Should TE be for profit?

aarona · Post by **aarona** » 03 Jul 2006 07:45

Before we can move on discussing the options for licensing, we have to decide on this point.

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 03 Jul 2006 09:34

I'm inclined to vote "Yes, but only as fair compensation for developers" but that comes with something everyone has to accept.

As several people said TE shouldn't be aimed at making money but when the oppurtunity to make money from it arrives we shouldn't turn it down. Key problem in this thinking is who gets how much. But aarona neatly used the term "fair compensation". My suggestion is:

If we aren't in this for the money, why not divide the money we might make equally over everyone involved, regardless of (proven!) time on the project.

Isn't every bit of money nice if we're only after a fair compensation or am I too communistic now

?!

aarona · Post by **aarona** » 03 Jul 2006 12:10

As far as I can tell this is the argument for being too difficult to organise:

Is there a system available to accept two or three different account holders in different countries and most importantly is online?
Most people would feel uncomfortable that money would be only going to one person no matter how trusted that person was. As soon as sizeable amounts come into play, the rules of acceptable human behaviour sometimes go out of the window. Oh look at Hyronymus' new sports car, how could he afford that?

Based on the "fair" model where everyone gets an equal slice of the pie, how do we then decide who gets some of the pie and who doesn't?
Ohhh that was *my* one idea, wheres my slice?
Oh I joined the project three years ago, didn't do much but still, I'm part of the team, wheres my slice?
Billybobperson got a slice, this is unfair, wheres my lawyer!?!?
Purno and his "friend" Punro both get a slice despite the fact they are the same person, hrm...

I'm not saying there aren't solutions, but I'm sure you can understand some peoples reservations with things like this.
I'm actually for fair compensation, but one persons fair is anothers unfair.

Any ideas?

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 03 Jul 2006 12:30

Yes, I certainly understand people's reservations. One problem is quite easiliy eliminated: if we agree to a rule now you're just being a complete a$$hole if you start complaining and/or demanding more later. Tough luck.

The blessings of a forum are that you can monitor when some "joined" a forum (section). We could therefor quite easily check how long someone is (was) on the project. I don't think we should loose ourselves in counting days then though but "round off" in months. The only truly difficult variable is activity. One way to solve that is to let activity count from the most recent resurrection of this project, ~2 months ago.

Purno · Post by **Purno** » 03 Jul 2006 12:31

I miss an option in the poll. IMO TE shouldn't be made to make profit, it even should be freely available IMO, but whenever the opportunity rises to gain profit from it, we should at least consider it

About who get's money and who doesn't;

That's quite hard actually. I don't work on TE for money, but when others get some money, it wouldn't be fair to skip me, IMO. Perhaps guessed can be how many hours of work someone has done.

Got a question about that; Can any artist/coder/whatever put a copyright on his works, claiming that TE can only use it if he gets a slice?

Perhaps we can kinda 'buy' someones work (tho it's probably hard for discussion, ideas and such), so the one who has the most valuable work, gets the biggest slice.

Dunno, just thinking loudly

aarona · Post by **aarona** » 03 Jul 2006 13:58

Purno wrote:Got a question about that; Can any artist/coder/whatever put a copyright on his works, claiming that TE can only use it if he gets a slice?

I'm no lawyer or expert in copyright law but from what I gather...
An artist/coder can copyright their work (as themselves) and give the Transport Empire team permission to use this code, and withdrawl that permission at any time. If they only provide their work on condition of royalty then you have to ask whether that person is right for the team (unless we chose to be not for profit).

I think if it was copyrighted under "Transport Empire Team" then such withdrawls would not be possible and all works would remain the property of the Team. (or company, etc)

Someone please correct me if i am wrong

jonty-comp · Post by **jonty-comp** » 03 Jul 2006 15:43

If I was developing it I would make it free but have a donate option somewhere.

If you decide to charge money for it, I probably won't buy it, I only get Open-Source stuff and some freeware off the internet.

Hyronymus · Post by **Hyronymus** » 03 Jul 2006 16:10

Please, read exactly what this topic is for. TE will be free but at some time there might be a chance to receive money and what do we do then? And if we accept donations: how do we divide them over the various people involved? That is the issue here.

