Stardew Valley, which has been sold to millions of gamers, has been created using the free MonoGame engine. So ConcernedApe is giving back to the open source software which made his commercial success possible, like commercial parties should.
Gifts do not confer obligation. Copying deprives the original party of nothing. Absolutely nothing about free software requires or even implies any responsibility to “give back”. This idea that anyone making money with free software somehow owes the original authors anything (or “should” donate a portion of their profits) is ridiculous.
If the authors wanted money for their software, they would have sold it instead of giving it away for free as a gift.
By releasing software under free software licenses you are explicitly stating that you do not expect or anticipate payment for it. The licenses (that they freely chose) are clear. Free software, in addition to being free as in speech, is also always free as in beer.
My friend bought me lunch. I used that energy at my job. Do I owe them part of my paycheck?
I think this comes off a bit too strong (as well as the replies to this to be fair)
The example isn't quite accurate. If a friend bought you lunch, the social norm of reciprocity would incline you towards buying them lunch in the future (i.e part of your paycheck)
Free open source software is a public good. While there is no obligation to give back, giving back helps that public good become more useful to other people (including your future self). I'm against making contribution an obligation, but I'm not against light social pressure upon philanthropists who have the means (which is what the parent comment was doing).
There is no obligation, but since they find the project useful and are making money from it, they want to make sure it is not abandoned. The best way to ensure that is to fund its development.
This also gives them direct access to the devs and can request new features or bug fixes that impact them to be prioritized. Everyone benefits. It's probably much cheaper to make a contribution than to do that in house and upstream the changes.
Not under capitalism, sure. But traditionally gift economies worked exactly because people understood that gifts also imbue a burden of responsibility. Not necessarily in repayment but to honor the gift and pay the good deed forward instead of simply enriching yourself.
> Absolutely nothing about free software requires or even implies any responsibility to “give back”
You're correct about that. The free software itself doesn't confer any responsibility. But the free software exists inside other contexts. Social/moral context. There're also future contexts for you or humanity. For example, if developing free software proves to be a sustainable model for people to do, you might get other projects LIKE the Blender Foundation to crop up in the future. You might benefit from them directly, or benefit from them by enjoying the things people produce with them. Also, if it's a tool that you like to use, maybe you just want that specific tool to continue to improve.
I don't want to assume, but I don't recollect any contributions of that magnitude from large studios (spare Valve). This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.
I suspect they also hope developer choice gets reframed from "Unity or Unreal" to "Godot or Unreal." In other words: Unity gets bumped out of the picture since Godot can do what it does and is open source, while Unreal stays comfortably in the hyperrealism/high-end perch.
It expands their empire like Microsoft pledging to "support" Open Source: it's disingenuous, self-serving, and develops a "claim" of authority over the sector. It allows them, the makers of Unreal Engine, to develop a business relationship with their competition and influence the trajectory on one of only major alternatives in order to control the market more.
If Epic Games really cared about Godot, they would align more with their values in-house. Their M&A drives the organization like a propeller.
Why is Valve's behavior relevant? I mention charity because that's what donations are. It's no secret Epic Games follows Microsoft's patterns for control of the industry.
Valve contributes effort to Wine via Proton, and provides open source software like Steam Audio.
EA does something similar, and their EASTL is an opinionated and gaming-focused container and algorithms library that they maintain and made open source.
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.
>I don't want to assume, but I don't recollect any contributions of that magnitude from large studios (spare Valve). This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.
Despite all the talk from libertarians about how private donations are the solution to the world's ills, open source software very rarely gets substantial donations.
Libertarians don't claim that they have "the solution to the world's ills". Just that the government is causing worse problems than it solves, and generally those problems can be handled by a free market.
We're already being taxed like crazy while that money subsidizes things almost everyone disagrees with. The libertarians believe that if people weren't taxed as much they could voluntarily spend money on things that are valuable to them. Some people would donate more and others wouldn't donate at all, and that's okay. I believe we would see a lot more voluntary donations without the burden of high taxes.
Claiming "libertarians haven't solved this yet" while continuing to take everyone's money is not a fair argument.
To stay on topic, this thread is about a private individual donating to a project he supports. That's something everyone should be happy about. And he did not do it as a political statement.
Because no middle managers will get promoted for doing this. All large corporate structures are the same: What's the incentive for the mini warlords to expand their mini empire? Nothing else is worth doing (to them).
I mean, this indie developer sold more than lots of (most?) AAA studios, and AAA studios have a lot more operating costs than an indie. Donating one dev year is a lot easier when you sell 50 million copies and hire no one than when you sell a couple million copies and have 100 employees plus investors. (I have 3000 hours on this game, so definitely not biased against indies or something.)
These studios have profit margins in the multi-millions, they could afford a symbolic $100k donation. Instead they choose to push their developers through another crunch cycle.
Its hard in a corporate structure to just 'donate.' The culture and system is not designed for it very well. This is why selling books or support works out better for foss projects.
Its hard to see SDV as some niche 'indie' project and more and more pedantic definitions of 'indie' aren't helpful. This is a game with an estimated half BILLION in sales. He's extremely wealthy and could have given 50x more easily. Its a bit arbitrary on who or who hasnt done enough. Why no metrics like 10% of your income if you use the tool? "Volunteerism" doesn't work and stuff like this seems like mostly PR and a tip, moreso that "let me help you run this project." I mean does this make monogame better? It seems like a tool that's not really used by any commercial devs. This just seems like a "thank you for helping me get super rich," kind of thing. A tip, which is different than funding a project, fundamentally. You can tip a dying business that is destined to fold shortly, for example. That's not the same as funding it.
This sort of "we are and aren't a business" gray-zone these foss projects live in needs reform, imho. Expecting the kindness of strangers doesn't work. Look at how many foss projects get little to no donations. I don't have the fix here but these developers should probably roll up a LLC and market some kind of service these companies can just easily write invoices for instead of just expecting a random middle-manager to fight the execs to write a $100k check to some guy named Phil in Minnesota that maintains something-something-lib, which is one tiny part of a larger ecosystem that maintains their backend.
> This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.
For the hundredth time. He's an extremely rare person focused on quality, value, and competency. And he clearly just loves his own game
Edit: Sorry? Pay for what, and risk what why? AAA studios simply cannot deliver good value in comparison. The donation is unrelated—or perhaps, arguably, open source makes this productivity possible.
Beyond love, what you prefer ? Pay 100K USD, or put at risk your 500M USD project ?
Edit: if the engine is not maintained, there can be compatibility issues, it can go abandoned and lack new features, etc.
It's the technical pillar of the product, like Unity.
