Lets all just rip them off!

I am very generous in allowing Dantom to take what they want. I have an upcoming deposit and subsequent donation that I think will help them out, if only to a smaller degree.

Lets look at this in a slightly different light...
Dantom, Dan and Tom, worked on this project endlessly for many years now, producing one of the best hub and game development (if not THE best) on the web. They did a majority of this work for free, a majority being around 99%. The small amount of money they have gained back has been far insufficient to even support the SERVERS and BANDWIDTH. This means they haven't even came close to breaking even yet! If you've read anything on the Dantom story, you'll notice that this was a development to make money. They aren't making money. It's been seven years. They have crafted an awesome system for us, and what do we do? We beg for features, send pointless e-mails about losing 20 cents while trying to buy the source code for a game that shouldn't have been distributed in the first place. We whine on the forums, and spam other users. Honestly, if I was Dantom, I probably would have gotten frustrated long ago and shut the whole thing down (of course, being the person I am, I probably would have redone it with a new name, and a MUCH higher payout scale). They have been kind enough to take their own living money from their jobs and apply it towards this project. You guys try to beg dollars and cents off other users, continuously, while they are pouring actual money they have earned, while trying to -- at the same time, manage a life. I know it's not easy. Admittidly, the 50% charge seems a bit steep, but could you even accomplish anything without this system? Probably not. You probably would have made a game in C++ with a much worse base (if you can even handle producing in that language), have poor marketing, and low hits. Essentially what I'm saying is this: Get over it. Live with the loss of your 5 dimes on your customers. Eventually things will turn around, Dantom will probably earn enough money (as in income after expenses) to lower the prices, and if not that, at least they will continue improving the system. If you expect to make a living off of BYOND as it is, maybe you should go find a job. I'm thankful just to be able to produce games, I don't even need the cash, I use most of my income to keep making new games, and to subscribe to other games. Eventually it will get to a state where we can make money, just be patient. Hey, maybe you could even go out and advertise!


~Polatrite~

Lummox JR wrote:

Alternate suggestion: 20% or $5 (not per player), whichever is higher.

I've considered this approach, but my thinking is that basically the 20% is too small. The $5 is doesn't amount to much because that is a developer-side fee. We might have 100K users playing 1000 games, and the $5000 in developer fees isn't going to do much for us.

The funny thing is that people perceive this huge psychological difference between 20% and 50%. Don't get me wrong-- it is a big difference, but it shouldn't be enough to evoke such strong emotions about the nature of the model (BYOND is a scam!) I think 50% is a nice round figure that is easy to divvy up, but if we were to go with a large percentage, 40% is more sensical if only for the reason that it is not the majority.

I'll think more about your proposal and whether we can make something like this work. One alternative is to mix and match various ideas-- charging smaller percentages on pager subscriptions in addition to user charges for the pager (where we can hopefully get a number of signups).

Polatrite wrote:

I am very generous in allowing Dantom to take what they want. I have an upcoming deposit and subsequent donation that I think will help them out, if only to a smaller degree.

Thanks for the kind words, Polatrite. However, you needn't support us out of the spirit of good will. Most new ventures fail; we have lasted so long because we have been too stubborn to give up!

In truth, I am really glad to hear all of the constructive criticism here. It is best that we get these out of the way before we embark on major changes that could alienate our potential recruits. Obviously we can't make everyone happy, but I'm hoping we can come up with a model that will appease the majority, or at least be able to justify our logic in choosing the route we do.

