I don't want to be mean or sound rude, developer. But I don't know, it seems that the forums started to die off when you gave a price for the final game.

It's just a feeling I got. I think that for an indie game, people should only have to donate. You announced a price and it wasn't quite a strategic decision due to the low amount of players that there was and the actual, well, let's call them "loyalists" that would stick with you no matter what and could bring the fame of the game back to life just in case.

Many of the players of RWR were probably teenagers who liked indie games and would praise the fact that people made the game out of love for the game itself, to please a fanbase, and as soon as they saw a price tag, fled while throwing curses for seeing another indie game "ruined".

So I propose this, please pasik, make the game free and ask for voluntary donations to keep the game running in a thread and in the game's website.

This is your choice, but I hope that you make the one that would please most people.

I support this.

A free game with modding can easily create a pretty damn big fanbase, which then turns into donations.
A game with a dozen customers is never going to have a significant modding community to begin with.

Ahem. Let me give you some reasons why pushing the game forward on a donation model is a good idea:

1) Donation models often show that several people are willing to pay much higher than what you dictate, which can more than compensate for those who pay nothing. See the humble indie bundle and other "pay what you want" products, such as Radiohead releasing their album for free, which caused them to make more money than they have previously ever made on an album.

2) Your audience isn't one of huge wallets. Your target audience seems to be young persons, who don't have credit/debit cards and therefore can't make online purchases without mom & dad. Your fringe audience however may include persons like myself who are of age and would in fact be willing to donate more than $5 if the game met expectations.

3) As a potential customer, I would never put my money into flimsy promises such as you claiming that I'll have every version from now until 1.0; it seems like the last thing in the world that could happen, and yet Project Zomboid just had a close call where they lost their most recent updates due to a theft of their work computers. I and several others simply won't invest our money, no matter how small the price, in a flimsy promise like that. But under the pretense of a donation, this condition doesn't apply as heavily because the money given is meant to help fund development, not to buy the game itself; I don't feel bad about spending 10 or even $20 to help a promising start up, but out of principle I won't likely be spending any money on the premise of "buying" the game now. You're no company, and you aren't going to refund me if you fall through, so what am I to do?

I do hope you'll see the potential your game has, and realize that it doesn't need a traditional buying model, and you'll open yourself up to a much larger audience just by making it free. I assume this is your first product, yeah? Well, I don't know about you, but when I became a web developer I soon learned that to get my name out there I actually had to do work for FREE. I had to OFFER people a free website so that they would recommend me. They weren't going to put money in someone they had no clue about.

It's the same thing for you, bud. You release this game for free, and it's awesome? You're going to be talent-scouted for hiring game development teams. But if you keep it in a traditional model, you won't get as much hype and not as many people can spread the word...

Thanks for that Gent, helps to see what older and established people have to say about this, showing that it isn't just a bunch of teenagers that want a game for free because they can't get their parent's credit card.

You're absolutely right, going commercial always cuts off certain part of people interested in the product, I think it's only natural behavior and expected.

I don't know if it would've made much difference if RWR would've had hundreds of thousands of players, and then I'd all of a sudden reveal a price on it, I might have actually received a far worse flaming due that.

I never had the intention of starting to do something of this size and keep going with it free forever, unless it would've turned out that there's no one who fancies a game like this. I'm sorry that some of the players got the feeling that the full game will stay free.



Actually, I basically tried the donation model while in alpha briefly, as I had the donate button on the website and the game was free for everyone. My ratio for donates per downloads was about 1 : 5000. I actually was expecting 0 donates, as I think the model only works in certain cases, and RWR is not one of those.

I have thought about a free-to-play version that might fit to people who now feel left out, but haven't worked out the details yet, like what are the limitations of playing free and what is the benefit in purchasing the game then.

I don't think the game needs to have a modding community before the game is final or almost final. I actually don't even recommend to start doing serious mods, until I've reached a certain level with the features. As you know, it's not nice to create a mod only to find out that it needs to be recreated on each game update. That is basically happening with map modding currently, and that will likely happen for the next 3 new maps by me, which in terms of versions probably means beta 0.9.

I think pay-what-you-want model works really well as a "discount sale" campaign, which only begins after some time the final product has been commercially launched and lasts for a limited time, I think that's pretty much how HIB has worked in the past. I admit Voxatron's debut success was a delightful exception to this, but I'm skeptical how often it works out so well in the future.