When you give money to help a pet shelter, or to feed kids in some far-away location, this is a donation. You give something, and you don't get anything back in return. Even a tax benefit, it doesn't change anything (as at the end you have to pay the same amount of money).
But now, what if you "donate" to a public park across the street from your house:
Is it charity? Yes, you are giving money to the city/trust that you don't have to give.
Do you benefit? Yes directly, your property value goes up and you have a nice place to walk.
Does that make it "not a donation"? No. It just makes it a smart donation or even sponsoring a project.
In all cases he is securing his own supply chain, and for a very cheap price. It is a very rational business expense.
I really hate that vision of the world with a passion. For people with such opinion nothing is ever enough or pure enough, but if you ask directly such people donate almost nothing themselves.
The fact people with this opinion exist also discourages donations from others because "nothing is ever enough" for you.
Also pro-tip, if you do more than a handful donations you'll realize that you as the giver is always the one that most benefits from being charitable. The feeling you get is why you do it.
> The fact people with this opinion exist also discourages donations from others because "nothing is ever enough" for you.
(this sounds like an attack btw, as you can't know what I do)
"Sponsoring", "Supporting", "Paying", "Hiring", "Contracting", etc, this is all ok.
but calling it charitable donation is a bit too much; calling "donation" money that you give that directly benefits your own interest is something I don't feel is right.
"I made a video game and now I chose to give 500 USD to help women who need shelter because they are beaten by their husbands", or even 50 USD, or 5 USD.
then yes, this is charity, and beautiful.
But this is very different to "I sent 100K USD to the project I absolutely and critically depend on".
It's not about the amount or doing "more", or that people are never satisfied, is that if you give to people who work in your interest, it's strategic sponsorship (or contractors...).
It's two very very different things, under the same word: "donation".
As someone who has been solo developing an app for months concerned ape is such an inspiration. He literally spent 5 years on stardew valley with zero income. It's such a beautiful game and reminds me what you can do when you follow what feels right.
The sad truth js that for every solo devs that becomes successful, there are an untold number of solo devs that don't find an audience and fail. The reality is pretty brutal in games.
Yeah but how often do you finish a AAA game and want to cry at how beautiful it is. You get that feeling pretty often with an indie game. Like something really important is being done by indie devs.
A true Christmas story! Somewhat unrelated, could someone provide insight into the following -
"MonoGame is a "bring your own tools" kind of framework, which means that it provides the building blocks to build your own engine and tools, but it isn't quite an engine itself.
If you are expecting a scene editor (like Unity or Unreal), MonoGame is not that.
If you love coding and understanding how things work under the hood, MonoGame might be what you are looking for. And fear not, getting a game running with MonoGame only takes a few minutes."
Yes, this is basically correct. When you start writing a game with MonoGame, all you get is basically a class with two methods, Update() and Draw() that MonoGame will be calling in a loop, plus a bunch of libraries for input, graphics, audio, content loading etc. you can use in your code. It's a step beyond something like bare raylib or SDL2, but it's a far cry from Unreal, which lets you think in terms of game entities from the very start: "here's the map, here's where the player will spawn, here, add some buildings and you can run around them".
With MonoGame/XNA/FNA, LOVE2D, libGDX, HaxeFlixel you are getting a bunch of tools instead, which is probably not bad if you like coding and your game doesn't fit into one of existing popular genres.
I think a lot comes down to whether a game is art-first or code-first, and almost all modern games are art-first, so it makes sense to have your platform be one that artists and designers are immediately productive in, and the software people are basically writing behaviour modules and plugins for that established system.
But it's good that code-first engines still exist. There are always going to be projects that are more experimental, or don't have a clear pattern of entities, or are dynamic enough that that kind of thing doesn't make sense.
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.
Stardew Valley is one of a few indie games that seems to be known outside the usual “gaming” circle. I have a few friends who’ve never engaged with any games but absolutely loved Stardew Valley. It’s the pinnacle of cozy, I suppose.
ConcernedApe has done something special with game development to achieve that. I always look to him as an example as I take to game dev as a hobby. This is yet another way I want to take after him for sure. Looking forward to Haunted Chocolatier!
Also I’d never heard of MonoGame somehow, def going to take a peek now!
I love Stardew and played a bunch when it was first released.
He really had perfect timing with its release. The original developers and the rights holders for harvest moon had so badly fumbled for so long with bad releases or only in Japan releases etc. Someone was bound to show up in that space since there was a clear demand for that type of game. It also helps that he aped (heh) harvest moon from the super nintendo / game boy generation so it basically runs on a potato and no one needs to buy dedicated hardware.
Stardew Valley is in the top 5 selling indie games of all time, with 50 million units sold. It's owned and run entirely by one person (the donor in OP's link) - he ended his relationship with a (small) games publisher a few years ago, and runs everything himself.
“In Feb. 2024, Stardew Valley reached 30 million copies sold, and if we assume each copy sold for $15, that means that the game could have generated a revenue of $450 million. A modest 10 percent profit margin puts ConcernedApe’s earnings at $45 million, a number that is likely to increase in the future.” Source: https://dotesports.com/stardew-valley/news/how-much-money-di...
TBH the profit margin on this game is probably closer to 100% than 10%, it was a solo-dev game so never much overhead, I think one guy was hired to work on it.
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.
In this case, as a solo dev, it's probably quite justified to be honest. I doubt ConcernedApe would have really been able to continue solo-ing it with this level of success if he also had to maintain distribution channels, sales/returns, marketing, legal stuff on a global scale.
It's probably the big name studios who already have entire departments to do that kind of stuff that feel they're being ripped off.
Stardew likely qualifies for the reduced store cuts. Steam _lowers_ the percentage for a game when it sells high. Still somewhere between 10 and 25%, though.
Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
This, however, is one area where eventually Epic Games shines — they take a much lower cut and if they increase in popularity with gamers then steam might be forced to lower their share.
Not really, what they actually do for most games is basically what Google and Apple do: a token review, then nothing apart from some niceties for players. Then they pocket an immense profit, it came out in one of Epic's cases that Valve net $50 million/year profit per employee.
The only thing for developers they still do better than Google and Apple really is a few promotions throughout the year that target specific genres for released games developers can register for (whereas Google and Apple select the games they promote), and the "Next Fest" 3x a year for unreleased games.
They used to do stuff like "visibility rounds" that would reach 100,000s of people who didn't know about your game - the same feature today targets people who already wishlisted your game, so these days most developers have to put significant effort and money into promoting their Steam page on other channels like tiktok/youtube/reddit.