Tom, I would just like to say Kudos to you and Dan for keeping Byond alive, and that I believe that what ever plan you decide to implement it will be good for the whole community in the end, like the 1906 Social Reforms made by the Liberal party in the UK. Whilst to some this price adding may seem like a bad thing because of what it may mean to them as an individual, the effect upon the sociaty on the whole will among the lines of Faster servers, a happier DanTom who would be able to spend more time on BYOND due to it giving an acceptable revenue and maybe even raising the bar of quality games upon the hub. I say Kudos to you, I'm with you no matter what the choice you make!
Maz

I was replying to you, but most of that was not directed at you. Admittidly the opening statement was a bit rude, although thats how it seems we are trying to handle it. I don't know too much about you, and I have enough decency not to insult YOU without knowing YOU. The thread was directed at the community as a whole, and much of the community is guilty of these "accusations." No harm was intended towards your person, sorry if I made you feel that way.


~Polatrite~

Tom wrote:

• Merchant fee
  

  This is a bit of a sticky issue. On the one hand, I'd like people who have no source of BYONDime income to be able to create a game, make a few bucks off it, and then spend that hard earned money elsewhere in the economy. It is very entrepreneurial. On the other, there are a lot of nuisances accompanying the free charge of wares-- already, even in this minimal economy, we've had a lot of problems dealing with fraud. So I think that imposing a $1-$5 fee (possibly in the form of a BYONDime deposit) is sensical. We'll have to discuss this more as we begin to implement these changes.

  
  I agree this would help stop fruad a little, although the profit to be made out of fraud it probably enough to cover the setup cost.
  Maybe when you set up a subscription system in your game, you can opt to have the first $10 worth (Maybe not $10, but a slightly higher amount then the average fee) of subscriptions pay for your subscription licence.
  This would mean the people who dont have access to BYONDimes would have a chance to earn some, but it would cost them more.
  Also, although Im not a financial genious, it means that if someone doesnt pay there entire load back, BYOND dont really lose anything.
  -DogMan

Dog Man wrote:

Maybe when you set up a subscription system in your game, you can opt to have the first $10 worth (Maybe not $10, but a slightly higher amount then the average fee) of subscriptions pay for your subscription licence.

This is a pretty good idea, actually. It's the same way CafePress (a Dantom partner!) handles billing for their premium service. If your first month's profits exceed the cost of the service, then you don't pay anything and they send you the difference. Otherwise you pay them the difference. If you can't or won't pay, then your service is terminated. Something similar could work for game publishing here.

----

On the publishing fee, let me just say that in the Real World(tm), authors typically earn royalties ranging from 10% to 35%. That's right, the publisher almost always takes a majority of the revenue (65-90%). In that light, 50% is a steal. A quick google search on "game publishing royalties" will tell the story.

Of course, Dantom is not packaging up your game and selling a physical product on your behalf, but they are providing a valuable service, should you choose to utilize it. The vision is for BYOND to become a gaming website, much like Yahoo! or MSN Games. People will come to BYOND to play games. If your game is published through BYOND, you will get several benefits:

• A potential audience that you may not be able to attract on your own. Again, this is assuming we can attract players in significant numbers (100,000+ users). From what I'm told, things are starting to happen behind the scenes to make this a reality in the next year or so.
• Incredibly easy payment system integrated into your game and the website (BYOND Passport). Of course you can have users pay outside of the system, but that's a lot of extra work for you - accept payments, track subscriptions/who's paid up to date, etc. Publishing through BYOND gives you all of this.
• Advertising on the BYOND site.
• Quite possibly more that I can't think of or am not at liberty to say. (just kidding about that)

Of course any developer can handle this outside of BYOND, but I believe the intent is to make the service easy enough and benficial enough that you wouldn't want the hassle of doing it yourself.

Is the 50% cut (or 40%, whatever) the right number for Dantom to take? I don't know, and I'm sure Dan and Tom don't either. But they're working hard to figure out a good system that, as Tom said, works as a symbiotic relationship between developer (us) and publisher (them). The goal is for each party to benefit from the strengths that the other brings to the deal.

