Is it possible to make money?

Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby sireus » 24 Sep 2011, 10:27

Yeah well, maybe people who develop games in their free time at least want them to be games they enjoy themselves, instead of a CoD clone. And I doubt most are trying to compete with the big commercial games.
Oh, and it's not about graphics or anything like that - just think of Minecraft for a second. But it's not solely about being innovative, either - think of The Humble Bundle(s), some games in those were innovative, but others were totally not.
At this point, I think you have to charge people for a game to make them think it's good. Otherwise, they'll just ignore it, no matter how good it actually is/how bad the commercial alternatives are. Once you've sold a batch, you can open-source it, but regardless of how much we like to believe this around here, that doesn't really matter.

@FreakNigh: I guess that depends entirely on what playing field you're aiming for. Big titles - FPSs, RPGs, sports games, all that - forget about that. But those "casual games" and small indie games, that's a different story. There isn't much difference between the development style and team size of those and open-source games.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby Modplan Man » 24 Sep 2011, 21:18

Didn't get a chance to reply at the time:

MyEmail {l Wrote}:An outdated video with poor-graphics is hardly an example of success. Perhaps you could come up with something meaningful, say a videogame with 250k+ sales?


I like how you don't even address the evidence, its accuracy, nor the fundamental fact that a film producer using a CC-BY-SA license has made significant money from her work even as it's distributed widely for free. You instead dismiss it based on being "outdated" with no reasons as to why, or how people who have looked into the issue more than you have still somehow understand it less than someone who won't even recognise the basic concept of the difference between value and price recognised by practically every economist out there. Not only do you ignore direct research into markets that explicitly operate without copyright and patent protection, along with evidence from experienced economists and researchers who have gone far more in-depth into the topic than you have, you then simply set up an arbitrary goal post. There are other factors that stop a FOSS game existing with 250k sales, one of those being social, like people such as yourself saying rather matter of factly (and without evidence to support your view) that FOSS cannot be a business, others being as already noted that many games simply aren't trying to make money, other factors being alternative business models, like the fact that a FOSS game business model does not have to rely on selling the software itself anyway, making the 250k sales goal irrelevant, amongst others.

Though I do wander how you'll dismiss and ignore Jason Rohrer(http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/), a successful game developer who puts his work into the public domain, not only earning pretty hefty sales (enough to pay his living costs), but likely doing even better by now with the publicity and fame he and his recent games are getting. Inside A Star Filled Sky alone has gotten plenty of attention, likely enough to gain significant sales, whilst employing no DRM, providing source code and placing his work in the public domain. Not forgetting the fact that the game is available on the biggest digital distribution service in gaming. I wouldn''t be surprised if he had, in fact, reached 250k+ sales.

The most basic common sense should illustrate to yourself how a product's licensing affects its value.


The most basic common sense and knowledge in economics should tell you price and value are 2 different things. Licensing is an act of using the monopoly granted by copyright law to enforce a certain agreement, typically mostly to the sellers advantage. Basic common sense tells you an individual with a monopoly will always earn more than an individual without through having no competition, and thus being able to set a price above what might normally be tolerated in the market and being able to chase other suppliers out of the market. This says nothing about the value of a product, nor the ability for business to make money without that monopoly, only the distorting effect that a monopoly has on a market. Not only that, your model of value ignores measures of utility of a product that cannot be captured by price alone, and the equally important measure of how much money a product may save a consumer regardless of its price, much in the way Linux is significantly valuable to Google in providing them a free platform to builds off of, lowering their development costs with Android and ChromeOS, in itself making their business easier to maintain. A product cannot have value without having a productive function, regardless of its price or licensing agreement, and its price does not affect that value, only the decision by a consumer as to whether they'll buy it or can afford it.

Marketing Cygnus Support

Cygnus Support was a small company founded to support and improve free software. We started with three people -- Michael Tiemann, David Vinayak Wallace, and John Gilmore. (David's nickname from MIT was "Gumby", and many people know him that way. After David married Silke Henkel, he became David Henkel-Wallace.) It grew to employ more than 120 people, with annual revenues over $20,000,000, ten years later. It was merged into Red Hat Software as Red Hat's second acquisition, in a time when Red Hat's revenues were much smaller, but its market capitalization was much greater (due to the tech and Linux stock market bubbles). The company was sold for about $600 million, making all of its early employees into millionaires.

[...]

