> Remind me, which Ferengi Rule of Acquisition is this?

You made my morning with this quip.

> Remind me, which Ferengi Rule of Acquisition is this?

Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition

How about #59: "Free advice is seldom cheap." Because you're basically saying that there's no such thing as free, and it's simply an 'unclarified financial contract to be consolidated at a later time.' Quark would approve! If I'm paying for a friend's lunch it's because I want to, not because I expect anything from him in the future. And beyond that, I do not consider downloading something somebody has released for free as establishing a relationship.

> You've created a logical justification for a myopic, misanthropic world view.

Nobody said it wouldn't be nice, but that it does not confer "obligation". This is the key word. I would argue a world where people do things because they want to, and not because they feel they have to, would actually generally be a nicer world to live in.

> Many find reciprocation important in a relationship.

Yes, and those sorts of relationships aren't really built on much if a gift obligates the other to repay. Why even buy lunch then? It just becomes this back and forth obligation and it is wearing and actually erodes the relationship slightly, if anything. I would argue a true gift is one that does not obligate the other party to reciprocate. That does NOT mean it would not be a decent thing to do something nice (for the other person OR someone else), but just that it is not obligated. The person should not feel a weight to do so. Once this weight is lifted, it is actually very freeing, and it strengthens the relationship, if anything.

> There's not much argument to be had.

Yes, there's no argument because you're incapable of coming up with an argument because you don't have anything to base it on. You're just responding emotionally and trying to slander them because you know that they made a good point and you hate that.

> You've created a logical justification for a myopic, misanthropic world view.

It is neither. It is a quite reasonable worldview that the vast majority of the population subscribes to and finds rather acceptable.

> Many find reciprocation important in a relationship.

This is a non-answer, because you know that the answer is "no", but you can't bear to say it because that would be admitting that your position is inconsistent, yet you can't assert that the answer is "yes" because that's obviously insane.

Thank you for so eloquently refuting all of your own arguments.

If there's an obligation, then it want really a gift.

>but if you're in the top 1% of benefactors of this pro bono work, you have the opportunity to do some good and make sure that others

Including, of course, oneself. Keeping the project you depend on running is good business.

If every gift one gives out comes with a moral obligation, it'd be pretty selfish to give gifts.

There is no moral obligation, either - that’s my point. They chose to give it away for free. It’s the author’s explicit decision that there is no obligation placed on recipients.

Giving a fake gift that comes with unspoken strings attached (and “keeping score” in your head) is the passive-aggressive, immoral act. If reciprocity is expected, it is definitionally not a gift.

Releasing software under a free software license is a choice to give a gift to the world. If the author wanted moral obligation strings attached, the license would say that.

> Someone built this and is letting you have it. For free.

That's the point of a FOSS license. You give the power back to the end users. This was purposefully chosen by the Monogame project.

This guy would probably cancel, anyway, because his friend didn't want to pay him for driving them to the restaurant.

In the lunch example, reciprocation would be releasing additional software under free software licenses, not payments.

There should be zero social pressure, as gifts do not convey obligation. It was the software author’s explicit choice when licensing and publishing the software to make clear that payment is not expected.

If you do that, then you're taking jobs away.

I disagree. The moral thing to do would be to respect the stated wishes of the author of the software, who made clear when they published it that no payments of any kind are expected.

If I gave you a gift and you tried to give me money, I would be offended.

I’m not saying free software publishers wouldn’t accept donations - just that publishing free software is giving a gift to the world, and there is NO moral obligation placed on recipients. That’s the point of free software.

How does the Godot donation expand their empire? Other than get more people into game development?

All of this is self-serving, even from the Stardew Valley dev. It’s win-win.

So? What Valve does isn't charity either. It's weird that you even mention this word.

Many corporations are free-riding on the Open Source they use. As most of us are honestly.

But I think people cynically underestimate the value of the contributions corporations do make and fail to understand just how much of the software we enjoy is only possible due to corporate funding.

Igalia may be a good example as most of have are not even familiar with them. But the Linux distro that I use comes from their, the Servo browser is being driven by them, and many other projects benefit from their contributions.

They use a lot of open source libraries, yes, but I think it's about how much of the end product depends on the OSS tool/library. Studios using unreal engine probably don't use that much critical OSS directly – their licensed software probably does. And the software vendors / big studios do donate to tools they depend on, for instance Epic Games donated $1.2m to Blender

AAA usually goes with AAA-tools and frameworks. So Unity, Unreal Engine or even their own engine. OSS might be used, but for smaller parts or as tools for producing their stuff (like browser, editor, etc.). So while they sometimes donate, there is not much reason to give a big sum to a single project. They might be even donating more overall, but separated on multiple different projects.

Many use Dear ImGui for example and some do donate afaik.

Stardew valley was also originally XNA

Historically, donations to charities drop when tax rates go down. As a percentage of income, donations were highest when tax rates were highest.

The best example that low tax rates don't increase giving: in 2017 the TCJA reduced tax rates for most people, and increased the standard deduction (but reduced the charitable deduction). Even though they were being taxed less and had more money to donate, Americans donated several billion less to charities each year (estimates very, but they're all between $15 and $20 billion less each year).

