TerranovaTeam @ Patreon

[Emxx52]

Hi!

A few days ago I came up with an idea which might change a bit the intensity of our works on Colobot: Gold Edition and other minor projects. So yesterday I started making this idea more real by setting up the base.

I see the team as not entirely efficient in what we are doing. We don't really have much time for developing the project, and so, the site from newcomer's perspective looks a bit inactive. Here's what I think would help us: motivation increase. And how to increase open-source/free-time/hobby/whatever team's motivation? By giving them money, that's how. Our motivation was always like 'the game deserves that' and all, but what if we could make real money (not just occasional donations from time to time) out of developing it? Would treating the project more like a job, not a free-time hobby, motivate us to work faster? Since I am the one managing our PayPal account I'd like to present you a great possibility.

What is Patreon?
For those who have no idea what it is - it's basically like Kickstarter, except for one major thing: the money is given to us every month (or per release, or whatever). I suggest watching an informative video on their website.

How in the world is that supposed to help us?
Well, it's like a circle - we create content and hmm, let's say people like those things we are doing and they become our patrons. And then we reach a goal of for example 100$/month. So we are motivated to work harder, better, faster and release even more content. So that means more people are reached and satisfied.

How does this system handle the money case?
The money is transferred right to our PayPal account, so from our current perspective nothing but the possible amount of donations and their frequency (monthly or per release nature) will change. But if our activities are appreciated enough, I will be able to send everyone at TerranovaTeam his salary every month/release (I guess we should split the money evenly for everyone on the team and give some percentage to the occasional contributors if they worked for the project during that month).

Sounds great, so how do we start?
I've constructed the base on https://patreon.com/TerranovaTeam, it's not yet visible for everyone, but I'd like to show you some screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/UuO86zE.png, http://i.imgur.com/u33oEIQ.png, http://i.imgur.com/6H0VXgG.png, http://i.imgur.com/YUInosN.png
But it's not that easy! Of course, I can just press that 'Launch' button right now, but we don't really have anything to encourage people to start supporting us. The first step is to create a video that will describe our project in a few words. Aand... a huge description of who we are and what we do, something like a combination of things written on our homepage.

This initiative would require quite a lot of activity. I'd like to see your thoughts on the subject in this thread. So, what do you think?

[Simbax]

It sounds very nice, however, there may be a few side effects of launching such a campaign.

• We were open, but after this, we will have to be much more restrictive with members of our team. The team will need to be stable. I think we should split the money less communistically - basing on amount of work done. Otherwise it will probably end up with no people working, as "everyone will get money anyway". It will be no motivation if everyone will get money even if rarely do anything!
  
• The source code will still be visible for everyone and there is a chance that there may be created a group of people more skilled than us, who will fork our code and encourage people to move to their's project because of different approach, more releases and so on. Not only we'll lost our chance for patrons, but also our years of work will be basically stolen from us, which may end good for the game itself, but it would probably end this beautiful community.
  
• Are there any other open source projects like our's, which use Patreon? It's a little odd to me and there might be unforeseen consequences of doing it in our case. Most of us don't even know each other in reality, how can we trust each other in splitting the money and getting the job done?
  
• Are we really up to the challenge? What if we will fail our patrons? It's not like we are full-time professionals, we are still learning and effects of our work might not be as good as we would want them to be. Especially, a marketing might be a problem. Our homepage isn't even done yet, we lack organisation, we have a huge mess, we don't have a landing page, we don't have any specific roadmap which we can show to our users. I think we should have at least one person responsible fully for marketing, who will tell us what needs to be done (not because of internal project issues, but because of need to show something), scare us with deadlines, criticise everything, make sure to deliver content to our users in best way possible and much more...
  

That's everything that comes to my mind for now, but there is probably more.

I am experienced with video editing, so I can of course help with that. I can even record some videos of the game (I am not sure if my computer is powerful enough to handle recording in HD with excellent quality, though...) or a commentary. Also, I saw a lot of bad webpages and a lot of good webpages, so I will criticise every single detail, as everyone should, because it matters.

Before we launch this, we must prepare, but right now, we must decide. Everyone from TerranovaTeam should state his opinion about this.

[tomangelo]

We aren't professionalist who work on this game in fulltime. We're working on that in free time, between work/school/other projects/whatever else. When they're paying to us, our patrons would expect to us working everyday, or at least to make some changes every week, what could be hard for us when we've many others duties.
Maybe when our team would be bigger, so at least one-two persons from TT would be active everyday, it could be great idea. But there are many things that we need to finish before.