We had the grandiose idea that major computer companies like Sun, SGI, and DEC would fire their compiler departments and use our free compilers and debuggers instead, paying us a million dollars a year for support and development. That wasn't quite right, but before we starved, we stumbled into the embedded systems market, doing jobs for Intel (the i960, a now-forgotten RISC chip), AMD (their now-forgotten but nice 29000 RISC), and various companies like 3Com and Adobe who had to port major pieces of code to these chips. In that market, once we fixed the tools to support cross-compiling, we had major advantages over the existing competitors, and we swarmed right through the market for 32-bit embedded system programming tools. And ultimately, we did get million-dollar contracts, such as one from Sony for building Playstation compilers and emulators. This allowed game developers to start working a year before the Playstation hardware was available. This enabled the Playstation to come to market sooner, with more and better games.

[...]

Our marketing message was "Freedom". Freedom from restrictive software licenses, and technological license managers that would make your compiler refuse to run. (Yes, "DRM" was alive and well in the early 1990s, but only on expensive commercial software, not on music, movies, and books.) Freedom from lock-in to a specific vendor. Freedom from the constraints of currently available products: we were happy to modify them for you, for a price, and if you didn't like our price or our work, you could do it yourself, or hire anybody else to modify them for you.

[...]

Our pricing was initially created by our inexperience. We were good businessmen, but not good marketers. We started by estimating what it would cost us to do a given development job, or provide a year's support to a particular company or department. Then we'd add a percentage for our overhead and profit, and that would be the price we'd quote them. (We aimed to grow the company using only revenues from customers, and turn a small profit every year -- and we largely succeeded at both.) This formula priced us well below much of the competition, and we were still making money. It appeared to us that the embedded system compiler market was full of "fat and lazy" little companies. We blew through it pretty well, and much of the time were getting as much business as we could handle. Many of those companies, such as Green Hills, died, or were bought and brought in-house by one of their big customers.

Later, after hiring more experienced executives, we discovered that our pricing was "leaving money on the table". We still needed to estimate our own costs and overheads and profits -- but we also needed to estimate how much money our work would SAVE our customer, or MAKE FOR our customer. When there was a big discrepancy in those two numbers, we could raise our price significantly, and the customer would still be happy. For example, the Sony PlayStation contract enabled Sony to ship the PlayStation months earlier (with working third party game software). Even a single month earlier of shipments would result in hundreds of millions of dollars of income for Sony. Similarly, big networking vendors like Cisco had tens or hundreds of millions of dollars riding on the introduction dates of their new products. We were selling them "insurance": if any big problems came up in the development software as they worked on the product, we'd fix them rapidly so their engineers would be able to deliver the product on time. Chip vendors, for whom we built many compilers, were betting big money on getting at least one large customer for their latest chip. Early availability of our tools allowed their customers to reliably prototype large, complex products with the chip. Our pricing gradually grew to include a percentage of the value that our work was creating out in the world, for our customers.


Seriously, please actually read up on economics 101.

Since I obviously have to spell it out for you: Lets say you create a videogame. It took an invested 5mil (which is rather low) to create. In scenario A you release it proprietary and sell it in stores, and make 20mil over the next five years. In scenario B you release it as FOSS and still sell it in stores, but everyone just downloads it for free (because you have licensed it saying that was Ok to do) and you make $0, zip, null. The only thing that changed in these two scenarios is the licensing, hence the licensing is directly related to the value of the software.


Once again you conveniently ignore the existence of piracy in the proprietary market which provides exactly the same effect as you describe in your FOSS example, in which much software is widely available for free, where DRM is regularly ineffective, and threats of legal action are ignored as major publishers regularly shouting about how piracy is supposedly destroying their business.

Your entire argument is built on an unrealistic hypothetical.

Like I was telling Knitter it is possible to make money through secondary sources that are completely separate from the software itself. But the monetary value of the actual software is still nill. This is where you are getting confused. Consider Android and cellphones. Anyone can get the Android OS for free, without price. The Android OS's monetary value is nothing. HOWEVER, money can be made through a secondary source by selling cellphones with Android pre-installed. Its the cellphone that produces income, not the FOSS/FREE Android OS.


