Is it possible to make money?

[charlie]

I'd be interested to hear about what kind of revenue Wolfire is generating from their Overgrowth pre-orders.

http://blog.wolfire.com/

[qubodup]

When I was working on a presentation < http://opendevmarketing.blogspot.com/ > I asked them, but they didn't want to tell yet.

They have plans to share revenue information in the future. Or at least preorder numbers.

I got a reply from Natural Selection 2's developer though and Amnesia's developers shared their info as well (just google amnesia sales figures or something)

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

Amnesia   Feb 2010   0   pre-order start
Amnesia   May 2010   2,000   
Amnesia   Oct 2010   36,000   
Amnesia   Jan 2011   200,000   

NS2       Oct 2009   $220,000   
NS2       Jan 2011   $802,000 (23,000)   

Note: NS2 is playable but not complete, just like Overgrowth. However I think NS2 is more playable than Overgrowth + it's centered about multiplayer (at least right now)

E-mail (Jan 8, 2011): "We are now up to $802k in 22,937 copies (as of this e-mail). We have gotten funding from angel investors and through pre-sales through our community but our pre-sales have outweighed the investment at this point (and continue helping us going forward). The 10k units only counts units sold in the closed beta (and we haven't hit that yet but we're close).

That's fine if you want to publish this data for your talk or to the public. I know how frustrating it was to need data like this when we were starting the company and not being able to find it anywhere. Good luck."

[qubodup]

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I have to make sure this link appears in this thread Fundry is a feature tracker with crowdfunding functions. I wrote about this before in a blog post. It's kind of Ardour's system

[FreakNigh]

Sorry for my ignorance I don't know much about Minecraft. But since it is Java it is sudo open source. How does Minecraft make money?

[charlie]

By being bought.

[qubodup]

But since it is Java it is sudo open source.

sudo? you mean quasi?

The license is not an open source one. The source code is visible but that doesn't make a big difference for sales, since redistributing and using the code are all illegal.

[FreakNigh]

Okay well still when it comes to making money the issue is still the same. The source is out there. They are making money on a game in which the source is out there for others to redistribute. So I ask how exactly are they going about it? Exactly how... Not "money is exchanged"... Thanks but no shit and you've wasted more then just my time with that.

It's been awhile since I've had to deal with people more interested if sudo or quasi was the right word used then the important topic at hand. Or people more interested in trashing the thread then moving forward.

Under your argument we could make money simply by giving the whole game for free with source etc so long as the license said you have to pay before you use it. Is that exactly how they are making money? ... Legalities are never an issue for someone who wants to play the game for free. Nor would you EVER sue or bother to get them in trouble. It's an entire honor system.

[charlie]

It's been awhile since I've had to deal with people more interested if sudo or quasi was the right word used then the important topic at hand. Or people more interested in trashing the thread then moving forward.

Oh, you mean people interested in facts and the difference between illegal and legal?

It's a while since I've had to deal with somebody who only gives a **** about their own opinion and what they perceive, and everything else is disregarded. No, wait, that's every day on the Internet.

\o/

[charlie]

But since it is Java it is sudo open source.

sudo? you mean quasi?

The license is not an open source one. The source code is visible but that doesn't make a big difference for sales, since redistributing and using the code are all illegal.

And only Internet pirates disregard copyright law. Businesses must abide by them, and the majority of game sales are done through businesses, believe it or not. If somebody else were to start selling/distributing Minecraft in violation of the license, they are not just bad human beings for taking credit for somebody elses work, but they are liable should they exist in the Western world.

Of course they could live somewhere that copyright law does not exist or is not implementable.

[qubodup]

words

What? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudo is the only meaning I know of sudo. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sudo
[edit] oh wait. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.p ... id=2825713

Okay well still when it comes to making money the issue is still the same. The source is out there. They are making money on a game in which the source is out there for others to redistribute. So I ask how exactly are they going about it? Exactly how... Not "money is exchanged"... Thanks but no shit and you've wasted more then just my time with that.

It is possible to distribute it illegally.

Games are being distributed illegally but publishers still make money. The source doesn't really matter for the making-money step as long as nobody takes the source and tries to compete, pretending do it legally.

Here's an article about a game that has free source and closed assets and how somebody who did not own the rights to the assets tried to sell it.

Under your argument we could make money simply by giving the whole game for free with source etc so long as the license said you have to pay before you use it.

No that doesn't work. What does work though is giving a game with source and rights to redistribute/modify/etc after you get paid. See
http://sleepisdeath.net/ and
http://insideastarfilledsky.net/

Is that exactly how they are making money? ... Legalities are never an issue for someone who wants to play the game for free. Nor would you EVER sue or bother to get them in trouble. It's an entire honor system.