[Simbax]

This is supposed to make us work much more.

[tomangelo]

When someone have free time - yes, it may make us work more. I just don't know how much free time everybody have.

[tomaszkax86]

I don't like this idea. I can't guarantee that I will have enough time to work on Colobot. I can't guarantee I will fix an issue each week or add new requested feature. And I don't want to be paid for such work. I'm just a volunteer. I work in my free time. If I wanted to get more money, I would simply find a job as a programmer or make a company.

Plus, Patreon causes some less known problems, especially in artistic areas. While great idea in theory, it changed the way some artists handle commissions. Patrons are often privileged group and they can even require you to do stuff for them or else they leave. I don't like that. I know some artists who have lost most of their patrons because they refused to make erotic art and were basically forced to make it to get those patrons back. I wouldn't want to be forced to add some idiotic stuff to Colobot because someone pays me for it.

[tomangelo]

I don't like this idea. I can't guarantee that I will have enough time to work on Colobot. I can't guarantee I will fix an issue each week or add new requested feature. And I don't want to be paid for such work. I'm just a volunteer. I work in my free time. If I wanted to get more money, I would simply find a job as a programmer or make a company.

This is exactly what I mean. Not everyone may reserve an hour, or two, or more to work only on Colobot.

Plus, Patreon causes some less known problems, especially in artistic areas. While great idea in theory, it changed the way some artists handle commissions. Patrons are often privileged group and they can even require you to do stuff for them or else they leave. I don't like that. I know some artists who have lost most of their patrons because they refused to make erotic art and were basically forced to make it to get those patrons back. I wouldn't want to be forced to add some idiotic stuff to Colobot because someone pays me for it.

Well, this is serious disadvantage. We want to remake this game and if our patrons would require from us to changing whole game (like "add shooting to aliens from neutron gun"), our all efforts would became pointless.

[krzys_h]

I've constructed the base on https://patreon.com/TerranovaTeam, it's not yet visible for everyone, but I'd like to show you some screenshots: http://i.imgur.com/UuO86zE.png, http://i.imgur.com/u33oEIQ.png, http://i.imgur.com/6H0VXgG.png, http://i.imgur.com/YUInosN.png

I feel like these goals are too big for a start. Looking at the amount of donations we get, I personally don't think we'll even reach the first one. I'd rather start small - something like $5/month, $10/month, $20/month and so on. Of course, the rewards for these wouldn't be too big, but it's something to start with.

We were open, but after this, we will have to be much more restrictive with members of our team. The team will need to be stable. I think we should split the money less communistically - basing on amount of work done. Otherwise it will probably end up with no people working, as "everyone will get money anyway". It will be no motivation if everyone will get money even if rarely do anything!

Exactly, the money should be split by the amount of work done. The only problem is, how do we measure the amount of work done? Diffrent people work on diffrent things, so it's not possible to split by e.g. the amount of changed lines in the code or commits, because you can't count people who do graphics this way.

The source code will still be visible for everyone and there is a chance that there may be created a group of people more skilled than us, who will fork our code and encourage people to move to their's project because of different approach, more releases and so on. Not only we'll lost our chance for patrons, but also our years of work will be basically stolen from us, which may end good for the game itself, but it would probably end this beautiful community.

This kind of problem exists in EVERY open source project. The only way to avoid that is to make our version the best one. Also remember, that GPL license allows anybody to create a fork, but also allows us to merge code from that fork back into the main repository if we decide so.
See also http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html...edVersions

Are we really up to the challenge? What if we will fail our patrons? It's not like we are full-time professionals, we are still learning and effects of our work might not be as good as we would want them to be. Especially, a marketing might be a problem. Our homepage isn't even done yet, we lack organisation, we have a huge mess, we don't have a landing page, we don't have any specific roadmap which we can show to our users. I think we should have at least one person responsible fully for marketing, who will tell us what needs to be done (not because of internal project issues, but because of need to show something), scare us with deadlines, criticise everything, make sure to deliver content to our users in best way possible and much more...

Yes, that's true - we aren't proffessionals. But do we really need to be?

