List of Free game development related patreons

[Julius]

I thought it would be nice to start a list of open-source game development related Patreon pages that seem worthy of support.

Please post additional suggestions, with a category and a short summary text why.

If you are thinking about starting your own Patreon page feel free to reply as well, although please have a look at https://liberapay.com/ as an alternative especially if you are EU based.

Here are some as a start (random order):

Game engine related:
https://www.patreon.com/godotengine
Fund a full time developer for the awesome Godot Engine

https://www.patreon.com/Areloch
Probably the most active developer of Torque3D MIT (very new Patreon, show him some love )

Libre art assets:
https://www.patreon.com/opengameart
Funds the running of OpenGameArt.org

https://www.patreon.com/Yughues
Creates a lot of great 3D environmental game assets

https://www.patreon.com/clintbellanger
Nice assets and the guy behind FLARE, funds only charged when assets are release (none lately)

https://www.patreon.com/justinnichol
Very nice concept art and sometimes 3D assets, payment also only per design.

https://www.patreon.com/quaternius
A lot of CC0 low-poly 3D assets

https://www.patreon.com/kenney
All sorts on nice (placeholder?) art for game development

[eugeneloza]

Game engine related:
https://www.patreon.com/castleengine
Michalis Kamburelis - the developer of Castle Game Engine for FreePascal/Lazarus.

[Duion]

https://www.patreon.com/duion

[BBmine]

Game engine related:
Minetest developer donation.
https://www.minetest.net/development/#donate

Note by moderator: fixed link. seems like there is no easy way to directly link to a paypal email as a link.

[Julius]

https://www.patreon.com/qreeves
Edit: see new link below.
Lead developer of Red Eclipse (recently ported the Tesseract renderer back to RE)

[qreeves]

For me and Red Eclipse, use http://redeclipse.net/patreon and http://redeclipse.net/paypal

[Julius]

Ok cool. US $15/month for a webserver and master server though (current Red Eclipse Patreon goal)? Quite expensive, when a VPS for less than US $5/month would easily do.

[qreeves]

We've actually moved most of our stuff to GitHub so that's fairly out of date as of the end of December 2017. It'll actually cost me $19.99 a month if I want to keep the oauth.io integration (which I'm currently trialling for GitHub API access) but that is a luxury we can do without. Mostly we just need a VPS to do the master server and URL forwarding now, but previously we needed more disk and bandwidth quotas due to hosting our own distribution methods.

UPDATE: I've fixed the Patreon page now

[O01eg]

https://www.patreon.com/citybound - Promising city-simulation game.

[Julius]

Game engine related:

https://www.patreon.com/armory

Creators of the Armory3D Blender Game Engine and the ArmorPaint PBR painter app.

[Wuzzy]

This should perhaps be turned into a wiki page to become more useful.

I'm too lazy to do it myself, maybe someone else is more motivated.

[Julius]

We could turn this into some sort of aggregated planet with Wiki on the social.freegamedev.net Hubzilla.
Someone would need to implement Patreon to RSS bridging in RSS-Bridge though (See: https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/issues/1024 should be relatively easy), or I need to experiment with this: https://github.com/daemionfox/patreon-feed

[Jastiv]

Wograld (multi-player online roleplaying game) Development
https://www.patreon.com/jastiv

[Wuzzy]

Does GoFundMe count?

VanessaE, a well-known contributor to the Minetest project, has a GoFundMe page, apparently they have lost their home and now are asking for help:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/5pqdb-help-me-move
https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=22462

[drummyfish]

art: https://www.patreon.com/cethiel (very nice 2D assets, HD art for patreons, posts lower res on OGA as CC0)

[Julius]

art: https://www.patreon.com/cethiel (very nice 2D assets, HD art for patreons, posts lower res on OGA as CC0)

Wow, this guy is creating some seriously cool stuff! What about the licensing of the higher resolution works only accessible for supporters? Is it still libre licensed and could be used in a game project, or are only the lower resolution works shared on OGA freely licensed?