I think you might be misunderstanding something about minecraft.

There is a free version called "minecraft classic" (MC) and there is "minecraft" (+"beta" or something).

You can play MC for free. You have to pay before you can play minecraft.

If you want to play Minecraft for free, you have to got to a torrent site and download it there, just like people do with non-indie titles.

[FreakNigh]

Okay I'm just saying they by circumstance happen to be making good money with a situation fairly similar to something that could be used in a foss project, or at least an open source project. If you abstract their situation a little bit you can see what over laps.

Do you two understand that you run a foss developers forum and I'm about as foss developer as you get? Lay the love off. I don't even want your responses if this is all you can say. There appear to be a lot of intelligent foss developers here how about you let them talk amongst themselves? This place is a shithole if every time you two see something your not sure about you have to butt in and be ignorant facehats.

[charlie]

Okay I'm just saying they by circumstance happen to be making good money with a situation fairly similar to something that could be used in a foss project, or at least an open source project. If you abstract their situation a little bit you can see what over laps.

But it is not similar at all. You don't seem to understand things. Minecraft is not FOSS. If it were FOSS, other people could easily hijack and redistribute it for free legally and it would appear everywhere (all those annoying download sites, and game sites) and the sales model would not work at all.

[FreakNigh]

Okay lets say you can't even download Minecraft without paying. And lets pretend that Minecraft intentionally comes with its source (intentionally / unintentionally not being the important point). And they make good money.

This means, licenses aside, if you bundled your exe with your source and simply made it so they couldn't download without paying then you can take by example that you can make money with this approach.

For me that would be an atomic revelation because all I need to do is do what Minecraft does but give the source that comes with it a GPL license.

So do they charge for the very download... or have an online login requirement to even play offline... registration key... I dunno. Was just hoping someone would see what I was getting at and happened to know so we could just run with it. That or I'd just get an answer.

[sireus]

For me that would be an atomic revelation because all I need to do is do what Minecraft does but give the source that comes with it a GPL license.

Uhm... you're not allowed to do that, simply speaking. I'm willing to bet their EULA forbids redistributing the source.
It's actually not much of a difference whether you get the source code with the (for-sale, non-redistributable) game or not. In both cases, the game can be given to others (unless it has DRM or some shit), and in both cases, that's illegal.

[amuzen]

If you sell open source licensed code, you technically only have one guaranteed sale. The first buyer can legally upload the package to a free download site, after which anyone can legally obtain it for free. If you use a non-open source license, every legal copy is a sale.

Whether a significant number of people would feel morally obliged to compensate you despite there not being a legal obligation is another matter. Because the guilt potential is lower, I'd imagine that the percentage of people who take it for free would be higher than the percentage of people who pirate proprietary games. It's all speculation, though, because I'm not aware of any statistics about this.

[charlie]

If you sell open source licensed code, you technically only have one guaranteed sale. The first buyer can legally upload the package to a free download site, after which anyone can legally obtain it for free. If you use a non-open source license, every legal copy is a sale.

This, which is the bit that FreakNigh does not seem to understand. You sell it once, and then it can be spread for free, legally. That app you had on android market for £1.99? Somebody sticks it up for £0.99, somebody else for £0.49, then before you know it people can get it for free on the market, and you make nothing.

I have thought about this a fair bit over the years. The only way I can see making money selling a GPL title is if you make the source / SVN easily downloadable apart from a few platform specific bits. Allow people to easily build it on their PCs as per the GPL, but keep closed e.g. Android port code or Steam deployment code or Mac OS X build files or whatever, but you can only be long-term successful if you withhold something. Also you would probably need to get a trademark to protect the brand.

You could offer to release the platform-specific ports once you reach certain milestones e.g. after £50,000 or something fairly substantial.

A different angle on this is the episodic releases where the engine and 1st episode is free, such as Steel Storm. Although that's quite close to the shareware model.

[StudioFortress]

Sorry for my ignorance I don't know much about Minecraft. But since it is Java it is sudo open source. How does Minecraft make money?

I've not played Minecraft, but do you mean because it's trivial to decompile? That doesn't make it open source to me, and there is nothing to stop you making this process much more difficult. Just writing a Java application it in a different JVM language makes it _much_ less trivial to decompile.

Getting back on topic, I feel most of the business plans provided in this topic do not leverage being open source. Most of them would work just as well, or better, if the game was closed source. But money is made through open source software by plenty of non-games companies, like Google with Android, and they do so by taking advantage of the benefits of FOSS (smart phone companies can tailor Android to their needs, which in turn helps to drive users to use their services). That is really the crux of it, what is being open source going to bring you that you could not get with a closed source model?