That has nothing to do with the value of the software, it is entirely to do with Googles business model that relies on advertising. Google wants its Android OS to be free to gain wider adoption, as a means to spread its advertising reach and data on customers to improve its services. Google's business choices are not a function of software value, considering they also give away proprietary software (in fact, most of the software they effectively give away is proprietary), they're business choices are a function of their core business model and strengths, which from the beginning has been search and the advertising business it feeds into. Google does not make money from a "secondary source" of selling Android phones, though phone manufacturers obviously feel Android is a valuable product to have on their phones to help sell them to consumers who themselves must obviously feel Android is valuable enough to want to buy a phone with Android specifically. Google makes its money through advertising, it deliberately gives away software both FOSS and proprietary to increase its search and advertising business with eyeballs and data on what users like (to feed them with more relevant ads).

And as far as piracy goes companies have found a simple solution that works very well: The game does not work unless you have a active internet connection and can login to their server with your account. The only way you get an account is by purchasing it from them (if you purchase the game you automatically purchase an account too). With this it is entirely futile to pirate a game--in order to play you still have to purchase the account. If you pirate you still end up paying.


And back in reality land, that simple solution has regularly failed to work, with unsurprisingly no evidence on your side that it has worked. Try looking at a torrent site recently, or reading the evidence like the SSRC's 440 page report on piracy that regularly finds enforcement ineffective in reducing piracy.

http://piracy.ssrc.org

Despite the stream of lawsuits and site closures, we see no evidence—and indeed very few claims—that these efforts have had any measurable impact on online piracy. The costs and technical requirements of running a torrent tracker or indexing site are modest, and new sites have quickly emerged to replace old ones. P2P continues to account for a high percentage of total bandwidth utilization in most parts of the world, and infringing files represent, by most accounts, a very high percentage of P2P content (Felton 2010; IFPI 2006). ISP-traffic-monitoring firm ipoque put P2P use in 2009 at roughly 70% of total bandwidth in Eastern Europe, 60% in South America, and slightly lower percentages in northern and southern Europe (Schulze and Mochalski 2009).27 US rates are generally estimated at 25%–30%, reflecting not so much lower utilization of P2P as higher utilization of streaming video services such as YouTube and Hulu. Rates of use of cyberlocker sites like RapidShare have grown rapidly, leading to pressure on those companies to monitor file uploads and sign deals with content providers.

MPEE, P. 44, Sec2:30


By most industry accounts, video-game piracy is concentrated within the traditional stand-alone PC-game market, resulting in pressure on developers to abandon the PC in favour of console-only titles. PC games with cracked serial numbers or activation codes are widely available online and in pirate optical disc markets. Unlike record companies or film studios, PC-game developers and publishers have a variety of ways of estimating the prevalence of pirated copies of their games, such as tracking the percentage of calls to technical support from gamers playing with pirated copies (Ghazi 2009). For popular games, reported ratios of ten pirated copies for every purchased copy are routine.

MPEE, P. 63, Sec2:49


Despite the prominence of modding in enforcement conversations, we are aware of no research on the prevalence of mod chips or modded systems and cannot find a credible estimate of how far the practice goes beyond tech-hobbyist communities. In 2007, Nintendo claimed that some seven million DS handhelds had been modded via a widely available Chinese-produced chip, contributing what Nintendo characterized as losses of $975 million across platforms (Nintendo 2009). Nintendo’s USTR submission for 2009 singled out Mexico, Brazil, China, Paraguay, and South Korea as hot spots for game piracy. The major US enforcement action against modding in recent years—Operation Tangled Web in 2007—netted just 61,000 mod chips, however, suggesting a problem on a much smaller scale, at least in the United States (Associated Press 2007a).45 The ESA, for its part, indicates that its analysis of online distribution finds comparable numbers of pirated console and PC games—challenging conventional wisdom on this point and pointing to a mass-market phenomenon. Clearly, this is a subject requiring more detailed study.

MPEE, P. 63, Sec2:49


Let's also ignore the example of the music industry, which abandoned DRM long ago and piracy is immensely prevalent, yet the music business as a whole doing better than ever, including subscription services like Spotify that have been very successful (and are only being killed by unreasonably high royalty demands from labels). By your logic, Spotify should't even be a viable business, seeing as people can easily get their music for free without pirates even having to work around any authentication software. How precisely does your model of economics and behaviour account for that anomaly? Or the anomaly of Netflix competing with rampant free competition from pirates (again, slowly being pushed and killed off only by royalty rates demanded by studios, not seemingly by piracy)?

Even Valve with Steam (a service which offers DRM) say it's effectively pointless, and instead you should focus on building a good service that gives a reason for people to pay, like automatic updates, achievements, ease of use, voice chat, ability to chat with steam friends in-game (along with web browsing), their recently announced Steam TV service, etc..