And the decision to risk years of his life spent on a project that might not pan out. IIRC he was largely supported by his girlfriend during development and he worked in a cinema. That's in contrast to a job at a studio where you get a salary for your time whether it succeeds or not.
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.
> What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is?
For whom? The manufacture? It's closer to 10-30% for the manufacture (lower for white label goods, higher for "premium" brands). And it's higher for products that enjoy monopoly status.
For retailers, it's 2-3%, but retailers also get products on loan and negotiate various agreements that help cover the costs of displays, shipping, marketing, and wastage. So even that small percentage margin is skewed a bit.
There's a reason that retailers and food manufactures ("canned goods") were some of the largest American companies prior to technology taking off. It's a highly profitable industry.
He used this open source engine, it is free. He is almost certainly getting between 60-70% of revenue after distribution fees. His only other expenses are taxes and the other devs he employs and he was solo until the game made like $100 million. Most of the copies sold for $15 so it seems fair to me to say his companies lifetime revenue is close to $10*number of units sold which is close to half a billion dollars. And since the companies expenses are effectively zero profit is the same. If he’s smart with taxes he’s paid 15% corporate tax rate then 15% capital gains rate which comes out to just under 28% so his own lifetime earnings is probably around $360 million.
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.
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%.
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.)
Your chances are much more higher building your own game than playing the lottery endlessly. You forget that guy who made Stardew Valley had to self-teach everything he knew, till he got to the point he quit his full time job. I don't see in what universe you have a better chance to win the lottery, than to build a successful indie game if you truly put your heart into it. Some of the greatest inventions didn't come to us because someone won the lottery, they experimented and kept going. Look at Duck Duck Go, he had 30 other projects that 'failed' before Duck Duck Go succeeded.
The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.
If you want to create indie games—and you can make it work without quitting your day job—go for it! But I don't think it would be smart for EA or Ubisoft to, like, stop making big-budget games and make indie games instead. If you can make a breakout hit, you can make a huge profit—but you have to make a breakout hit, and that comes down to a lot of luck.
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Now, I do think it would make sense for EA/Ubisoft to try more mid-budget releases, which explore something new instead of continuing a 10+ year franchise. A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the publishers were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped? Although caveat, I also haven't been following gaming as closely as I once did.
> A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the studios were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped?
I think the problem comes from marketing budgets. For any given game a marketing budget can push some amount of sales, but applying a marketing budget to each game makes it much harder for the winners to make up losses on the rest.
Small releases also need to be 'lean' releases; management overhead is another cost that's hard to make up in scale.
Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
Hearthstone (Blizzard) is another rare exception of an indie-scale, in-house game that was a breakout hit that could not have come from the outside (because of the IP involved), but even that existed because it started as a "closet-scale" project with senior developers who insulated themselves from management pressures.
That's interesting, I think you're probably right.
> Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
The advantage would be funding. I love indie games but I do get tired of 2D pixel art. With just a bit more money—still an order of magnitude less than Call of Duty, mind you—the possibilities really expand.
I started playing Psychonauts 2 this week, and I think it's such an incredible game—and a great example of what can happen when an "indie" developer manages to secure a real budget. (I don't know if Double Fine is indie, but their games contain the sort of outside-the-box thinking I associate with indies.)
Perhaps some sort of YCombinator-esque model could actually work here.
> The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.
Absolutely. People tend to assume that 95% of video games turn a profit, when it's the reverse. There are highly polished, incredibly high quality video games who simply just don't sell.
Is it incredibly rare? We've seen time and time again in the last few years, really basic indie games overtake AAA games in sales on Steam. Schedule One is another one which had 450 thousand concurrent players not very long after its launch. It seems AAA game studios are missing what gamers want at every turn. There's an uptick in indie devs that have broken through the barriers with good gameplay despite the graphics not being AAA quality.
Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O.
More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.
Those games are a grain of sand in the infinite desert that is the indie game world. The vast majority of indie games on Steam are barely even noticed by anyone.
Schedule One sold more copies than a brand new Assassins Creed game at launch on Steam, Minecraft has sold more copies than most AAA games, including GTA 5.
Yeah, sometimes I look back and think: Why didn’t they just choose to build a genre defining game? Next you’ll tell me that instead of just buying Bitcoin at $1k they chose to make yet another game.
There are thousands of new games each year. The handful lucky outstanding low-budget games won't put anyone to shame.
> There's an uptick in indie devs that have broken through the barriers with good gameplay despite the graphics not being AAA quality.
Don't confuse indie with AAA. Indie is about control, AAA about budget. There is usually a correlation between control and budget, but there are also many long-running indie-devs with good budget now. Supergiant, who made Hades 2 for example, are such an AA(A)-Indie.
> Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O.
> More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.
Those are long-running, genre-defining games, which also received a good budget over the years. Many of them are in the realm of AA, probably AAA now. Those are naturally grown services-games which could grow from success to become even more successful. Big studies tried to emulate this in the last years, but ultimately failed big in most cases.
The general problem is, the bigger your budget, the bigger the anxiety, leading to more control, conservative micromanaging and throwing every shit into the game to cater as much people as possible, which in high numbers cannibalizes the market eventually. Low-budgets can take on more risks, focus on their gaming-mechanisms and don't have to sell big. Making small money to cover your costs is already good enough, and they all can always explode by luck if they get their marketing right.
Games like Schedule 1 or R.E.P.O. don't have to offer 100h+ of fancy fun and high level entertainment. People are happy if they can get their 10+ hours of fun out of it, because they didn't waste big money on it anyway. So you will always see cheap games occasionally explode for a short while, while everyone is waiting for the big games going on sale, especially when the cheap games are coming with a social aspect.
> It seems AAA game studios are missing what gamers want at every turn.
I’m really not sure what it is. Usually, when a company begins to abandon/shaft their user base like that, it’s because they found a more lucrative market to chase instead.
I'm not claiming it's every indie game I'm saying its not quite as rare as you suggest, I look at new releases on Steam all the time, there's less indie games than you think being released. More than there probably should be, but its not like tens of thousands a day or week or even in a month. Its about 800 a month. That's rare if anything, not "incredibly rare"
And out of the 800 new indie games a month, how many are breakout successes and sell even 10k copies? That's what is rare, not that indie games are rare, but having a success (like winning the lottery) is relatively rare.
At 10k new indie games a year, maybe a dozen gross over a million. A larger studio can't afford those kind of odds. That said, they should be able to make more games with a better focus on gameplay and a bit less on leading tech graphics.
This. And honestly, 10k sales is the bare minimum. Even if you’re a solo dev with no team and you handle everything yourself (programming, sound, music, art, marketing) to keep costs down, you’re still looking at around 6–12 months of work.
