Patreon: Milestone Goals

[Simbax]

You guys gathered together from the love to this game. If you start coming here for money I think this community, or rather Terranova Team, will break down.

And only people with love to this game will stay here. A lot have already lost the love and nobody new is coming. Nowadays, Colobot isn't even one of a kind, because there is a lot of (good) programming games much better achieving their goals. Colobot doesn't even have a serious programming language, so there is even no motivation to learn from it. In my opinion, this project is already dead for the supposed target audience. It was already dead in 2001, as it was too hard to learn anything from it without previous at least little knowledge about real Computer Science and nearly everyone beat it without any programming, so it missed its main goal. This project is only attractive for people, who remember the game from their young ages, not for completely new people who hear about it the first time. Most of us can't even convince our closest friends to the game, and we want to convince some random guy on the Internet, who has never programmed before?

No thrilling plot, too small educational value, no shocking graphics, no sophisticated sandbox, no anything to attract anyone new. If we would like to advertise it, we would need to lie, so there is really not much point in Patreon, it's just another source of small donations to let the place for community going on. I agree, there is no point in splitting the money, better spend it on the server and so on, to let the old nostalgic fans have their fun. I wouldn't except any miracle with or without money.

I don't like these goals, as they are promises which we can't keep.

$101 per month
With this basic amount of money to share between the members of our team we could possibly work faster!

Split $101 between team members and other costs and everybody gets basically just another can of Coca Cola or something like that. This certainly wouldn't make anyone work much more.

$201 per month
Increased amount of money == increased number of Colobot: Gold Edition releases per month!

Aside from that $201 would have as much of effect as $101, increased number of releases is not something that would mean faster development. I would even say it would make it slower, because we would be wasting more time on releasing than on actual development. And more releases would put more pressure on us, thus they would have much worse quality overall, which would culminate in a bad end product.

On the Offensive!
$303 per month
We would be able to pay for high quality rendering of Colobot: Gold Edition trailers and other game-related animated videos of our production!

I asked @RaptorParkowsky about that. Here is the result: using https://blendergrid.com/ rendering not fully done GOLD teaser (http://colobot.info/forum/showthread.php?tid=584) (2500 frames in 4k resolution) would cost... 897 USD (excl. VAT). Keep in mind server costs and splitting between members of the team. This needs no further comment.

$502 per month
That's a huge amount of money for us (open-source game devs), don't ya think? What would we do with that much money? Well, buying new and improved versions of commercial programs like Adobe Premiere or FL Studio would probably allow us to create better quality content for both the project and the community around it.

And we would buy it as... who? A company? Or everybody would just buy what one needs? It is then from one's personal budget and nobody can force anyone to buy a program especially for Colobot developing. Frankly, I think that most of us use a free software or a cracked one anyway, so it wouldn't make any difference. Everybody in the team use their own tools and is alone responsible for having them legally and choosing them, the only thing that matters for the public is the effect of their work.

$904 per month
We would be surprised. And stunned. And we would work even harder to meet your expectations!

Well, this sum maybe would actually motivate someone. If we wouldn't need to save money for render farms.

$12,000 per month
Quite impossible to achieve, isn't it? But... we would be able to leave everything else and just develop the game. The project would no longer be an open-source free-time hobby, it would become our job.

Yes, we would, if the team won't be growing. However, some of us might still have a better (and, what is more important, certainly) paid full-time job. And remember about all the taxes and splitting problems.

$65,536 per month
TerranovaTeam would be gathered in one single place, forming a studio of game developers. That practically means Colobot: Gold Edition, Colobot 2 aaand other games developed faster. Aaand videos. Aaand so many other stuff that game studios create. Like... I don't know, Imma just an open-source dev, I kinda work for free.

Nice dream, but there would be a LOT of problems with establishing this. It's not that easy to change a place to live, and we are spread across the whole country, if not world. And who would take the responsibility for managing that? It's really hard...

To sum up, in my opinion, they are really bad goals. There should be less of them and they should be more realistic, without empty promises. Most of them shouldn't exceed $100 and, honestly, I think that asking for $10,000 at the beginning is as funny as a person asking  "I want to make a new Facebook, just give me money".