“Having a connected platform on the PC is raising everything. Raising retail sales.”

Digital sales do NOT harm retail sales say Valve. When they have a free weekend, in this example with Day of Defeat, both types of sales – Steam and retail – spiked. In fact, 28% more unites were sold at retail than sold through Steam. “Startling” says Holtman. “We were just inviting people to play.”

14.38. “Rampant piracy is just unserved customers,” says Jason Holtman.

He then goes on to discuss the advantage of real-time sales data. It makes you “really smart” about what you can do with your game.

14.32. Steamworks, of course, is free. And this Holtman states, is essential. Anything else that would put a barrier in would take it away from the advantages of the PC.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/05 ... alve-live/


Does the fact they give you complete cross platform access to a game regardless of whether you bought it on Windows, Mac or PS3 mean the other versions effectively have zero value? After all, they give you versions that traditionally would have be bought separately, so surely they're just killing their own business and reducing money they can extract out of people, and to hold you logically consistent, that would be valuing the other versions given to the customer at - in your words - absolutely 0. Various games on Steam do not employ DRM, and many indies simply do not have the financial means to pay for the legal services to make legality of sharing their software any significant risk for pirates. What about the high profile examples of the Humble Indie Bundle's who have expressly chosen to "fight" easy, free distribution of their games (with no DRM or authentication required to stop them) by not doing anything about it other than offering their games at reasonable prices (whatever you want to pay, including 1p, which effectively gives $0 for them) and in a way that it's easy and convenient to get them? Are you honestly going to say the HiB success was solely due to being proprietary, considering Wolfire explicitly stated that source code and non-commercial free availability of their game (including being on getdeb.net) has not affected sales of Lugaru at all?

"We learned that open source software is still commercially viable. After open sourcing a number of games in the bundle, none of our sales were negatively affected."

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010 ... u-want.ars


Even if you take into account a true subscription service, the analysis leaves us nowhere near jumping to the conclusion that FOSS is dead in this area. In fact, we end up no worse off than a proprietary game publisher dealing with piracy and alternative game servers (which do exist for games like World of Warcraft, in fact), which by all reputable accounts you do so on the basis of:

1. Authenticity - Being the creator, originator, and someone you generally want to reward, both out of valuing the work they put into it and wanting to guarantee future development and content updates (hopefully of a similar quality).

2. Guaranteeing a good, reliable service that people will want to pay for e.g. long uptimes, low maintenance times, large player capacity, etc..

Your notion of the selfish consumer is fundamentally one dimensional, in that he evaluates things solely on price and thus will flock immediately to the provider who gives him the lowest. Nowhere n your account is there someone who considers even the 2 above basic things that any other consumer accounts for in their purchasing choices. This is the narrative pushed by every other major proprietary software producer/publisher, the major labels in music and the major studios in film, but it's one that has been regularly debunked time and time again by research into the effects of piracy and consumer reasoning for when they pirate and when they buy, It is also one debunked similarly in research into the behaviour of consumers of counterfeit goods and areas that don't benefit from strong or even any copyright and patent protection like food and fashion industries.

With FOSS however it is so vulnerable to competition even this isn't plausible. Even if you where to make income from a secondary source, there is nothing to stop someone else from doing the same, or even offering the same for free. While this is definitely Ok at a corporate scale for things like Android, it is nowhere near acceptable for a small (<10 devs) FOSS project. Consider a mmo-game that is FOSS and makes money from the online service they provide. While they can make money and the software is FOSS, anyone who didn't invest a dime can do the same. I could copy the mmo-game, setup a new server, and charge $5 less than the original developers. Heck, I could even offer the service for free. Either way it ruins their income. Either way the software's value is nil, and its the service provided that produces the income.


The simple fact is your analysis fails to consider that running an MMO service is nowhere near as simple as simply downloading the software. There are plenty of other barriers that forbid someone from doing so, not least of which the server and ISP costs, the continual maintenance required to keep the service running which takes up personal time, the ability for someone running a server to increase their capacity to deal with more simultaneous players amongst others, all of which are perfectly compelling reasons for a user to pay to have a well run, enjoyable experience. Half the reason you simply don't (in the real world) see < 10 man teams even attempt to take on an MMO is precisely because of high barriers to entry in the market for services that want to compete with WoW or even become remotely significant in the MMO market. Even with plenty public, free servers to choose from in many games (like FPS games for example), there are still servers that charge for access or privileges with little advantage (certainly little software advantage) over any other server operator, and still attract people to pay without even being creators or contributors to the game itself.
Last edited by Modplan Man on 24 Sep 2011, 21:23, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby oln » 24 Sep 2011, 21:20

I think you missed the whole MyEmail story. But kudos anyway.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby vexorian » 25 Sep 2011, 00:03

@Graphics vs innovation vs whatever discussion: What I notice is that a game may have cool graphics or be very innovative or not but most amateur games (FOSS or not) lack polish. I think that is usually the deal breaker.