Most indie games don’t sell for more than $10 USD, but let’s be generous and say you manage to convince your audience to pay $20.
Total: 200,000 USD
After Steam Cut: 140,000 USD
And now you need to get lightning to strike every year to maintain your annual income so you can retire before you're Methuselah.
Could you work on the game part-time while holding down a full-time job? Sure, but you've got to have some iron stamina to want to sit in front of a computer for another 4 hours after a full day of work. Furthermore, not being able to focus on the game means dev might take significantly longer.
Indie games (which is just a tag you can add to your game) notwithstanding - the number of games released per month appears to be closer to double that.
Half a billion USD (40M+ units sold), so 125K USD to have the core engine of your product be actively maintained by an expert for the price of +/- one developer is a very good deal
Stardew valley was apparently solo developed, and if Google is accurate it has sold over 40 million copies. Even if he sold it for a dollar, the dev would be very successful by most standards.
>MonoGame is free to use on all platforms from the public repository, but the code for supporting console platforms is only accessible to authorized console developers.
>These platforms are provided as private code repositories that add integrations with the console vendor's APIs and platform-specific documentation.
> The MonoGame Foundation cannot directly give anyone access to the private console repositories without prior approval from the vendor due to NDA requirements set out by each vendor.
Blame here goes to Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft (though I'm not so sure about Microsoft)
This also applies to Godot, another open source game engine, which doesn't have any code for console support on its upstream repository.
But no one is paying MonoGame in this case? Maybe I'm just thick but X developer pays for MS/Sony/Nintendo to become authorized > and then they ask permission to use MonoGame per the page.
1. Apply to the vendor developer program (required for publishing).
2. Through the program, request access to the MonoGame console repositories
When ever I hear and see Mono Game I think back at the time I decided to dig a bit into XNA. I was a huge Xbox 360 fan and liked the idea of the indie platform they tried to setup. At the time the decision moving from Flash was either XNA in c# or Unity. Back then Unity used JS as a scripting engine. I wanted nothing to do with that. I also thought that MS is a saver bet. Well XNA is dead but the legacy lives on in parts in MonoGame. Unity well, would have been a better choice. But in end I had to work with Unity anyways be it not as a game developer implementing game logic.
As many, I got into programming as young boy thank to video games.
I remember one year, someone bought me an old book on game development. It was a book using DirectX 3.0. To this day, that was probably the most intimidating programming books I’ve ever read. I remember hearing about XNA at the time and it just made so much more sense to me.
I’ve tried a few times to get back into game development, but I don’t like most big engines. The opinionation of them doesn’t square with how my non-game dev mind wants to model things, and I’m too retarded for the math/physics involved in rolling your own engine.
I did briefly toy with monogame though during a period where I was unemployed. It certainly had me the most comfortable as someone who’s career prior had been enterprise .Net crap.
At this point though, game dev seems extremely tedious. I have much more interest in game design. I’ve considered picking up genetic coding just to try it out for that purpose.
Couldn't have seen this donation go to a more dedicated group of folks I have worked and interacted with in the past and love seeing these contributions back! :)
Not without reason:
Stardew Valley, which has been sold to millions of gamers, has been created using the free MonoGame engine. So ConcernedApe is giving back to the open source software which made his commercial success possible, like commercial parties should.
Gifts do not confer obligation. Copying deprives the original party of nothing. Absolutely nothing about free software requires or even implies any responsibility to “give back”. This idea that anyone making money with free software somehow owes the original authors anything (or “should” donate a portion of their profits) is ridiculous.
If the authors wanted money for their software, they would have sold it instead of giving it away for free as a gift.
By releasing software under free software licenses you are explicitly stating that you do not expect or anticipate payment for it. The licenses (that they freely chose) are clear. Free software, in addition to being free as in speech, is also always free as in beer.
My friend bought me lunch. I used that energy at my job. Do I owe them part of my paycheck?
[delayed]
> Gifts do not confer obligation.
Remind me, which Ferengi Rule of Acquisition is this?
There's not much argument to be had. You've created a logical justification for a myopic, misanthropic world view.
> My friend bought me lunch. I used that energy at my job. Do I owe them part of my paycheck?
Many find reciprocation important in a relationship.
If your friend keeps taking you out to lunch and you never return the favor, he’s probably going to stop.
I think this comes off a bit too strong (as well as the replies to this to be fair)
The example isn't quite accurate. If a friend bought you lunch, the social norm of reciprocity would incline you towards buying them lunch in the future (i.e part of your paycheck)
Free open source software is a public good. While there is no obligation to give back, giving back helps that public good become more useful to other people (including your future self). I'm against making contribution an obligation, but I'm not against light social pressure upon philanthropists who have the means (which is what the parent comment was doing).
Copyleft removes legal obligation but we're free to confer a social obligation.
It's nice to give back to people, no matter the amount.
https://framerusercontent.com/images/9GsFxfDtmRFpfgGlNH61QsX...
He also needs that tool to stay alive for the future, even if not considering the past.
It's a bit better position for everyone.
There is no obligation, but since they find the project useful and are making money from it, they want to make sure it is not abandoned. The best way to ensure that is to fund its development.
This also gives them direct access to the devs and can request new features or bug fixes that impact them to be prioritized. Everyone benefits. It's probably much cheaper to make a contribution than to do that in house and upstream the changes.
This ignores the practical economics of open source. I'm not sure what you suggest by jumping around definitions like this.
It is the moral thing to do.
> My friend bought me lunch. I used that energy at my job. Do I owe them part of my paycheck?
No but you owe him lunch next time. Wait till you find out that you have to share your birthday cake on your birthday.
Not under capitalism, sure. But traditionally gift economies worked exactly because people understood that gifts also imbue a burden of responsibility. Not necessarily in repayment but to honor the gift and pay the good deed forward instead of simply enriching yourself.
What is this, the lawyer planet from Farscape? You shouldn't need a contract to be prosocial.
You have a social obligation to buy your friend lunch sometime.
> Absolutely nothing about free software requires or even implies any responsibility to “give back”
You're correct about that. The free software itself doesn't confer any responsibility. But the free software exists inside other contexts. Social/moral context. There're also future contexts for you or humanity. For example, if developing free software proves to be a sustainable model for people to do, you might get other projects LIKE the Blender Foundation to crop up in the future. You might benefit from them directly, or benefit from them by enjoying the things people produce with them. Also, if it's a tool that you like to use, maybe you just want that specific tool to continue to improve.
