I buy a short $5 indie game. I give it away afterwards digitally to a friend. The next guy does the same thing. And the next guy.
Now the developer has to primarily make money by selling merch or ingame ads. No thanks. If the game is good, people will buy it.
You could argue people did this with physical media. But it was not nearly as impactful; I couldn’t click a few buttons in seconds and hand the game away.
I would be very glad if we would stop with game sales altogether. Instead, add option to support the developer and platform. Completely unrelated to the amount of people and hours played.
Just download the game (ideally through P2P), enjoy it, ‘donate’ if you like it, however much you like.
For online games, you have a pool for keeping servers alive, if it runs out, open-source it, and let users with the maintenance.
Like I would have donated much more to Terraria than to Devil May Cry 5.
I buy a short $5 indie game. I give it away afterwards digitally to a friend. The next guy does the same thing. And the next guy.
Now the developer has to primarily make money by selling merch or ingame ads. No thanks. If the game is good, people will buy it.
You could argue people did this with physical media. But it was not nearly as impactful; I couldn’t click a few buttons in seconds and hand the game away.
So you opened another can of worms.
I would be very glad if we would stop with game sales altogether. Instead, add option to support the developer and platform. Completely unrelated to the amount of people and hours played.
Just download the game (ideally through P2P), enjoy it, ‘donate’ if you like it, however much you like.
For online games, you have a pool for keeping servers alive, if it runs out, open-source it, and let users with the maintenance.
Like I would have donated much more to Terraria than to Devil May Cry 5.