For example:

- Feature creep. I am guilty of this. Adding features does not necessarily make a game better. There is a moment in which you have to stop. All the features of a game should work together to make the experience solid. Not to make a large list of things when describing your game.
- Inconsistent art: Your game may have a great art collection, but there should be a visual theme to follow. This is a big drawback of projects that are community-based, because there are many guys at work. If you take a look to Popcap, for example, each graphic in each of their games follows a palette and visual style. All zombies follow the same style. This is something that is hard to see in FOSS. For example Maryo Chronicles kind of gets very close to the goal, but then some Jelly fish with random particles pop up and they don't fit at all with the other characters.

What's ironic is that these two things that make games look like they have less quality are a direct result of the pursuit of the things that we usually believe bring quality to a game: Feature creep is the result of a misguided search for innovation, whilst art inconsistency comes from trying to get very cool art from as many sources as possible.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby mdwh » 25 Sep 2011, 12:43

I'm not saying it's not possible to make money from open source games, but I'm not sure about this bit:

Modplan Man {l Wrote}:Once again you conveniently ignore the existence of piracy in the proprietary market which provides exactly the same effect as you describe in your FOSS example, in which much software is widely available for free, where DRM is regularly ineffective, and threats of legal action are ignored as major publishers regularly shouting about how piracy is supposedly destroying their business.
It's different though - with non-open games, the only way to obtain it is downloading off bittorrent etc. With open source games, it is entirely legal for people, including companies, to stick up websites, to put it on download stores, to even sell it in stores. They can advertise it. If you are doing open source because you want more people to play your game, that's great; but if you're trying to make money, you can be facing legal competition from other people or companies. Now sure, you can argue that won't happen so much, but this is nothing like the situation with piracy.

It is also wrong to equate not-pirating with buying the "official" version. If I decide to not pirate something for whatever reasons (ethical reasons, not wanting to break the law, worried about viruses, wanting to have a nice CD and case), then this doesn't apply to open source, where I end up obtaining it elsewhere.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby FreakNigh » 25 Sep 2011, 19:39

I agree with modplan. The real world circumstances are effectively the same. And no it is not illegal everywhere to sell and distribute pirated software. These kinds of morals are only humored in richer first world countries. I'm living in india right now and spent some time in Nepal. They don't buy the official version of software here and trust me they are not morally ashamed (quite the opposite actually).

Money is a hard set real world issue and needs to thought within real world circumstances. Not flim flammy moral utopias and walls built with words. I think the real question is whether a typical unfunded FOSS development team can even make a game worth paying for.

Legally FOSS lets anyone essentially resell the source / executables. However people are going to buy it from whoever distributes and supports it best. This is almost always going to be the original developing group. If people are going to buy it, they aren't going to buy it from someone who just took it and is reselling it lol.

But yes if the piece of work becomes critical mass then you should expect official redistributers...

I think the philosophy behind FOSS is that a certain significant enough percentage of the users need to also be contributors. Thus it's development is supposed to be funded by a lot of "little" contributions instead of an organization getting paid. This is basically the reason I think FOSS and games may be unrealistic. Maybe the realistic means to reaching an open source game is to develop it and charge for it in conventional ways then after it is commercially strung out FOSS it and manage and help everyone else who wants to mod it.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby mdwh » 25 Sep 2011, 22:12

FreakNigh {l Wrote}:I agree with modplan. The real world circumstances are effectively the same. And no it is not illegal everywhere to sell and distribute pirated software. These kinds of morals are only humored in richer first world countries. I'm living in india right now and spent some time in Nepal. They don't buy the official version of software here and trust me they are not morally ashamed (quite the opposite actually).
I'm not sure how that changes my argument - if you're saying that no one buys the official version, then that's not arguing you can make money from open source; you're arguing that no one can make any money at all.

But of course, that's not what happens. Some people do buy the official version, and those "richer first world countries" still are enough of a market. But if suddenly you as a company are competing against anyone else giving your product away for free - seriously, I'm a great fan of open source, but it seems odd to claim that this would have no effect on sales.