I don't want to assume, but I don't recollect any contributions of that magnitude from large studios (spare Valve). This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.
Epic Games has a program called MegaGrants where they give a bunch of money to various projects.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants
For example they gave $250k to the Godot game engine project in 2020.
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epi...
Also notably $1.2 million to the Blender Foundation.
Looks like they did literally nothing in 2024?
I wouldn't call anything Epic Games does charity: it's all empire expansion for them.
How does the Godot donation expand their empire? Other than get more people into game development?
I suspect they also hope developer choice gets reframed from "Unity or Unreal" to "Godot or Unreal." In other words: Unity gets bumped out of the picture since Godot can do what it does and is open source, while Unreal stays comfortably in the hyperrealism/high-end perch.
It expands their empire like Microsoft pledging to "support" Open Source: it's disingenuous, self-serving, and develops a "claim" of authority over the sector. It allows them, the makers of Unreal Engine, to develop a business relationship with their competition and influence the trajectory on one of only major alternatives in order to control the market more.
If Epic Games really cared about Godot, they would align more with their values in-house. Their M&A drives the organization like a propeller.
The other option is Epic is the same as now but Godot gets no money
All of this is self-serving, even from the Stardew Valley dev. It’s win-win.
I disagree. I think ConcernedApe is actually genuine with his charity and we should see this as a standard for corporations to follow.
Charitable donations that are self-serving aren’t non-genuine. The money still spends the same.
Look, it's really nice that you maintained WooCommerce for so many years.
I know you might be tempted to move on to do something else, but I really need my shop to keep working.
So, here is the deal: I am going to send you a 'donation' of 500 USD now, and then a monthly recurring 'gift.'
Contractually? You have no obligation to work, and I have no obligation to pay.
But if you stop working on WooCommerce, I will obviously have to stop the donations.
Sounds cool?
==
The output of that is rather positive here though, but it would be naive to not see the self-interest.
I'm confused. What exactly makes his charity genuine vs Epic's charity "disingenuous"?
So? What Valve does isn't charity either. It's weird that you even mention this word.
Why is Valve's behavior relevant? I mention charity because that's what donations are. It's no secret Epic Games follows Microsoft's patterns for control of the industry.
Valve contributes effort to Wine via Proton, and provides open source software like Steam Audio.
EA does something similar, and their EASTL is an opinionated and gaming-focused container and algorithms library that they maintain and made open source.
They’ve also paid tons to Igalia to develop features for them in open source projects.
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.
> but I don't recollect any contributions of that magnitude from large studios
Epic has a grant program that has given out thousands of grants, including over a million dollars to the Blender project
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants
Stardew is probably one of the most (if not the most) popular game ever made with MonoGame
AAA studios don't really use MonoGame.
Their point wasn't about MonoGame. Do AAA studios really not use any open source tools?
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.
Second would be Terraria (originally made for XNA).
Stardew valley was also originally XNA
>I don't want to assume, but I don't recollect any contributions of that magnitude from large studios (spare Valve). This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.
Despite all the talk from libertarians about how private donations are the solution to the world's ills, open source software very rarely gets substantial donations.
Libertarians don't claim that they have "the solution to the world's ills". Just that the government is causing worse problems than it solves, and generally those problems can be handled by a free market.
We're already being taxed like crazy while that money subsidizes things almost everyone disagrees with. The libertarians believe that if people weren't taxed as much they could voluntarily spend money on things that are valuable to them. Some people would donate more and others wouldn't donate at all, and that's okay. I believe we would see a lot more voluntary donations without the burden of high taxes.
Claiming "libertarians haven't solved this yet" while continuing to take everyone's money is not a fair argument.
To stay on topic, this thread is about a private individual donating to a project he supports. That's something everyone should be happy about. And he did not do it as a political statement.
Definitely indie. It was a solo project until launch.
It's an epic story. Grinding on a solo project for 4 years is pretty daunting, I'm glad the universe rewarded him.
Because no middle managers will get promoted for doing this. All large corporate structures are the same: What's the incentive for the mini warlords to expand their mini empire? Nothing else is worth doing (to them).
I mean, this indie developer sold more than lots of (most?) AAA studios, and AAA studios have a lot more operating costs than an indie. Donating one dev year is a lot easier when you sell 50 million copies and hire no one than when you sell a couple million copies and have 100 employees plus investors. (I have 3000 hours on this game, so definitely not biased against indies or something.)
These studios have profit margins in the multi-millions, they could afford a symbolic $100k donation. Instead they choose to push their developers through another crunch cycle.
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?
Its hard in a corporate structure to just 'donate.' The culture and system is not designed for it very well. This is why selling books or support works out better for foss projects.
Its hard to see SDV as some niche 'indie' project and more and more pedantic definitions of 'indie' aren't helpful. This is a game with an estimated half BILLION in sales. He's extremely wealthy and could have given 50x more easily. Its a bit arbitrary on who or who hasnt done enough. Why no metrics like 10% of your income if you use the tool? "Volunteerism" doesn't work and stuff like this seems like mostly PR and a tip, moreso that "let me help you run this project." I mean does this make monogame better? It seems like a tool that's not really used by any commercial devs. This just seems like a "thank you for helping me get super rich," kind of thing. A tip, which is different than funding a project, fundamentally. You can tip a dying business that is destined to fold shortly, for example. That's not the same as funding it.
This sort of "we are and aren't a business" gray-zone these foss projects live in needs reform, imho. Expecting the kindness of strangers doesn't work. Look at how many foss projects get little to no donations. I don't have the fix here but these developers should probably roll up a LLC and market some kind of service these companies can just easily write invoices for instead of just expecting a random middle-manager to fight the execs to write a $100k check to some guy named Phil in Minnesota that maintains something-something-lib, which is one tiny part of a larger ecosystem that maintains their backend.
> This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.
For the hundredth time. He's an extremely rare person focused on quality, value, and competency. And he clearly just loves his own game
Edit: Sorry? Pay for what, and risk what why? AAA studios simply cannot deliver good value in comparison. The donation is unrelated—or perhaps, arguably, open source makes this productivity possible.
Beyond love, what you prefer ? Pay 100K USD, or put at risk your 500M USD project ?
Edit: if the engine is not maintained, there can be compatibility issues, it can go abandoned and lack new features, etc. It's the technical pillar of the product, like Unity.
Is it so hard to accept someone else might give away money for a charitable reason rather than because of fear?
When you give money to help a pet shelter, or to feed kids in some far-away location, this is a donation. You give something, and you don't get anything back in return. Even a tax benefit, it doesn't change anything (as at the end you have to pay the same amount of money).
