@WANO:
I was here and I was watching very carefully when Silkwizard's NEStalgia was accidentally announced to the internet at large. Tens of thousands of users tried to log in and play over the course of the day, and over 90% of them quit within minutes of joining due to the terrible network performance. These were people from Digg, Kotaku, Reddit, and a few other sites. Sure, NEStalgia ended up becoming a lot more successful over the following months (okay, 300 players peak daily), but countless more users left BYOND with a sour taste in the mouth from this experience and unfortunately, they're going to carry this impression with them.

The deal is, Reddit and Kotaku and Digg represent a large majority of gamers who tune into gaming news and tune into indie gaming. These are the guys you'd advertise any games to, and the first time anyone advertised to this crowd from BYOND has been a huge flop.

This is why I say that it'll be difficult to find potential players from outside of the BYOND community; because outside of the community, you'd be looking at the people from Reddit, Kotaku, and Digg.

NEStalgia was not built to handle 100+ players simultaneously (very few BYOND games can since it is single-threaded) and that is why it had those lag spikes. However, while that may well be a limitation of the engine, that doesn't mean it is crap. It just means that a game may be limited to a smaller number of users, or else utilize multiserver linking to get bigger. There is nothing wrong with building games that cater to 10-20 players-- in fact, that is a real opportunity market these days since most games fall on either end of the spectrum.

I wouldn't make too much of that incident. Almost no one on the Internet has heard of BYOND and if one develops a good game with it, it'll get played regardless of our previous bad branding. And if that's an issue, one can use the standalone and not even mention BYOND (although that doesn't exactly help us).

Well, given that we have a system for releasing games without even mentioning BYOND, there's really no reason to use an incident from a few years ago as an excuse not to promote a game. I think most people don't even bother trying, which is sad to me.

Also, NEStalgia did get a pretty good response after the initial lag issue was resolved. It hasn't taken off, but if it had gotten onto Steam (and it may still) I suspect it would have. Same goes for a number of games here.

I just don't understand why we don't have access to simple things like angle / rotation, and atom.alpha, or a very simple particle engine... You're on direct X already, and a server shouldn't be responsible for all client graphical effects.

Save the feature creep, just give us something basic.

We don't have access to those things because that is all more development time and we've been spending all of our time trying to figure out how to earn money so we can put in that time. That's like the whole point of this post.

Yes, $5000/month would be enough to sustain some level of active development so we could work on features instead of working on trying to make money. I mean, we've already been doing that practically for free for 17 years so it's not that much to ask. I don't think it's going to happen though.

I think the same few people will donate, and, while that is extremely generous, it's not really what we need to be sustainable. We need all of the players of these games to help. And no amount of feature creep will really change that, as we've seen in the past. BYOND the software is better now than it has ever been but (aside from this very nice blip), we aren't earning anymore money. In fact, no technical change has ever really helped us out.

Long term, certainly if we added some cool graphical effects, client-side processing etc, maybe someone could develop a hit game and we could get some cut of sales to keep us alive. But we can't bank on that since it may never happen. Ergo, the problem.

That is no reason to give up fighting! it is also why I suggested running donations a few times a year at a higher goal so the hype was renewed.

There are many ways to monetize this community and you just have scratched the surface! You need to focus on researching ways to get paid for your efforts and then focus on more features, Donations are a good start but more is required, all we need is a constant revenue source for Byond. I know it is easier said than done but it is possible, the community needs to put their heads together and really come up with ideas.

And Tom you need a business plan that lays out exactly how much you spend and how much you earn and how much you need to earn and how you are going to do it. I love that you are moving in the right direction but don't stop here! :)

I knew it. And it works well in a budget: Instead of just putting off some money in Misc Charges and spend a bit on BYOND, you could put aside, say, $20 a month in your budget for BYOND. That makes it simpler than flipping a coin and deciding whether to spend that coin on BYOND.

Paypal cut would be like a $1 or more on that .. so it wouldn't be worth it really.