Think about this: if you had to advertise yourself, accept credit card payments yourself, maintain your own database of subscribers, maintain a website that shows live game statistics, how much time and money would it cost you? Let's say it costs you $1000 a year for a large (several thousand user) base of players. This covers server space, bandwidth, time and effort, credit card processing fees, etc. Let's say you want to make $5000 profit off of 1000 subscriptions. So you need to set your game price at $6. Publishing through Dantom, you have no extra work to do and no overhead costs - just the 50% (for example) cut to Dantom. You need to charge $10 to make $5000 profit. With the large player base that BYOND expects to have, is it so hard to believe that you would get fewer $10 subscribers through BYOND than $6 subscribers doing it yourself? Keep in mind that good games can easily sell for $20 or more, so for the player, $10 is still peanuts.

That last question wasn't quite rhetorical, by the way. If anyone has any thoughts or comments on this example scenario, please do share!

CalmStorm wrote:

most booth workers are payed a fraction of what they rip!

It would suck if you had BO.
I could have made two jokes about that line, one would be funny to my stoner buddies, and the other just wouldnt be funny, so I choose the one that isnt funny.
-DogMan

First, let me say that I have nothing but respect for Dan and Tom. Everybody has to make a living somehow, and they have worked selflessly for the last several years in order to create the best game programming language/platform/system I have ever seen. And to top it all off, it's free to use. It's about time they got something back for all their hard work.

But at the risk of sounding greedy and selfish, what happens to those of us who don’t have the money to fork over for this new BYOND economy or to those of us who simply don’t want to? Does this mean that no one will be able to join our games? Will we go on some kind of BYOND Blacklist? Or does it simply mean that these games will no longer be available through BYOND itself (pager, games live, etc.)? How will this work?

All of the discussions in this thread so far have shared one major assumption: that anyone who is serious about coding on BYOND is out to make money. Not only am I legally forbidden to charge people money to play my current project, it is morally unjust to do so (this is far more significant to me). Even if I could, I wouldn’t. This doesn’t seem to stop the DBZ-ers, but that’s another story . . And no, I don’t claim to be a saint like a certain other programmer who we all know and respect, who before making his own fangame did in fact ask for permission from the company owning the rights to that certain video game series. I came to BYOND with one purpose, to build my dream game. Nothing more. Nothing less.

So I need to know what this new economy will have in store for producers like me and games like mine. I have no BYOND income, nor do I want any. It’ll be a cold day in Hell before I ask for donations . . . asking for charity when you don’t need it is for the shameless. (And yes, this means you, if you have ever created a game with a “donate” verb. If you really need money so badly that you have to beg people for dimes, you shouldn’t be spending so much time on BYOND. Some people say this is a way of showing how much people really enjoy your game, but if you’re content “selling out” your hard work for pennies, then I pity you for doing so.)

You may think I’m being rather bitter about this. After all, what can a useless programmer like me do for BYOND, since I don’t want to contribute to the economy? If you want to attract lots of people, you have a better chance of doing so by offering a no risk product for free than by offering one they may not enjoy at all for a price. Lure people with the free offers; snag them with the costs once they get here. This is where people like me come in . . . Once I have something worth promoting, I intend to do so - not to the general public but to those who I think would most appreciate the games hosted on BYOND. “If you build it, they will come.” If there are no accommodations made for non-profit games on BYOND, I’m afraid you will end up causing more harm than good by imposing this new economy and all of its restrictions.

Ok here here we go
Who makes all the racket and spam: DBZ
Who sells illegal source code: DBZ
Who buys the code: DBZ
What does everybody complain about: People complaing about DBZ and Dbz its self.
Why do we get annoying people joining our games: Dbz

Now if we didnt have dbz, byond would become respectable.

But why do all the people come here just to make dbz. Letting dbz go is like adding more fuel to the fire, untill we get the point across no stupid noobs, we are gonna keep getting them.

I myself probably would tell all of you to blep your selfs if i had to pay to make a game, and go learn c++ instead. I cant get money sent over here because my parents wont let me, and seeing i live in aus, even if i send over $100 i will only have $50 due to exchange rates.

The whole problem, is that we dont have enough serious devlopers.