XeryusTC · Post by **XeryusTC** » 03 Jul 2006 16:48

We could devide the money under all staff that is really involved with TE, then we could save some money for temporary artists if we want to have some models/textures when we are low on active artists or when we want something done faster, money usually helps

.
We could give developers an certain amount of money every week that they're active, although it will be quite hard to check from time to time if someone was really active or if he/she just said that he/she was.

Purno · Post by **Purno** » 03 Jul 2006 18:23

Another option is that all the money we get, put in a fund, and only spend it on things in advantage of TE. Like advertising, further development, whatever. In that case we don't need to worry about who's getting money and who doesn't, since nobody gets the money.

Just an idea.

Arathorn · Post by **Arathorn** » 03 Jul 2006 18:30

I like Purno's idea. A lot of succesfull open source projects work that way, and it's the fairest option IMO.

Steve · Post by **Steve** » 03 Jul 2006 19:15

You'd still need a central repository for the cash and who gets that?
I know I'm responsible and trustworthy, but it's silly for you to feel the same towards me, especially since you've never met me in real life.

Something that was said in the other thread made me think.. whilst server costs now are minimal, we have no content to be broadcasting. When a game is in beta or even worse, completed, we'd have massive bandwith considerations to take up.

For now, I propose a system whereby adverts are placed on the website at the start of each month and by the time they've paid the month's server fees, they get removed. These would be google ads to be paid to the server owner, so nice for the users and the server owner has nothing from his own pocket. Right now it's all coming out of my pocket, but I'm not sure it's worth implementing a system right now, as it's not really that much money ($25-35 a year for part of my server and a domain).

prissi · Post by **prissi** » 03 Jul 2006 19:41

It seems a little early to divide the catch, without an animal in range for hunting?

I wish TE all luck, don't get me wrong. But imho "coding for money" is a bad way to get a community project to work, because this will leed to greet and fights and a project manager, which costs money too. If you want to go commercial, go all the way.

But even then, there are good codes around, that just wait to be commercialized. E.g. 3DTTT is seeking for a publisher, it is a full game with 3D engine and a developed industry system. (See also the threads further down in this forum.) Contributing there might be more sucessful in the short and the long end.

Coding because of enthusiasm work much better. And if TE becomes commercial, then of course you could not host it on SourceForge and so on. Even then, to get TE on the track, I would contact some of the authors of the games that gave up development in a later stage than TE, like the Zugspiel and use it as a basis.

Ok, now flame me.

Post by **Dave** » 03 Jul 2006 19:51

If I may add a short opinion, I agree with prissi.

Bringing money into what appears to be a hobby project is never a good idea.

As prissi says - don't aim to finish for the money. Any money you make from the game being good is a bonus, but you shouldn't start with the overall aim of making a fortune - because, again as prissi says, this will lead to arguments and greed.

I don't agree with prissi's alternative idea however - if you think you guys have the ability to go for broke and finish this thing alone then by-all-means go ahead! There's obviously some VERY proficient coders/artists etc in this project, and it would be a shame to see it go to waste.

aarona · Post by **aarona** » 04 Jul 2006 05:28

I think that in reality if we didn't charge for the product but only relied on donations then we would have barely enough to cover the server costs based on what I've seen at other online communities. (Does anyone know of a successful example?) So all of this discussion about what we should do with the remainder may actually be for nothing.

jonty-comp makes a good point, he (like others) are all in the frame of mind that its only worthwhile if its free because they have come to expect it. Regardless of how much time people spend playing/enjoying a game, it wont be enough to convince some people that putting aside a little bit of their money to help the developers is a good thing. Meanwhile the developer(s) spend hours of their free time making patches and implementing features for a "gimmie gimmie gimmie" public. Its not so much of a problem with tens of coders, but with one...

As for commercial games, we all know that the developers get small royalties and the production companies are the ones reaping in the big bucks, so it's not exactly fair is it? (Which is why people resort to stealing right??)

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » 04 Jul 2006 12:58

If you have the time, the energy, and the endeavour to make TE into something you can sell, then I congratulate you.

However, currently TE is ranked alongside Duke Nukem Forever in terms of it's release prospects and 3D Realms have an entire team of programmers and artists working on that one.

