At this point it's mostly just to show your support to BYOND, though it still has a few benefits such as being able to disable ads on the site and pager, as well as a bit of space to upload files on BYOND. It isn't really meant to be a "hey look at all this cool stuff I get and non-members don't!" and more "BYOND is in the red and I think they're cool guys, so I'll chip in some money to help them out."

Oh right, members can receive benefits from games too if the developers of said games implement them. I keep forgetting that exists because it's a completely underused feature!

Personally, I bought a five year membership on both of my accounts purely for the fact that I love what BYOND is meant to be. I don't do it for the benefits, I do it to support BYOND. BYOND is the reason I got introduced to programming, and it has made me a great deal of money over the years because of it getting me into such bountiful fields. Between my two accounts, I'm at $246 donated to BYOND, and I intend to get both of my accounts on the top thirty list within the year.

Where do you think the money goes? What have you seen that costs $5000+ a month?

Two full time employees and running costs of a small business.

Christ.

King_ed wrote:

Full time employees which from the development rate and progression rate of the BYOND software don't work 'full time' as they are their own bosses they work when they want. A small business, the hosting BYOND needs costs no more than $200-400 a month. So are they really pocketing $4800-4600 a month?

As a fellow Saiyan of Planet BYOND, I can tell you that they need the remaining $4600-$4800 to pay for the moderators we have. Ter13 alone is paid $1500/monthly for his services.

Lige wrote:

King_ed wrote:

Full time employees which from the development rate and progression rate of the BYOND software don't work 'full time' as they are their own bosses they work when they want. A small business, the hosting BYOND needs costs no more than $200-400 a month. So are they really pocketing $4800-4600 a month?

As a fellow Saiyan of Planet BYOND, I can tell you that they need the remaining $4600-$4800 to pay for the moderators we have. Ter13 alone is paid $1500/monthly for his services.

Why pay when you can find dedicated moderators willing to work for free?

While I am at loathe to discuss personal finances, I'm a senior engineer (in the most junior sense of the word) and I earn $7000 a month, and have earned that in deep recession, in startups, in chummy nepotist corporate arrangements etc.

I think Tom and Lummox could probably earn $7000 each, for getting fat and trawling through xkcd comics between pointless "agile kanban waterfall progress meetings" all day. Lord knows, I do.

So this notion that getting /at most/ $2500 each, in practice usually more like $1500, is some kind of dream steal for them is pretty much laughable.

I mean if you don't want to buy a membership, then that's your prerogative, and based on your sense of "what is BYOND worth to me". But I wouldn't go subtly (or not so) crapping on the donation target as being a money grab, when Tom and Lummox could frankly do so ... so much better in that regard, for less hassle.

Just be a man, say it straight, and leave it at that: You don't wanna spend money on BYOND. No shame in that.

It would be nice, from a business point of view.

I mean for a guy like me, I'm not sure there's anything BYOND could offer that I'd want to buy, strictly speaking. But, I kinda like BYOND, benefit from it, so I'm game to buy memberships based on the honour rule.

But I mean, if their current business model doesn't appeal to you, and you're not the kind of guy to donate .... then don't? There's no obligation at work here. Market forces and all that.

Why donate now when there are recessions going on, when no benefits are provided and you can use the money wiser?

It's not a bad question. Unfortunately, it's a question without a satisfying answer for you, or for Tom to hear.

The facts are this:

It should be noted that this commentary in no way is intended to be an official stance of anyone representing BYOND, nor is it intended to speak for Tom. This is all my take on things, and is quite prone to subjective interpretation of yours truly only. It is not derived in any way from commentary made by Tom or Lummox, and is not intended to be an indictment by them of this community or this product.

I am not a paid employee of BYOND, nor do I in any way have a stake in BYOND's profits. I merely act as a volunteer primarily approving demos and libraries, but occasionally delving into the realm of keeping the forum tidy, with a primary focus on Dev Help.

1) BYOND can't compete with products like Unity2D, RPGMaker, or Unreal2D. We're always going to appeal to a niche market only.

2) The current developer community is largely speaking incapable of using the features that we do have implemented already, much less giving merit to expanding BYOND's feature-set.

3) The player-base is an unmanageable and ugly chore to work with. They complain incessantly about any attempt to support BYOND, and accuse Tom of stealing from them, asking simply for this business endeavor to justify its own existence.

4) The developer community is either unwilling, or unable to abandon backward design considerations, like GDI-based game interfaces, 1:1 screen aspect ratios, games that run at 10 or 20fps, any kind of a control scheme, etc.

5) The community is toxic and poisonous to outsiders. About 80% of our community consists of people with some form of social ineptitude. You can't get more than four of us into a thread without it devolving into a pissing match about who is more useless. It either drives away competent developers, or ruins them by making them completely unable to realize their potential (See: Yut Put/Lord Andrew/almost Silk Wizard)

6) When Dan left, large portions of BYOND's source code became unintelligible, and we're stuck on a rendering setup, networking protocol, etc. That Tom/Lummox alone can't get the product off of. We don't have the resources to hire people that could actually move BYOND toward anything resembling a profitable business model, and we can't make BYOND more profitable without the resources to do so.


Add all of these together, and frankly, you can see that BYOND is at a point where if the community can't save it, Tom and Lummox can't do anything about it.

Tom's fed up, Lummox, I'm sure is at the point where he's tired of it as well.

And then to take the cake of what's actually going on, he has to deal with people questioning his every decision and ranting incoherently about things they don't actually understand.