I can walk into a shop and buy Linux - not from the people who actually wrote it. I can't just pop into Nepal and buy an unofficial version of a game.

Legally FOSS lets anyone essentially resell the source / executables. However people are going to buy it from whoever distributes and supports it best. This is almost always going to be the original developing group. If people are going to buy it, they aren't going to buy it from someone who just took it and is reselling it lol.
What if they take it and give it away for free?

Or, what if they do support it better, or do have better distribution? As I say, for those who want their product to be widely used, this isn't a problem in open source. But if your aim is only to make money from it, it may be an issue.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby vexorian » 25 Sep 2011, 22:26

If they support it better, well, so be it. Supporting something better means they are doing your job better and are spending resources on doing it. They are your competition and you slept it off.

If you are going to provide a service that is not competitive you will do badly, the free software license is not THE issue there.

As for the question "What if they take it and distributed it for free". When you are making free software, you want people to do it, because well, you probably thought of a business model that makes such action help you in your economic gain. Again, red hat exists, they distribute Fedora for free. CentOS, a competitor that does the same that Red Hat does using Red Hat's work as a starting point also appeared. And Red Hat manage to still make money through a service-based model. Since commercially-successful free software projects do exist, then I will claim that if free software games are not succeeding it is not because of the licenses.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby Modplan Man » 28 Sep 2011, 15:45

seriously, I'm a great fan of open source, but it seems odd to claim that this would have no effect on sales.


You don't need to take anyone's word for it, just look at the data. The SSRC piracy report details in depth various countries filled with both online and physical piracy as the norm, and how even in India, legitimate home-grown companies have competed very well with piracy. They've done so by doing exactly what the pirates do - low prices, early and wide availability, and they've reaped rewards in doing it. It even details how proprietary firms benefit from piracy, including even companies who have openly admitted it. This is something I've recently written about too:

http://somethingmild.blogspot.com/2011/ ... tware.html

There will always be some that never pay, but this is true regardless of whether you're talking about open source sharing or piracy. What you do is make it easy for people to support you. For others, you justify it in providing some other form of reward (e.g. simple merchandise as a bonus to say "I supported x project"), a continual service, or ways to build a closer connection with fans.

Various research on piracy and more general lessons on the wrong assumption that a monopoly is need to make money:

File-Sharing and Copyright - Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf

Channels & Conflict: Response to Digital Media Distribution, Impact on Sales and Internet Piracy (Youtube)

http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ippd-dppi. ... 01456.html

Against Intellectual Monopoly - written by 2 economists. Various other articles available at the site too.

Lessons from fashions free culture

Saying you can't compete with free is sating you can't compete, period

I'll also refer back to the example of Nina Paley, who has herself explicitly stated she made more money making her film CC-BY-SA (equivalent of GPL effectively) than she would have the "proprietary" route:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200908 ... 5986.shtml

http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution

Theoretically you could make more money the all rights reserved route, but this assumes you have the money and resources to fight legal battles against what data has shown time and time again are their own customers in most instances.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201107 ... dopi.shtml

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201107 ... stry.shtml

http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/21/study ... ore-music/
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby vexorian » 29 Sep 2011, 13:37

Open source has an effect in "sales", but it doesn't necessarily have a bad effect on "profit". In trying to commercialize FOSS, you need a different business model than the obsolete licensing fee one. That one doesn't even work for Microsoft anymore.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby MCMic » 07 Oct 2011, 11:02

Hey! Have you guys heard of https://elveos.org/ ?
What do you think of this system to finance free software development?
Do you think it can work for games?
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby KIAaze » 11 Oct 2011, 00:31

MCMic {l Wrote}:Hey! Have you guys heard of https://elveos.org/ ?
What do you think of this system to finance free software development?
Do you think it can work for games?

I am pretty sure I heard about a similar system before (the "bounty system" basically). Although I haven't used any such system yet, it is something I might do and I think it can work.
It can definitely work for Free software development and games. It's just a matter of popularity, user demand, available developer time and money needs.

In fact, it has been tried for Globulation! cf: http://cofundos.org/project.php?id=49 (I think there were other bounties as well at one point.)
Granted, this does not look like a successful example at the moment.
But the CC portrait fundraising worked for instance: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/131 ... b6554e12eb (although I cannot find all the 35 promised portraits... :/ )

Anyway, the reason I came here is because there is another idea I would like to submit: Creating a "FOSS humble bundle"
i.e. offering a bundle of FOSS games (and maybe apps) as a pay-what-you-want sale, with the option of supporting the FSF, Opengameart, etc. ^^
The games should obviously be complete, finished games.

