Mindustry: Funding options

[polak-jan]

There seems to be a lot of people asking for features that requier servers. That means we need a way to pay the bills for them.

Poll where people can vote:
http://poll.lab.io/XBTDep9mzxavlTkw7zjNlg

[Epowerj]

I did some math and figured out that a $25/month server should be more than enough to handle a server browser and map hosting for several thousand users. I've seen other free games have donation goals where you could see exactly how much money they need to stay afloat, and you can see the month's donation progress. I think this could work.

[cktang88]

@BeefEX would in-game purchases be mostly cosmetics?

[Luxray5474]

In-game purchases aren't the best idea, and makes the game inequal across different people. Just note that I am completely with donations and funding for Anuke. I'm just expressing my opinion on what ways we should provide sufficient funding.

Instead, we should focus on...

1. ...Making the content that's _already_ in the game _better_ and adding more of it. We have to give players a reason to donate to fund development and support the game other than having them buy stuff within the game. The only way to do that is to improve and add more free, but quality content inside the game. They will find it worth more to contribute by donation.

1. ...Aquiring a larger audience. The larger the amount of players we have, the greater amount of people deciding to donate there would be. This could be done by making content related to the game on a large platform, like YouTube, (where it's already being done) Twitch, Reddit, and along with the popular opinion, Steam.

2. ...Very lightly encouraging the players to donate. Not a prompt that pops up every 5 minutes telling the player to donate, but perhaps a little 'Donate' textbox that peeks out of the donate button every time the player opens the game. A well-written message should be presented when the player taps/presses the button. It's enough to incline the player to donate, but not too much that it annoys them or draws them away from the game.

Those three methods, if done right, will provide sufficient funding for paying for the server.

Let's not do these, though:

1. Let's not make the game a P2P where you pay to get stronger weapons, cosmetics, or benefits that other players who didn't pay can't have. Although this is the second most recommended choice according to the poll, it again is not ideal. Let's not get too desperate. 😉

1. Let's definitely not include ads. Contrary to popular vote, ads should absolutely not exist anywhere in the game. Although it could potentially provide a lot of funds, it makes the experience worse, paints a bad picture of the dev, and would be an outright degradation to the game.

Hopefully you agree with me on this. Again, I don't mean to say that Anuke shouldn't be given funds to pay for maintaining and developing the game. I'm just expressing my opinion on how I think people could donate to the development of the game, while keeping it a quality, fun game as it has always been. :smile:

[Anuken]

I'm definitely not planning on having ads, and after thinking about it, there's no good way to add cosmetics to the game either.

Increasing donations might work, but at the same time I don't think it's going to increase profits by much. We'll see. I'm hoping that I might be able to get most of my profits by selling the game on Steam, while keeping it free on itch.io/Google Play, like some other indie games have done in the past.

[Anuken]

Closing, as the core funding methods have been decided (Steam, iOS store, Mac store, possibly UWP as well).