[drummyfish]

I think the high resolution cannot be licensed as free, because then any supporter could reshare them at OGA... by definition, the terms of use of the high resolution must discriminate against non-patreons, which will make them non-free. But it would be best to ask Cethiel himself to confirm this.

[Julius]

I think the high resolution cannot be licensed as free, because then any supporter could reshare them at OGA... by definition, the terms of use of the high resolution must discriminate against non-patreons, which will make them non-free. But it would be best to ask Cethiel himself to confirm this.

Could in theory, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. This is similar to GPL projects that only distribute source to.customers.
Yughues for example even licenses his for pay stuff on the unity asset store freely. So far no problems I think, but he also doesn't advertise this widely.

Edit: got a response here: https://opengameart.org/content/tileable-dirt-textures

The license is the same for every HD files on Patreon, everything is in CC0, but for now, the textures on Patreon and on OpenGameArt are the same 512x512 textures ; that's why you can download them here too for free.

I will work on high resolution textures later, that's why if you're only interested by the actual textures, you should wait before supporting me.

[drummyfish]

Interesting, I am confused by the answer still, not sure if that really means all his HDs are CC0 as well? I think providing something under CC0, which is advertised as exclusive to the supporters, could make them feel "cheated". Indeed I'd be very glad to have the HD versions under CC0, but at the same time I don't want Cethiel to lose his supporters... or someone "cheat" him by reposting the HDs.

I myself sell my own models (only the ones that are completely my original work) at Turbosquid, while also posting them at OGA and Blendswap as CC0 I don't even hide it, I do it to make a bit money for my work by taking them from people who have so much of them that they buy blindly and can't be bothered to check the free repositories first. I don't see any problem whatsoever with this approach.

However I think anyone who distributes a GPL program (v2 or v3) without providing the source is violating the GPL. From Wikipedia article on GPL:

The fourth section for version 2 of the license and the seventh section of version 3 require that programs distributed as pre-compiled binaries be accompanied by a copy of the source code, a written offer to distribute the source code via the same mechanism as the pre-compiled binary, or the written offer to obtain the source code that the user got when they received the pre-compiled binary under the GPL.

[Julius]

Sure, but the key point is the "distribution". If you only distribute to your customers you also only need to give the source code to your customers.

On a different note, on Patreon you are supporting the artist not purchasing a product. So in theory no one should feel cheated... but yeah that's the theory and the way Patreon (or Kickstarter or that matter) are set up certainly muddles the water in that regard.

[SteveSmith]

Can I add my patreon? https://www.patreon.com/stevesmith

All my open worth-looking-at open source is here: https://my-open-source-code.blogspot.co ... -page.html

[onpon4]

I reopened my Patreon page recently:

https://www.patreon.com/diligentcircle

It's a bit more general now than it used to be, including card games and possibly board games if I ever make any of those. But as before, all video game development stuff is libre open source.

[mdtrooper]

With the new year, I started a Patreon too.

It is in https://www.patreon.com/migueldedios. And it is small (at the moment) and has messy articles in spanish an english.

I want do a blog of projects or works and I don't want sell private content. I will try each month write something about free software / free content which I am coding or fixing or working or wathever...

[Jazek86794444]

This should perhaps be turned into a wiki page to become more useful.

I'm too lazy to do it myself, maybe someone else is more motivated.

[Wuzzy]

Well, here goes nothing.

I don't have a Patreon page, but I have a Bitcoin wallet now. If you like what I do, feel free to give me a tip.
My Bitcoin address: 17fsUywHxeMHKG41UFfu34F1rAxZcrVoqH

My portfolio: I am one of the main developers of Hedgewars and author of countless mods for Minetest, and even a few games for Minetest (most of them are, I have to admit, forks). I also contributed a large amount of tracks for Stunt Rally, most of them have made it into the official game. When I'm not programming, I'm often helping translating libre games into German, including Xonotic, Widelands, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, 0 A.D., SuperTux, SuperTuxKart, FLARE and more. But of course, I'm also playing a lot of video games myself.