Obviously there are some problems:
-Who would organize it? Who selects the games?
-Since most FOSS games have a lot of contributors, with very varying degrees of contribution, who does the money go to?
-Do they need the money? What will they use it for? (because unlike indie devs, I think most FOSS devs don't work full time on their projects and also not with goal of making money from it)

In fact, it would probably be more like a common one-time fundraising operation than a "sale", but it might be worth it.

(P.S.: The reason I'm suggesting this is because I am considering lowering my HIB contributions and giving money to some FOSS projects instead. :)
It would be nice if the HIB had a guarantee of open-sourcing games once a certain amount of money is reached, but that's not the case.)
Last edited by KIAaze on 02 Apr 2013, 10:34, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby MCMic » 11 Oct 2011, 14:20

Yeah, the idea of a FOSS Bundle is in the mind of a lot of Free Game developers I think.
I think it could work, even if it is not the more logical way of earning money (game devs should earn money gradually as they develop the game, not a lot amount of money in one time - one weeks for humble indie bundles).

In the second humble indie bundle, a game had been put under a free license a week after its release, at the end of the bundle operation. The next step is to release it at the beginning of the bundle operation!
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby Xavier Antoviaque » 11 Oct 2011, 16:17

Agreed, would be very nice to see a Free Software Humble Bundle. Where do we sign KIAaze? ;)

To contribute my 5 cents to the conversation, here is our take on building profitable games:
  • Freemium model - a multiplayer game hosted on a server. By allowing users to retrieve their data and making server code free software too, users aren't locked in, but we rather end up competing on the level of service. The "main" developers definitely have an edge here, in terms of ability to follow player's need, solve technical issues, brand recognition...
  • Freemium doesn't say *what* you're selling though, other than the fact that it's about paying for non-mandatory extras. For a card game we're building for example, this translates into "selling" extra card decks for a price - you can play with the basic deck, but if you run out of ideas about the base deck, you can buy another one. The incentive is high to not make this "extra" art available under a free license (freedom), though.
  • To try to keep all art free, there is the option of mixing in with other models, like the ransom-like model here (ie the card becomes free after X people have paid for it) or to try to integrate it more to the game mechanisms (you get a card if you can win against someone who "owned" the card on this server - if a competitor tries to make all cards available for cheaper or free, it will still attract users, but also lessen the interest of the game on that specific server, since the perceived value of owning a card would be lessened there => Magic The Gathering model).
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby DangerOnTheRanger » 14 Oct 2011, 04:53

I see commercialization as one of the biggest obstacles to mainstream FOSS adoption. We programmers have to make money somehow, and unless someone comes up with a method of FOSS distribution that allows developers to actually make a living producing FOSS software (and only FOSS software), me and a lot of other people are still going to create at least some proprietary applications. I personally think the idea of making the artwork CC-BY-NC or similar, but keeping the code free, is a good idea, though some people think that doesn't qualify as FOSS; but personally I think it does, since there is nothing preventing someone from making a CC-BY(-SA) art pack. I noticed a lot of the ideas in this thread are focused on MMOs. We need to keep in mind that many games (especially FOSS ones) aren't MMOs, and such ideas aren't even applicable to non-game software, like an office suite.

My thoughts/opinions, that I listed in this post, lead me to wonder how many people on this forum actually write software for a living, and out of those people, how many write FOSS software and only FOSS software for a living. Could we have a poll to see? I ask because I wonder whether writing FOSS software for a living is a sustainable practice. I would absolutely love it if it were so, but I'm not sure it is. Don't get me wrong - I love FOSS - but I have to keep a roof over my head as well.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby charlie » 14 Oct 2011, 09:43

Unfortunately in FOSS gaming, I think making money will be the exception rather than the rule.

Yes, it is possible. No, it won't happen for most of us. What makes FOSS interesting is that people do it out of passion.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby DangerOnTheRanger » 14 Oct 2011, 15:29

charlie {l Wrote}:Unfortunately in FOSS gaming, I think making money will be the exception rather than the rule.

Yes, it is possible. No, it won't happen for most of us. What makes FOSS interesting is that people do it out of passion.