The way I see it, being open source only interests a small niche of developers: those who want to use your code. Unless you can find a way of translating that to be applicable to a large majority of users, who have a reason to give you money, then I don't see any gain from providing an open-source game over closed-source. For example again with Android, companies building smart phones can re-use the Android to develop a smart phone in less time, which in turn is sold to millions of users.

[FreakNigh]

From my experience open source means you might see a port, or a few trivial bug fixes from the community. Otherwise they'll take it and either do simple things like remove features or build a few hacks. It has to be a big deal before you'll see forks and real developers getting involved unless you have them from the beginning. Open source from my perspective means securing the future of the game and making it available for more platforms. Also maybe inspiring people to learn how to program.

Even though you don't have full source, or it maybe obfuscated etc. You would still be able to fairly easily remove any security checks and redistribute the game for free under ground. The free redistributing part being the main issue when someone thinks they can't make money with a game and have the source available.

[charlie]

Even though you don't have full source, or it maybe obfuscated etc. You would still be able to fairly easily remove any security checks and redistribute the game for free under ground. The free redistributing part being the main issue when someone thinks they can't make money with a game and have the source available.

You could also break in to the home of that old lady neighbour of yours whilst she does her groceries and steal stuff she won't notice. But you wouldn't.

Stop going on about how you can decompile or hack or do other illegal stuff with games - Java or otherwise. It is not relevant.

[FreakNigh]

Hey people do that. Because why? They were able to and it was their preferred choice. And I don't think they're paying.

I thought I already charlie proofed my comment when I went out of my way to say "The free redistributing part being the main issue".

[xahodo]

Well, you could always provide a trial period in which the game could be free to play online. After that trial period the player should start paying money to get online access.

For an mmo it is obvious that everything is stored online and all activity is online, so you can get away with more (say €10 p/m). If only part of the game is online (convenient online data storage, extra content or multiplayer access) you can get away with a lot less (about €3 p/m). The latter is so much lower because there is less incentive to go online.

You could also sell some nice boxes containing the game and some nice extras (say a paper map, a printed manuel, things like that). Asking for donations for continued availability of the game could also help. Perhaps players who donated some money (above €5, perhaps) could receive some perks (extra upgrade points, to a certain limit (for example)).

You could also do it as D&D online does it. Give some content away, have the players pay for the rest with points which they can either collect by playing OR by paying some money.

[MyEmail]

There are only a handful of ways a FOSS project can make some $$, but none of them are guaranteed, and none of them will generate near as much $$ as a closed-source commercial project would.

The very nature of FOSS is to be "free". The very nature of making money is to be "not free". "Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)" and "making money" are by nature incompatible. This entire argument is covered in the comments in here: http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2011/06/s ... -game.html

[FreakNigh]

Well then maybe the idea of "FOSS" is a fallacy because nothing is free, the time it took to develop those projects was at the $$$ expense of the developer if not someone else.

I don't think the goal here is to make something free and paid for at the same time. The goal is to get your returns and maybe some more to invest on open source software. And if we have to stop calling it FOSS then so be it.

But like I said to call anything "FOSS" is a lie anyways.

[Knitter]

The very nature of FOSS is to be "free". The very nature of making money is to be "not free". "Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)" and "making money" are by nature incompatible.

The "free" is from freedom and never from price. Stop confusing one with the other. I used to develop free software, as in freedom, and I was paid to do it. The company that sells the software was one of the most successful company in the FLOSS development in 2008 and is still in business selling free software.

Making money from free software is not only possible, is something that is real and there are several companies that do so and have great profits, the fact that not everyone can do it is not the same as to say that it's impossible or incompatible. I continue to develop free software and I'm creating my business model around FLOSS.

Games are no different and there are several ways to make money from them, most of which have already been mentioned here some others could be used but the inability to use them doesn't translate to them being invalid. If any FLOSS game development team puts some effort into it it's possible to generate revenue from the development, but it's like proprietary games: you need to invest a lot to get any revenue and your investment needs to be in time and money.

I don't deny the fact that most games are developed by teams with no knowledge of marketing, business or any of the areas that are needed to successfully take a product and make it sell, and that's probably the biggest obstacle. That and the fact that most current FLOSS game projects seem outdated when compared to proprietary games that are released today.