But now, what if you "donate" to a public park across the street from your house: Is it charity? Yes, you are giving money to the city/trust that you don't have to give. Do you benefit? Yes directly, your property value goes up and you have a nice place to walk. Does that make it "not a donation"? No. It just makes it a smart donation or even sponsoring a project.
In all cases he is securing his own supply chain, and for a very cheap price. It is a very rational business expense.
I really hate that vision of the world with a passion. For people with such opinion nothing is ever enough or pure enough, but if you ask directly such people donate almost nothing themselves.
The fact people with this opinion exist also discourages donations from others because "nothing is ever enough" for you.
Also pro-tip, if you do more than a handful donations you'll realize that you as the giver is always the one that most benefits from being charitable. The feeling you get is why you do it.
> The fact people with this opinion exist also discourages donations from others because "nothing is ever enough" for you.
(this sounds like an attack btw, as you can't know what I do)
"Sponsoring", "Supporting", "Paying", "Hiring", "Contracting", etc, this is all ok.
but calling it charitable donation is a bit too much; calling "donation" money that you give that directly benefits your own interest is something I don't feel is right.
"I made a video game and now I chose to give 500 USD to help women who need shelter because they are beaten by their husbands", or even 50 USD, or 5 USD.
then yes, this is charity, and beautiful.
But this is very different to "I sent 100K USD to the project I absolutely and critically depend on".
It's not about the amount or doing "more", or that people are never satisfied, is that if you give to people who work in your interest, it's strategic sponsorship (or contractors...).
It's two very very different things, under the same word: "donation".
> (this sounds like an attack btw, as you can't know what I do)
What, me saying I hate your opinion with a passion wasn't obvious enough?
As someone who has been solo developing an app for months concerned ape is such an inspiration. He literally spent 5 years on stardew valley with zero income. It's such a beautiful game and reminds me what you can do when you follow what feels right.
The sad truth js that for every solo devs that becomes successful, there are an untold number of solo devs that don't find an audience and fail. The reality is pretty brutal in games.
Yeah but how often do you finish a AAA game and want to cry at how beautiful it is. You get that feeling pretty often with an indie game. Like something really important is being done by indie devs.
A true Christmas story! Somewhat unrelated, could someone provide insight into the following -
"MonoGame is a "bring your own tools" kind of framework, which means that it provides the building blocks to build your own engine and tools, but it isn't quite an engine itself.
If you are expecting a scene editor (like Unity or Unreal), MonoGame is not that.
If you love coding and understanding how things work under the hood, MonoGame might be what you are looking for. And fear not, getting a game running with MonoGame only takes a few minutes."
Yes, this is basically correct. When you start writing a game with MonoGame, all you get is basically a class with two methods, Update() and Draw() that MonoGame will be calling in a loop, plus a bunch of libraries for input, graphics, audio, content loading etc. you can use in your code. It's a step beyond something like bare raylib or SDL2, but it's a far cry from Unreal, which lets you think in terms of game entities from the very start: "here's the map, here's where the player will spawn, here, add some buildings and you can run around them".
With MonoGame/XNA/FNA, LOVE2D, libGDX, HaxeFlixel you are getting a bunch of tools instead, which is probably not bad if you like coding and your game doesn't fit into one of existing popular genres.
I think a lot comes down to whether a game is art-first or code-first, and almost all modern games are art-first, so it makes sense to have your platform be one that artists and designers are immediately productive in, and the software people are basically writing behaviour modules and plugins for that established system.
But it's good that code-first engines still exist. There are always going to be projects that are more experimental, or don't have a clear pattern of entities, or are dynamic enough that that kind of thing doesn't make sense.
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.
Stardew Valley is one of a few indie games that seems to be known outside the usual “gaming” circle. I have a few friends who’ve never engaged with any games but absolutely loved Stardew Valley. It’s the pinnacle of cozy, I suppose.
ConcernedApe has done something special with game development to achieve that. I always look to him as an example as I take to game dev as a hobby. This is yet another way I want to take after him for sure. Looking forward to Haunted Chocolatier!
Also I’d never heard of MonoGame somehow, def going to take a peek now!
I love Stardew and played a bunch when it was first released.
He really had perfect timing with its release. The original developers and the rights holders for harvest moon had so badly fumbled for so long with bad releases or only in Japan releases etc. Someone was bound to show up in that space since there was a clear demand for that type of game. It also helps that he aped (heh) harvest moon from the super nintendo / game boy generation so it basically runs on a potato and no one needs to buy dedicated hardware.
This reminds me of Relogic (Terraria) donating 100k to Godot and FNA after the whole Unity pricing change debacle a couple (few?) years back.
Really glad to see mega successful devs giving back to the tools that they use.
How much money does he have in order to make such a big donation? Has stardew valley made that much?
Stardew Valley is in the top 5 selling indie games of all time, with 50 million units sold. It's owned and run entirely by one person (the donor in OP's link) - he ended his relationship with a (small) games publisher a few years ago, and runs everything himself.
Does this mean he does the mobile games himself now? I remember he had outsourced those for a while.
Think of it this way; he subcontracts, but he deals with the subcontractors himself.
Additionally there is a concert series that's quite good and other merchandise.
My girlfriend owns the board game, she enjoys it!
“In Feb. 2024, Stardew Valley reached 30 million copies sold, and if we assume each copy sold for $15, that means that the game could have generated a revenue of $450 million. A modest 10 percent profit margin puts ConcernedApe’s earnings at $45 million, a number that is likely to increase in the future.” Source: https://dotesports.com/stardew-valley/news/how-much-money-di...
TBH the profit margin on this game is probably closer to 100% than 10%, it was a solo-dev game so never much overhead, I think one guy was hired to work on it.
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.
God, that's awful. That 30% cut for the middle man hurts. At least the government tax can be put to good use (emphasis on can...)
In this case, as a solo dev, it's probably quite justified to be honest. I doubt ConcernedApe would have really been able to continue solo-ing it with this level of success if he also had to maintain distribution channels, sales/returns, marketing, legal stuff on a global scale.
It's probably the big name studios who already have entire departments to do that kind of stuff that feel they're being ripped off.
Stardew likely qualifies for the reduced store cuts. Steam _lowers_ the percentage for a game when it sells high. Still somewhere between 10 and 25%, though.
Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
This, however, is one area where eventually Epic Games shines — they take a much lower cut and if they increase in popularity with gamers then steam might be forced to lower their share.
Gabe gotta buy a $500 million dollar yacht.
It pays to be the middle man!
The yacht and the company that makes it. Plus like 10 other ships. His fleet probably employs more people than Steam lmao.