Are there any other open source projects like our's, which use Patreon? It's a little odd to me and there might be unforeseen consequences of doing it in our case. Most of us don't even know each other in reality, how can we trust each other in splitting the money and getting the job done?

I think that after all these years we can trust each other, but that's just my opinion.

Plus, Patreon causes some less known problems, especially in artistic areas. While great idea in theory, it changed the way some artists handle commissions. Patrons are often privileged group and they can even require you to do stuff for them or else they leave. I don't like that. I know some artists who have lost most of their patrons because they refused to make erotic art and were basically forced to make it to get those patrons back. I wouldn't want to be forced to add some idiotic stuff to Colobot because someone pays me for it.

Well, this is serious disadvantage. We want to remake this game and if our patrons would require from us to changing whole game (like "add shooting to aliens from neutron gun"), our all efforts would became pointless.

I think that open source projects are supposed to be driven by the community. If the community wants us to implement some crazy feature, why don't listen to them? Isn't that why we are working on C:GE, to make it better, at least in our understanding? If not, what are we even doing here?
Remember, this is world of open source, so even if we deny to implement some feature that will be hugely requested, somebody can make a fork and implement that. If that turns out to be something that is good for the game and community, we can still pull that idea back to the main project.

[Simbax]

About splitting money, me and @Emxx52 came up with a lot of ideas, but only two of them seem reasonable:

• One person decides. We would meet at the end of each month and state our opinions about each person's work (including ourselves). After that, the person "responsible for finances" decides how much each one of us gets, based on stated opinions (including his own). I think we won't like this solution, but it makes sense, so we can use it if we will need it.
  
• We split evenly between everyone, except people, who did hardly or no at all anything. Reason doesn't matter.
  

Unfortunately, there is indeed no way in which we could measure amount of work... We can't measure an amount of time spent by each individual, we can't compare effects of work, even if we somehow did, it would be not fair, as what if someone would be working hard to provide something sophisticated and he failed? He would get nothing, but he could work a lot more than people, I don't know, making simple icons or one line commits for example.

[tomangelo]

I think that open source projects are supposed to be driven by the community. If the community wants us to implement some crazy feature, why don't listen to them? Isn't that why we are working on C:GE, to make it better, at least in our understanding? If not, what are we even doing here?
Remember, this is world of open source, so even if we deny to implement some feature that will be hugely requested, somebody can make a fork and implement that. If that turns out to be something that is good for the game and community, we can still pull that idea back to the main project.

Well, yes. But big changes were supposed to be introduced in Colobot 2. C:GE is a reedition, which mean that we should change gameplay only when it's necessary. Making Colobot gameplay to looks like Battlefield or another AAA game, where we're shooting to everything, because our patrons wants so is quite big change of our goals.

[Simbax]

Patrons won't have any power over us, nobody will, have or had, because it's just not possible. They will be just... regular donors. They could cancel their subscriptions at most. I don't think they will want such changes anyway, we will have clear goals listed for them. We are also not a studio who is short on money, we are volunteers, so they can't threaten us like "we won't pay you if you don't do that!". It would be actually quite funny if they even tried.

[Emxx52]

Patrons are often privileged group

True, there is a rewards system on the page, which allows us to say 'thanks' by different means to our most faithful patrons. For example putting patron's name in game credits might be a good idea. We should discuss the means we could afford.

they can even require you to do stuff for them or else they leave

Becoming a patron does not make you the creator's boss. Of course, you can request something but it's still the artist's decision whether he will create a thing or not. And we are kinda not planning on living on donations, we will work no matter how much money we get monthly. But getting more money than no money might be a tempting possibility, motivating us to work more and more intensively every month.

I feel like these goals are too big for a start.

That was just an easter-eggish proposition (as you can see most of the amounts were meant to remind Colobot missions), so those goals and their descriptions are more like just examples and so I'd like them to be discussed here.

I think that after all these years we can trust each other, but that's just my opinion.

++

EDIT: <just letting you know that the poll has been added>

[krzys_h]

It's already a month since Patreon was suggested. There are 5 votes for yes and 2 votes for no, but there is NO ACTIVITY AT ALL about this topic. If we really want this to happen, we need to start preparing descriptions, videos etc.

[RaptorParkowsky]

Well, after analysing those textwalls I'm still between "Yes" and "Nah..." so I'm on hold from voting. If there will be any need for animations or simply directing the content for this (the movie, promotional images, etc.), then I can help with that.