That is true, but what that means is most of us will have to earn money another way, and that is probably proprietary software, unfortunately.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby charlie » 14 Oct 2011, 15:44

Some people do other jobs altogether. Not all FOSS programmers are software engineers.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby DangerOnTheRanger » 14 Oct 2011, 16:15

charlie {l Wrote}:Some people do other jobs altogether. Not all FOSS programmers are software engineers.


That is also true. But I, like most software engineers, would prefer to get a job programming (since that is what I love to do), and it looks like the only way to do that is write proprietary software. I'm also guessing at least the majority of FOSS developers have day jobs writing proprietary software.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby FreakNigh » 14 Oct 2011, 20:16

I know of only dwarf fortress that is free and pays it's bills with donations. However it is not open source.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby qubodup » 12 Nov 2011, 10:40

From http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questi ... ource-game comes a list of short answers to 'how to make money with an open source game?':

  • Distributions of the source: Build versions of the source code, tools, etc that people can work with. If they are modifying the source themselves then this won't help them, but if they just want to include a dll for example, this can simply things especially if your build process is complex. Another options is to sell incremental revisions of the source and open source previous versions.
  • Art, Basic Levels, etc: As mentioned above, providing art resources and building block maps, objects, and other assets simplify development for others.
  • Server Rental: If your game is an open source multiplayer game, you can rent out time on servers you run. This makes supporting the game easier for people building off of your game, and ensures stability (this relies on you of course) for multiplayer games.
  • Advertising: A no brainer, advertising on your site and support forums could earn you something
  • Support: While I generally view selling support as evil, perhaps selling room in online training sessions, access to advanced tutorials, or "1 on 1"-ish support wouldn't be so bad (likely more like 1-or-2-on-team but hopefully you get the idea).
  • Microtransactions: You could sell content in game, or only provide certain content in the "premium" version of the game that YOU built. People building off of the game would have to either go without said content or pay you to include it.
  • Commercial Licences: While your game could be open sourced for non-commerical purposes, you could require that you be paid a certain amount or a cut of the profits for people planning to sell derivatives of your work.
  • Promotional Items: If your game gets popular enough, you could sell T-Shirts, etc relating to the original game.
  • Sponsorship Period: Following along the lines of point 1, you could sell the game for a certain amount of time and THEN open source it.
  • Donations: Simple--ask for donations to your project (this would probably look bad if you were doing too many of the other things but it may be worth a shot).
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby xahodo » 06 May 2012, 07:44

The whole issue with free software games is that you can't make a profit from it directly. That's where most games get their profits from: direct profit (i.e. you go to the shop and buy the game). Free software games must have it from server accounts.

Paying for software doesn't always end up happening directly. The software's development time always ends up being paid for, otherwise the project isn't worth the development in the first place.

With most software you can generate an income from indirect profit, as there are businesses who want their users educated and the software maintained. Perhaps they will even ask you to develop additional functionality.

Now, with games the number of services you can provide are quite limited. Nobody is interested in an education for your game. So, a complete free software path is difficult and very uncertain.

That does not mean impossible. A game company could (as I outlined in this thread) provide "official" servers, which makes life easier on the players and has certain guarantees. Now, payment could be extracted for access to the servers. There you have it. The servers needn't be that expensive and development of the software gets paid (as the company gets paid). This is a drive for the developers to keep improving the game (to keep the players paying for the servers).

Another option is getting paid to develop the game (basically get an order for a specific peace of software). This is what happens most of the time with special purpose office software.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby KIAaze » 19 Oct 2012, 22:55

Two new Flattr-like services, both interesting because they actually offer a libre software platform to set up your own tipping service:
Gittip:
https://www.gittip.com/ (code: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com)
Librement (Still under development, the author only learned about Gittip after starting it. I don't know if he will continue it or join Gittip development.):
http://librement.net/ (code: https://github.com/rhertzog/librement/ )
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby Evropi » 06 Dec 2012, 15:13

Just wondering. why don't people ever recommend straight-up selling the source code and executable versions in these types of topics? It is allowed in all open source licenses as far as I know.
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Re: Is it possible to make money?

Postby charlie » 06 Dec 2012, 15:27

Evropi {l Wrote}:Just wondering. why don't people ever recommend straight-up selling the source code and executable versions in these types of topics? It is allowed in all open source licenses as far as I know.

You're referring to 'shared source' no? Allow those who buy your software to see the source.

If the source is not publicly available, then it can not be considered open source.

Then there's the difference between open source and Free software...
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