I colaborate and follow a few FLOSS games, most are similar to games that I played in 2000, look at OpenDungeons (when was dungeon keeper release?), Red Eclipse, FreeCol, FreeCiv, SuperTux Kart (I played a game with better graphics in 1999), Warsow is fallowing Quake style... I could go on but I think you get the idea. The games are great, I don't deny that, but they don't sell in their current state and their user base is very limited.

As an example, playing Wesnoth on the iPhone is way better than playing it in the PC. It's the same game, but in the iOS platform it goes along the same lines as the proprietary alternatives, in the PC it just looks outdated. I can easily sell the iOS version but I have trouble getting anyone to play the desktop version.

Given my experience I don't think the problem with FLOSS games is in the fact that most people expect them to be gratis, it's the fact that most teams don't have the necessary resources, both in time, money and man power, to properly invest in monetizing the projects. The availability of the code is not a problem, people are rarely interested in the code of a game, even those that start forks or want to grab an existing game's code will have to invest a lot of time to understand the code base and that makes most of them give up.

Well, it's my view and it's worth what views are (nothing ). Still after reading the topic and the opinions given I feel that most never tried to develop a product and place it in the market, it's not easy even if the project has huge fundings and in the end it doesn't matter if the model if FLOSS or proprietary, buyers for the most part don't care less about that. My point is: the problem is not in FLOSS, as far as business is concerned, FLOSS faces the same problems as proprietary software, the problem is in the teams developing.

Regards,

Knitter

[MyEmail]

Well then maybe the idea of "FOSS" is a fallacy because nothing is free, the time it took to develop those projects was at the $$$ expense of the developer if not someone else.

You misconstrued my words. The entire premise of this thread is the money made from the invested development time, not the invested development time. The thesis of my post was that the nature of FOSS projects being "free" prevents money from being made off of the invested development time.

I don't think the goal here is to make something free and paid for at the same time.

Lets take a look at your next sentence: "The goal is to get your returns and maybe some more to invest on open source software." Is that not a form of "paying" for the software? You just renamed it to softer words, eg "invest", "returns", etc.

The "free" is from freedom and never from price.

"free" as in "freedom" is in all cases "free from price". You are confusing the ability to make revenue with that of the monetary value of the "FOSS-ed" software. You can make $$ from a FOSS project (granted it is very limited and hard to do), but the actual software is still free.

Consider a FOSS MMO game. The MMO-client is 100% free and FOSS, but a fee is charged for the online services. The monetary value of the actual "software" is nill, but revenue is generated by providing the online services.

Lets use google and the vp8 codec for a different example. Google makes its $$ from online services, the one for this example being YouTube. It was more beneficial for Google to release VP8 as FOSS (+patent grant) in order to promote YouTube, then it was to make money from licensing VP8. Again, the actual "software" is 100% free and FOSS, but income is made from a secondary source (YouTube).

is something that is real and there are several companies that do so and have great profits

List please? Once we have the list we will compare the yearly revenue of said companies to their commercial counterparts.

I continue to develop free software and I'm creating my business model around FLOSS.

If that really is true, then I tip my hat too you. I also say good luck, because your gonna need it :P. All it takes is one jerk to rip you off and your ruined. Don't believe me? Read this post: http://xeno.planetxonotic.com/forum/vie ... ?id=150%29

I don't deny the fact that most games are developed by teams with no knowledge of marketing, business or any of the areas that are needed to successfully take a product and make it sell, and that's probably the biggest obstacle. That and the fact that most current FLOSS game projects seem outdated when compared to proprietary games that are released today

While I would generally agree with this statement, I would also imply that developing a FOSS-commercial game is considerably harder than that of commercial development because of the limitations being FOSS imposes on projects, which is why it is as you said "a big obstacle".

I would also disagree in that the marketing of the software is harder than the actual development. In fact, most FOSS projects don't even make it to the marketing stage because the development stage is so hard.

Given my experience I don't think the problem with FLOSS games is in the fact that most people expect them to be gratis, it's the fact that most teams don't have the necessary resources, both in time, money and man power, to properly invest in monetizing the projects.

Correction, its not that people don't have the time, its that people don't invest the time. If FOSS projects could be commercialized as if it where a real commercial project (payed employees and everything), the time wouldn't be an issue. But because in most cases FOSS projects can't be commercialized they suffer from the lack of resources, time, and man power because no one will invest the time to a non-guaranteed and risky project.

And that goes for "money", "man power", etc as well.

I feel that most never tried to develop a product and place it in the market

That's definitely not the case with me .

My point is: the problem is not in FLOSS, as far as business is concerned, FLOSS faces the same problems as proprietary software, the problem is in the teams developing.

And the problems the teams receive are those imposed by it being FLOSS, which again leads to the fact that FLOSS is the problem .