Keep it free and open and if the game ever reaches the stage where it has enough quality to make people want to hand over money, set up a donation account and go from there.

Planning to go for-profit when you spent 3 years planning this game will just complicate matters when you come to implementing it. People will clash, the development will suffer, and it simply reduces the chances of you ever creating a playable version of TE.

If you really want to make money out of TE, then do it properly and make it a commercial venture. Take what you have and approach games publishers about financing development. Anything less and you'll just be wasting a lot of time and energy on a redundant aspect of an already stretched project.

Ultimately it's up to those working on it, but you didn't listen to me before and you spent a long time doing very, very little - to the point that the project was essentially declared dead. Listen to me now; this is a waste of time. Forget it.

aarona · Post by **aarona** » 04 Jul 2006 13:34

Well we can't do anything unless we know what license we are going to use and that is what this whole exercise is about. If we end up going for GPL and use someone elses GPL'ed code then we can't commercialise it full stop thus one avenue is automatically closed without any proper consideration taken.

charlieg wrote:Listen to me now; this is a waste of time. Forget it.

I dont think it matters if its a waste of time. The project has been about community consultation, and this is another area which needs to discussed and agreed upon. Yes its going to take an eternity...I'm itching to get stuck into some actualy coding but I have to wait weeks to get answers about what people want to do, and should I proceed regardless, people will get unhappy ...because this is a community project.

The Blurb of the TE Forum wrote:Discuss a Transport Tycoon-like game being programmed by forum users.

*shrug* Whats the answer?

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » 05 Jul 2006 14:25

Just because you GPL the code doesn't mean you have to GPL the artistic content, so it does not, by any means, close down that route.

However if you start closing down the content then you may find people less eager to create art for TE. I'm not sure OpenTTD would have so many high quality contributions to the new hi-res gfx if it wasn't all free.

You close up the game (code or art) and you automatically narrow down the people that can contribute and the people that will be willing to contribute. Does TE have the resources to be so selective?

aarona · Post by **aarona** » 05 Jul 2006 14:53

charlieg wrote:Just because you GPL the code doesn't mean you have to GPL the artistic content, so it does not, by any means, close down that route.

Yes thats true but this discussion is really about the license of the game engine itself which is to be programmed to be as extensible as possible with respect to graphics. So I think that the artistic aspect is (at the moment at least) irrelivent (or is it?), because as you said they are seperate issues. (Of course this negates the "default" graphics the game may or may not come with)

charlieg wrote:However if you start closing down the content then you may find people less eager to create art for TE.

You mean less than one person, as is the case at the moment?

charlieg wrote:I'm not sure OpenTTD would have so many high quality contributions to the new hi-res gfx if it wasn't all free.

Sim City and Civilization are two example that come to mind of a closed source game which attracts a large community of artists willing to create mods for free. But then again OpenTTD (and TE for that matter) is not of the same calibre as Sim City and Civ (in terms of universal popularity).

charlieg wrote:You close up the game (code or art) and you automatically narrow down the people that can contribute and the people that will be willing to contribute. Does TE have the resources to be so selective?

I'm not sure I completley agree with this. I could imagine there would people who are willing to code or create art for money. In fact, this would seperate the men (people willing to work on it) from the boys (those who say they will work on it).

charlieg, you are more than welcome (in fact I encourage it!) to voice your opinions and try to persuade others to go along with your ideas however if the majority decides that it should be closed, then we have to go with that. This is apparently what democracy is all about.

Post by **orudge** » 08 Jul 2006 17:06

Steve wrote:For now, I propose a system whereby adverts are placed on the website at the start of each month and by the time they've paid the month's server fees, they get removed. These would be google ads to be paid to the server owner, so nice for the users and the server owner has nothing from his own pocket. Right now it's all coming out of my pocket, but I'm not sure it's worth implementing a system right now, as it's not really that much money ($25-35 a year for part of my server and a domain).

Slightly off-topic, but as I've always said, free hosting is available with Zernebok, at least until such time as TE is using many tens of gigabytes of bandwidth, should that happen. The account is already there, you just need to use it.

Locked until the DD discussion arrives at this issue.

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