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.
See: Blood, Sweat and Pixels; Chapter 2
https://a.co/d/4OIUtsN
Well he made a 10% deal with a publisher iirc and steam gets 30% - so that's a chunk right there
All the game markets take huge cuts. Steam is 30% if I recall correctly.
Damn I didn’t realize. 30% is pretty hefty
The service Steam provides to game developers is substantial.
Not really, what they actually do for most games is basically what Google and Apple do: a token review, then nothing apart from some niceties for players. Then they pocket an immense profit, it came out in one of Epic's cases that Valve net $50 million/year profit per employee.
The only thing for developers they still do better than Google and Apple really is a few promotions throughout the year that target specific genres for released games developers can register for (whereas Google and Apple select the games they promote), and the "Next Fest" 3x a year for unreleased games.
They used to do stuff like "visibility rounds" that would reach 100,000s of people who didn't know about your game - the same feature today targets people who already wishlisted your game, so these days most developers have to put significant effort and money into promoting their Steam page on other channels like tiktok/youtube/reddit.
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.
Hundreds of millions minus hundreds of thousands of dollars lol.
And the decision to risk years of his life spent on a project that might not pan out. IIRC he was largely supported by his girlfriend during development and he worked in a cinema. That's in contrast to a job at a studio where you get a salary for your time whether it succeeds or not.
Why would 1 unit of this game have a "profit margin" of 10%? It's a video game. He's not selling canned goods.
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.
> What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is?
For whom? The manufacture? It's closer to 10-30% for the manufacture (lower for white label goods, higher for "premium" brands). And it's higher for products that enjoy monopoly status.
For retailers, it's 2-3%, but retailers also get products on loan and negotiate various agreements that help cover the costs of displays, shipping, marketing, and wastage. So even that small percentage margin is skewed a bit.
There's a reason that retailers and food manufactures ("canned goods") were some of the largest American companies prior to technology taking off. It's a highly profitable industry.
He used this open source engine, it is free. He is almost certainly getting between 60-70% of revenue after distribution fees. His only other expenses are taxes and the other devs he employs and he was solo until the game made like $100 million. Most of the copies sold for $15 so it seems fair to me to say his companies lifetime revenue is close to $10*number of units sold which is close to half a billion dollars. And since the companies expenses are effectively zero profit is the same. If he’s smart with taxes he’s paid 15% corporate tax rate then 15% capital gains rate which comes out to just under 28% so his own lifetime earnings is probably around $360 million.
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.
https://steam-revenue-calculator.com/app/413150/stardew-vall...
69 million dollars in refunds!? That's 12% of the gross, seems crazy high. Is this pulling from actual Steam numbers?
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%.
This should really put any AAA studio to shame. A single developer sold half a billion dollars on Steam alone.
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.)
Your chances are much more higher building your own game than playing the lottery endlessly. You forget that guy who made Stardew Valley had to self-teach everything he knew, till he got to the point he quit his full time job. I don't see in what universe you have a better chance to win the lottery, than to build a successful indie game if you truly put your heart into it. Some of the greatest inventions didn't come to us because someone won the lottery, they experimented and kept going. Look at Duck Duck Go, he had 30 other projects that 'failed' before Duck Duck Go succeeded.
The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.
If you want to create indie games—and you can make it work without quitting your day job—go for it! But I don't think it would be smart for EA or Ubisoft to, like, stop making big-budget games and make indie games instead. If you can make a breakout hit, you can make a huge profit—but you have to make a breakout hit, and that comes down to a lot of luck.
---
Now, I do think it would make sense for EA/Ubisoft to try more mid-budget releases, which explore something new instead of continuing a 10+ year franchise. A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the publishers were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped? Although caveat, I also haven't been following gaming as closely as I once did.
> A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the studios were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped?
I think the problem comes from marketing budgets. For any given game a marketing budget can push some amount of sales, but applying a marketing budget to each game makes it much harder for the winners to make up losses on the rest.
Small releases also need to be 'lean' releases; management overhead is another cost that's hard to make up in scale.
Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
Hearthstone (Blizzard) is another rare exception of an indie-scale, in-house game that was a breakout hit that could not have come from the outside (because of the IP involved), but even that existed because it started as a "closet-scale" project with senior developers who insulated themselves from management pressures.
That's interesting, I think you're probably right.
> Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
The advantage would be funding. I love indie games but I do get tired of 2D pixel art. With just a bit more money—still an order of magnitude less than Call of Duty, mind you—the possibilities really expand.
I started playing Psychonauts 2 this week, and I think it's such an incredible game—and a great example of what can happen when an "indie" developer manages to secure a real budget. (I don't know if Double Fine is indie, but their games contain the sort of outside-the-box thinking I associate with indies.)
Perhaps some sort of YCombinator-esque model could actually work here.
> The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.
Absolutely. People tend to assume that 95% of video games turn a profit, when it's the reverse. There are highly polished, incredibly high quality video games who simply just don't sell.
Why would it put them to shame? It’s an incredibly rare situation and most AAA devs would be super happy for him.
Is it incredibly rare? We've seen time and time again in the last few years, really basic indie games overtake AAA games in sales on Steam. Schedule One is another one which had 450 thousand concurrent players not very long after its launch. It seems AAA game studios are missing what gamers want at every turn. There's an uptick in indie devs that have broken through the barriers with good gameplay despite the graphics not being AAA quality.
Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O.
More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.
Those games are a grain of sand in the infinite desert that is the indie game world. The vast majority of indie games on Steam are barely even noticed by anyone.
Schedule One sold more copies than a brand new Assassins Creed game at launch on Steam, Minecraft has sold more copies than most AAA games, including GTA 5.
Minecraft has sold like 350 million copies which is more than second and third place combined IIRC if you look at the top best selling games
Yeah, sometimes I look back and think: Why didn’t they just choose to build a genre defining game? Next you’ll tell me that instead of just buying Bitcoin at $1k they chose to make yet another game.
> Is it incredibly rare?
There are thousands of new games each year. The handful lucky outstanding low-budget games won't put anyone to shame.
> There's an uptick in indie devs that have broken through the barriers with good gameplay despite the graphics not being AAA quality.
Don't confuse indie with AAA. Indie is about control, AAA about budget. There is usually a correlation between control and budget, but there are also many long-running indie-devs with good budget now. Supergiant, who made Hades 2 for example, are such an AA(A)-Indie.
> Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O. > More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.
Those are long-running, genre-defining games, which also received a good budget over the years. Many of them are in the realm of AA, probably AAA now. Those are naturally grown services-games which could grow from success to become even more successful. Big studies tried to emulate this in the last years, but ultimately failed big in most cases.
