 years on the project, ergo 4 months funding. As progress is made, they should keep asking for donations, and as more people play 0AD then they'll get more donations. They stand a far better chance of raising 180k in donations over 2 years than over 40 days.

[Arthur]

Personally I feel the support for 0 A.D. has been in no way close to what it really should be. People seem to be willing to pledge money for products that have next to no prototypes, and 160 000$ is bread crumbs compared to what the cost of developing the game would be in the proprietary world.

Kinda makes me wonder whether any other FOSS game projects stand a chance at all in funding some of their development. Sure, 20 000$ is 20 000$ and you can pay for quite a bit of infrastructure for that kind of money (server space, hardware etc) but if you really want to do full-time development 20 000$ will not last more than maybe 3-5 months in many places of the world.

Anyway, I have pledged money to their campaign and really hope it will be successful.

[rogerdv]

I was thinking to fund my game that way (around $5000 required to recover my PC, get PCs for my artists, improve the engine and pay some animated models), but considering this, I dont have too much hope in the help FOSS community.

[Julius]

Let's be honest, most people see Kickstarter as a cheap pre-order option and not for actually funding development. That is why F2P and open-source games do so badly.
At least that is my theory In the case of 0 A.D. it might also be that people say: well I already got Age of Empires, why should I buy support a clone of it (I am not saying that that is the case, but to the layman gamer it might look like that at a quick glance).

[Sauer2]

I'm with Charlie. I guess, people are thinking "Well, that founding won't be a success, so why put my own money into it."

[Arthur]

Well that would be sensible if it were a fixed campaign and not a flexible one like they run now... though I guess people generally don't care enough to learn the difference.

[charlie]

Well that would be sensible if it were a fixed campaign and not a flexible one like they run now... though I guess people generally don't care enough to learn the difference.

I'm not saying that it is the funding model. I understand why they went with indiegogo over kickstarter. (Although Sauer is probably right that a good % of the readers might not know the difference.)

I just think this is a long term ongoing model. Having a deadline date to raise the money for up to 2 years of development is insane. The deadline for that should be, well, in 2 years time when the final pay cheques are due!!!

[Julius]

They had a "donation" link up on their site and have been asking for donations for quite some time now, so that 2 year funding proposal of yours doesn't seem to work out at all

It is really all about media presence, and you can't keep that up for 2 years.

[Arthur]

Agreed, and also people generally can't just live from month to month without knowing if they will even have money for rent the next month in case funding dries up - they need to either have a normal wage-paid job, or get enough money up-front to take time off their usual job/wait with finding a new one.

[Sauer2]

Well that would be sensible if it were a fixed campaign and not a flexible one like they run now... though I guess people generally don't care enough to learn the difference.

Common sense and the ability of reading a text until the end: So rare they should be considered super powers.

[charlie]

They had a "donation" link up on their site and have been asking for donations for quite some time now, so that 2 year funding proposal of yours doesn't seem to work out at all

It is really all about media presence, and you can't keep that up for 2 years.

Julius. You are being naive!

Of course a flat donation button doesn't work. People don't click something or give to something basically that passively sits there in the background!

A much better example is Haiku. They have been consistently fund raising for years, hiring people on and off on the back of an OS-ideal that is over a decade old [far more niche than 0AD].

http://www.haiku-os.org/

You have to make it front and centre of your online presence and regularly bring it up in news items/requests. "We need X amount of do Y over the next Z months." etc

[Julius]

I intentionally simplified it a bit, but they *did* in fact regularly and quite prominently ask for donations alongside their alpha releases IRC. Sure running a "We need X amount of do Y over the next Z months." as you put it campaign might have been slightly more effective, but IMHO it probably wouldn't have brought in the same amount of cash like their fundraiser now (besides the more practical issues mentioned by others above).

You also can't quite compare 0 A.D. to other non-gaming open-source projects. Yes games are less niche than some obscure OS, but I believe the same holds true for open-source project funding as for what was quite well studied with F2P games: it is a tiny minority of diehard fans that are responsible for >80% of all revenue/donations (again IRC...). Games (especially unfinished ones, that look like clones) also have the problem that the overall games market is really saturated, and people consider them to be "just" games; at least the part of the population that actually has money to spend (for donations).

[shirish]

Actually 'games' is a niche topic within FOSS OSses themselves. I was at a FOSS event and some people were decrying about no games in FOSS. While I wanted to show them 0ad at the event but was held back by the bandwidth requirements.

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

$ aptitude show 0ad-data
Package: 0ad-data                       
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Version: 0.0.14-1
Priority: optional
Section: games
Maintainer: Debian Games Team <pkg-games-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Architecture: all
Uncompressed Size: 1,179 M
PreDepends: dpkg (>= 1.15.6~)
Suggests: 0ad
Description: Real-time strategy game of ancient warfare (data files)
 0 A.D. (pronounced "zero ey-dee") is a free, open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. In short, it is a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of Western civilizations, focusing on the years between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D. The project is highly ambitious, involving state-of-the-art 3D graphics, detailed artwork, sound, and
 a flexible and powerful custom-built game engine.
 
 This package contains the main data files required by 0 A.D.
Homepage: http://play0ad.com/


Of course, this machine which I'm using is pretty weak for games. I hope to buy an Haswell procy with an ATI Radeon card onboard lappy soonish and then showoff 0ad on that . Also lots can be done to make it look special, for instance if somebody can get this generation screenshots on screenshots.debian.net so within synaptic it looks good and also evanglize the game so people do come to know.

As far as funding is concerned, I do agree on the point of having a flexi-funding campaign. At least some money will flow in. Other ways could be via merchandizing as well (the usual mugs, t-shirts thing etc.) which probably they are saving for future.

Just saw they crossed 21k. It would be good if they do put an update as to which things have becom doable whenever the goal is finished, and hopefully funding starts again after the next release as idea goalposts keep on shifting.

[jcantero]

7 days left and $27601 raised.

[charlie]

That's a good amount. They should be able to get cracking with that for 3-6months and try to maintain ongoing donations to continue in the months to come.

[jcantero]

Less than 48 hours to the end of the crowdfunding, +$29,000, and Update 12:

Dear fans, backers and developers!

Thank you very much for your support! Thank you for all the positive or critical comments, the donations, your help in spreading the word about our campaign and the work done by everyone who works together with us on 0 A.D.!

In this update we would like to give you a better look behind the scenes of developing a free and open source real time strategy game!

We have two technical articles about programming topics and some videos of LordGood, our new team member in the art team, sketching and modelling the new Ptolemaic buildings and a Carthaginian temple.

[... more stuff...]

We only mention a few of the most interesting changes. For a detailed description of all the other important work since the last development report, read the full report on our website.

(It's really frustrating that the updates don't have a direct link in IGG)

[jcantero]

Well, the funding finished with almost $4,000 in the last 24 hours. The final amount raised is $33,251. Congratulations to the 0 A.D. team!

[jcantero]

Update 14:

Hey fans! Looks like we hit $33,251 in donations! We at Wildfire Games want to extend our gratitude to everyone who donated and who worked hard to spread the word about our game and this fundraising campaign. The sum we raised for this campaign dwarfs all of our past fundraisers combined. We are very happy to have raised this much and we'll be putting your donations to good use in the year ahead as we hire our programmer for a full 12 months of work.

(read the rest in the activity page of the campaign)