pay for features?

[zany]

on another forum I am on they have it so people can pay the devs to get new things into the game. would people on this forum pay the devs to get their idea into the game?

[Emdek]

This is that concept:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_bounty

And such things can help in speeding up work, if there are clear goals and tasks can be separated.

[Emdek]

OK, after some additional thoughts (and as side effect indirect reply to some post from you-know-whose-blog) got went following reasoning for above idea.
Disclaimer: those are my personal thoughts, not shared or discussed with others before publishing it in this post.

OK, lets start.

As we all know we don't leave in "ideal" world, we need to make money to live (unless you don't have family, you live in a cave, you have efficient solar panels or something other to produce enough electricity to power up computer, you scavenge food in nearby forest etc.), so some communities of open source / free projects coined idea to pay developers to make their live easier (as they usually don't get rewards other than gaining more experience and pride for doing things for free for others), also there is related model in which companies like Red Hat, Novell, Intel, AMD, IBM and others sometimes hire people to work on open projects (exclusively or as part of their work), they hire existing active members (to free them from worrying about making money to live) or new ones (then in agreement they state that their work will go open source). They do that as kind of charity (less often and not as main goal), but in fact to advertise themselves and / or to make bigger money on solutions based on open source work (like LGPL or BSD licensed libraries).

In case of Warzone I doubt if someone forces or pays for working on that game to any of current developers (or all who worked on it after it was freed by commercial developers, studios, and publishers).
Also (as long as their work is used according to license) everybody can make use of it, create own forks, but personally I think that there should be one core repository with core engine and "default" assets, and other would create more varieties through replacing those assets (that would become fully true if we would have enough flexible scripting, look for my other ideas scattered around to find more).

[effigy]

I feel better about developers that choose to improve and maintain the game because they enjoy it (the game itself/coding for it).

edit: that said, allowing donations to help with hosting costs would be a nice show of appreciation from the users.

edit edit: that that said, I just remembered the web space is donated, not sure about the server setup, though.

[aubergine]

I feel better about developers that choose to improve and maintain the game because they enjoy it (the game itself/coding for it).

+1

[Emdek]

edit: that said, allowing donations to help with hosting costs would be a nice show of appreciation from the users.

I think that in this case the only real cost is to get domain up, or wz doesn't use server from projects like sourceforge etc. for main page (github account for VCS hosting is free if repositories are public)?

[Jorzi]

Coming from the blender community, I've seen it done, but it's not without its problems.
-The dev will have to set up his own donation system, to make sure no one else gets the money
-Many people don't realize that they cannot expect much from a donation of, say, 20€. That is a single hour of work.
-In fact, one cannot legally require any result from a donation

[Emdek]

Jorzi, yeah, but I think that here is example of something really successful:
http://haikuware.com/bounties

[zany]

Coming from the blender community, I've seen it done, but it's not without its problems.
-The dev will have to set up his own donation system, to make sure no one else gets the money
-Many people don't realize that they cannot expect much from a donation of, say, 20€. That is a single hour of work.
-In fact, one cannot legally require any result from a donation

what do you mean? one guy payed $100 and they put in what he wanted

[aubergine]

Depends what people will work for. $100 won't even by me a week's food (and I don't eat much). And it depends how big the coding task is too.

[Berg]

I'll make you a rock feature for 100 bucks

[Emdek]

zany, you would need to look for developers / artists from countries where US dollar value is higher (for me $100 equals 1/4 of monthly spending for family consisting of two members).

[Emdek]

Apparently similar models works too, also for post apocalyptic like games (RPG this time).
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2

[zany]

Apparently similar models works too, also for post apocalyptic like games (RPG this time).
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2

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