The general problem is, the bigger your budget, the bigger the anxiety, leading to more control, conservative micromanaging and throwing every shit into the game to cater as much people as possible, which in high numbers cannibalizes the market eventually. Low-budgets can take on more risks, focus on their gaming-mechanisms and don't have to sell big. Making small money to cover your costs is already good enough, and they all can always explode by luck if they get their marketing right.
Games like Schedule 1 or R.E.P.O. don't have to offer 100h+ of fancy fun and high level entertainment. People are happy if they can get their 10+ hours of fun out of it, because they didn't waste big money on it anyway. So you will always see cheap games occasionally explode for a short while, while everyone is waiting for the big games going on sale, especially when the cheap games are coming with a social aspect.
> It seems AAA game studios are missing what gamers want at every turn.
I’m really not sure what it is. Usually, when a company begins to abandon/shaft their user base like that, it’s because they found a more lucrative market to chase instead.
> Is it incredibly rare?
Yes. It's incredibly rare. And suggesting otherwise is silly. Go ahead. Compare all the indie games released and see how often they succeed.
Sure, you can find successful ones, but you are ignoring those that do not succeed. There is a name for that, you know—survivorship bias.
I'm not claiming it's every indie game I'm saying its not quite as rare as you suggest, I look at new releases on Steam all the time, there's less indie games than you think being released. More than there probably should be, but its not like tens of thousands a day or week or even in a month. Its about 800 a month. That's rare if anything, not "incredibly rare"
And out of the 800 new indie games a month, how many are breakout successes and sell even 10k copies? That's what is rare, not that indie games are rare, but having a success (like winning the lottery) is relatively rare.
At 10k new indie games a year, maybe a dozen gross over a million. A larger studio can't afford those kind of odds. That said, they should be able to make more games with a better focus on gameplay and a bit less on leading tech graphics.
This. And honestly, 10k sales is the bare minimum. Even if you’re a solo dev with no team and you handle everything yourself (programming, sound, music, art, marketing) to keep costs down, you’re still looking at around 6–12 months of work.
Most indie games don’t sell for more than $10 USD, but let’s be generous and say you manage to convince your audience to pay $20.
And now you need to get lightning to strike every year to maintain your annual income so you can retire before you're Methuselah.Could you work on the game part-time while holding down a full-time job? Sure, but you've got to have some iron stamina to want to sit in front of a computer for another 4 hours after a full day of work. Furthermore, not being able to focus on the game means dev might take significantly longer.
Indie games (which is just a tag you can add to your game) notwithstanding - the number of games released per month appears to be closer to double that.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases
And over 8 million copies for the Switch.
Half a billion USD (40M+ units sold), so 125K USD to have the core engine of your product be actively maintained by an expert for the price of +/- one developer is a very good deal
Stardew valley was apparently solo developed, and if Google is accurate it has sold over 40 million copies. Even if he sold it for a dollar, the dev would be very successful by most standards.
It was a labor of love by a single developer. Assuming he never really hired that many more people, he can probably afford it.
Solo developer who’s sold millions of it, yeah I think so
>MonoGame is free to use on all platforms from the public repository, but the code for supporting console platforms is only accessible to authorized console developers.
>These platforms are provided as private code repositories that add integrations with the console vendor's APIs and platform-specific documentation.
https://docs.monogame.net/articles/console_access.html
How can something be open source and closed at the same time? Is this basically MIT license? (Project page says Microsoft Public license)
In the same page,
> The MonoGame Foundation cannot directly give anyone access to the private console repositories without prior approval from the vendor due to NDA requirements set out by each vendor.
Blame here goes to Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft (though I'm not so sure about Microsoft)
This also applies to Godot, another open source game engine, which doesn't have any code for console support on its upstream repository.
> though I'm not so sure about Microsoft
GDK is open-source (https://github.com/microsoft/gdk), but to be fair there is a possibility that there are some parts under NDA.
It's a common business model - have an open source core, but have separate closed source extensions to support enterprise features.
>It's a common business model
But no one is paying MonoGame in this case? Maybe I'm just thick but X developer pays for MS/Sony/Nintendo to become authorized > and then they ask permission to use MonoGame per the page.
1. Apply to the vendor developer program (required for publishing).
2. Through the program, request access to the MonoGame console repositories
MonoGame gets nothing in the end.
When ever I hear and see Mono Game I think back at the time I decided to dig a bit into XNA. I was a huge Xbox 360 fan and liked the idea of the indie platform they tried to setup. At the time the decision moving from Flash was either XNA in c# or Unity. Back then Unity used JS as a scripting engine. I wanted nothing to do with that. I also thought that MS is a saver bet. Well XNA is dead but the legacy lives on in parts in MonoGame. Unity well, would have been a better choice. But in end I had to work with Unity anyways be it not as a game developer implementing game logic.
As many, I got into programming as young boy thank to video games.
I remember one year, someone bought me an old book on game development. It was a book using DirectX 3.0. To this day, that was probably the most intimidating programming books I’ve ever read. I remember hearing about XNA at the time and it just made so much more sense to me.
I’ve tried a few times to get back into game development, but I don’t like most big engines. The opinionation of them doesn’t square with how my non-game dev mind wants to model things, and I’m too retarded for the math/physics involved in rolling your own engine.
I did briefly toy with monogame though during a period where I was unemployed. It certainly had me the most comfortable as someone who’s career prior had been enterprise .Net crap.
At this point though, game dev seems extremely tedious. I have much more interest in game design. I’ve considered picking up genetic coding just to try it out for that purpose.
Pretty cool, I think the industry benefits a lot with more game engines or frameworks at disposal.
Indie devs doing this is pretty cool. I think the Sidekiq guy gave $250k/yr for years to Ruby.
Couldn't have seen this donation go to a more dedicated group of folks I have worked and interacted with in the past and love seeing these contributions back! :)
MonoGame has great logo.
I'm sorry but why C#? Isn't the big tech (Microsoft) in this case is a very big downside?
Why not LÖVE (Lua) for example? https://love2d.org/
There is also libGDX (Java) but not sure Oracle is any better than Microsoft. https://libgdx.com/
Lua is awful for anything large. It is untyped, refactoring does not exist, etc. C# is an amazing language with amazing tools and very good libraries.
C# is open source now and has been for a while. Same as .NET
Only proprietary bit is the debugger (vsdbg) but there are open alternatives.
He should join the Open Source Pledge (disclaimer: I run it). The minimum is $2,000/dev so I'd say he qualifies haha