Also, a permanent pay-what-you-want can be a good fit to start after a year or two after the final release.



I'm actually targeting the game to a more mature audience, with a sort of retro feeling and some resemblance to Cannon Fodder, which is actually older than majority of teens in the first place. I'm certainly happy that also younger players have found RWR and like it, and can only hope that their moms & dads understand.



If you don't think the game will ever become final, you probably shouldn't purchase it until it actually is final. The advantage of purchasing the game only when it's final is that you know exactly what you're buying in terms of features, the downside is just that you have a bigger price to pay. If the price won't be an issue and there's no urge to get to play the game right now, then it's absolutely fine to skip the risk of pre-purchasing.

I don't know the specifics of how Project Zomboid managed to had most of their new sources on laptops that are subject to getting stolen / broken and not in a version control system on a server. Tough luck I guess, I'm sure they have a server for that, everyone doing any serious software development has one.

I do have the donate button on the website still, so if someone doesn't want to specifically pre-purchase the game but rather wants to donate for development, I'd be amazingly happy and also a bit surprised by such action. If you leave a note in the donation that you'd like to test drive the beta, I can easily give you the access to the beta as well. I somehow can't see the big difference between pre-purchase + beta vs donate + beta, but maybe it's just me.



RWR is actually not the first commercial game I've been involved in. With another team we made a PC sports game (floorball to be exact, most of you have probably not even heard of the whole thing, see http://www.fbl-game.com) distributed on DVD for a true niche market consisting of almost Finland and Sweden only, and that went fairly well looking at the circumstances. Not that well anyway that we could've kept making new versions after the first one or ported it to consoles, but it was a good experiment still.

With RWR, my target is not to show-off my dev skills to get to work in another game dev team. Quite the opposite actually, I'm making a game, a game engine and a tool set on which I can build new games in the future too, possibly with more people involved then.

I support RWR going commercial.
Take minecraft for example, it is an indie game, it is commercial, in fact, it is 13 bucks more compared to RWR, yet minecraft has a huge community, and it grew bigger after minecraft went commercial. I could argue the same about terraria.
At the same time, it is only fair to get something back in return for all this hard work, not donations, but actual "payments".

Edit: I got to know RWR during late 0.4 beta, just days before 0.5 came out, in another word: I did not play a lot. but when I see 0.5 beta and the purchase option, I pulled out my visa. Why? I LOVE this game. I thought this is a great game, and the dev surely deserved something in return. I didn't even know pasik has "promises" about later development at that time.

-Vanishing

-I know that something like this can't stay free forever, but you shouldn't have done it so soon, I don't know how your sales went, but I'm pretty sure that the forums got a hit in activity when you made it free. I'm not worried about daddy or mommy not giving me their MasterCard, I'm worried about the game's fame not rising in quite a while because a lot of people will feel a bit off seeing a 5,20€ + taxes price for an indie game that they don't even know if it will be finished or not.

-The problem about your donations system is that you didn't publicize it (if I remember correctly), you didn't announce, didn't make a sticky thread in any of the forums, didn't ask for any donations at all. While some dedicated people will donate, for others, it doesn't even cross their mind to do such a thing if they don't even see anything that asks them to do so.




-But Minecraft is Minecraft, I'm pretty sure it already had a huge community before going commercial, in the alphas and betas you could already see huge amounts of fans telling the game's bugs, problems, what to fix, what not to fix, doing publicity all around, etc. Terraria got its little place on steam and looked like a "cheaper, 2D minecraft", these simple things gave them a huge heads-up in terms of sales. RWR doesn't have any that, and that's a very bad point when you consider making the game pay to play.

-Yes, we all know that this is an excellent game, but let's face it, the grand majority of the gamer base are teenagers without any way to use a paypal-credit card paying method, while I know that this game is targeted for a more mature audience, the thing is that most of the mature audience left their video games and concentrated more on their life, while only playing more casual video games or old school. It is rare to find old Cannon Fodders players, and it's even more rare to find one that still is a dedicated gamer and could actually get to find this indie game.


Now now, I'm saying all this but giving no solutions, allow me to give one out: making the game free but doing heavy publicity for donations.
Or, making a "donator" version, a pay-to-play download and a free version, a download & play with the exact same characteristics, you would just have to ask people to buy the donator version so that you can use this money to make this game better and allow development to go faster.

There's a fully functional demo version of the game (single player only though) which is totally free. If you pay for it, you get multiplayer version. Hmmm