They typically pay a lot more than $100k for Unreal and the likes or employees working on their in house engines.

Oh and these studios often lose money instead of having profit margins in the multi-million, see Ubisoft.

But ConcernedApe uses Monogame for Stardew Valley, the studios don't use Monogame. Why would they donate?

Is it so hard to accept someone else might give away money for a charitable reason rather than because of fear?

You seem like a bitter person. I hope you find love.

This is a somewhat naive view of engines in modern game development. Full-featured engines allow every department to dive in head first in parallel. The first gameplay elements often get programmed before the first pieces of content arrive. Scenes can be blocked out and drafted immwdiately at the start of the project. Complex animations with states and blend trees can be created amd tested independently of the gameplay code. Audio scenes, complex cues and (dynamic) music can be mixed and mastered independently of any code to integrate audio into the game. The whole process is highly parallelized these days and the engine tools serve to insulate the departments from one another to some extent so that everybody can move faster.

> You get that feeling pretty often with an indie game.

Poppycock. What, you wanna cry at how beautiful *checks notes* Hatred is? What about Unity Asset Swap Shovelware #375438? And for those who fall on the 'violence' side in the 'violence' vs 'sex' debate, how about we take a gander at the corruption genre?

Sure, there are some amazing indie games (think of Unrest, for example), but there's also a ton of low effort garbage, and far too many projects which suffer from a lack of time, lack of resources, lack of ambition, or, sadly, lack of care. And, of course, the occasional 'I can't believe anyone at any point during the project thought this was a good idea'.

> You get that feeling pretty often with an indie game.

I've never had that feeling about any game. Indie games tend to be higher quality (because they are made by people who prioritize the game above business), but I think you're strongly overstating how good they are.

The last game I felt that strongly about at the ending was Red Dead Redemption 2. I don't think I can recall the last indie game I felt strongly about.

Indie games are important and deserve more attention. Let's not glorify them too much though. They can be shit, just like AAA games; they can also be great, just like AAA games.

Games are hard. I wanted to focus more on the fact that there is a perceived glamour to indie development that is totally amd utterly disconneted from their reality.

My girlfriend owns the board game, she enjoys it!

Think of it this way; he subcontracts, but he deals with the subcontractors himself.

30% off the top for most stores (Valve/Steam, Apple/iPhone, Google/Android, etc), then around 50% taxes between state, local... some fixed expenses and overhead. It's probably well under 20% in the bank after all is said and done. That said, it's still a lot of money.

Valve's 30% cut would lower it substantially. Taxes might put it beneath 50%.

The game has also been on sale numerous times for less than $15. It is currently available on Steam for $9

He also put an insane amount of effort, far more than most of us mortals.

All the game markets take huge cuts. Steam is 30% if I recall correctly.

Well he made a 10% deal with a publisher iirc and steam gets 30% - so that's a chunk right there

Steam takes 30%, other stores take 10-20%

Presumably he spent years working on it. His own time should be subtracted from the revenue too.

Of the purchase price that the end-user pays, the retailer has to pay tax. That knocks off a variable percentage. It would be 20% in the UK.

There's also the cost of selling through Steam / Google Play / Whatever - typically 30%.

I assume the developer has some professional expenses - an accountant at a minimum, probably a lawyer, certainly insurance. Maybe they also have a PR team, advertising, and the like. I don't know whether they pay for testers, translators, and things like that.

Then we get on to things like buying a new development machine, going to tech conferences, taking an educational course, backups, and all the other things that a business needs to spend on in order to be effective.

Maybe a profit margin of 10% is unrealistically low - but developing software has legitimate costs. The margin is never going to be 100%.

What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is? They make cents on every can. Something like 2-3%.

The video games industry is filled to the brim with gatekeepers who take their cuts. Valve takes 30%, just for their store. Publishers start at 10%. Your engine might take a cut.

Estimating that Stardew Valley, the big success video game with the lowest overhead bar none, has made 10% profit might be too low. 20%? Might be high.

Besides tax and the store's cut, the games also regularly sales and prices-changes. So you can't just extrapolate the price today with the amount of units sold and assume this to be the revenue.

Amount of refunds is usually pretty high for all less popular games. A lot of people tend to use refunds as demo.

I doubt its that high for Stardew Valley though. Simply because popular games are sold via network effect and people ususlly know what they buying.

This doesn't seem high to me at all. You buy the game, try it for an hour, feel kind of meh on it or even just see a different game you think you'd like even more, and hit the refund button. If anything, I'm surprised it's only ~12%.

Why would it put them to shame? It’s an incredibly rare situation and most AAA devs would be super happy for him.

Stardew Valley is a very noteworthy achievement, but it’s not the kind of success anyone should expect to simply replicate.

Go for it, but most will not achieve a similar outcome.

A winning lottery ticket would have an even better return on investment. Good luck with that business strategy.

(To be clear, Stardew Valley is a great game. But "making a breakout indie game" really does feel akin to winning the lottery to me, even if the game is fundamentally great.)