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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn between "That's better than the $30k it was the last time we discussed this years ago, which was itself better than $0" and "If one produces something as staggeringly joy-bringing as Dwarf Fortress, one can fairly easily avoid being a starving artist by applying single-digit hours of worksmanlike execution on monetization."

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This has been their performance:

  2015:     $60603.43
  2014:     $66765.31
  2013:     $48999.11
  2012:     $57854.88
  2011:     $42294.19
  2010:     $54501.15
  2009:     $32516.44
  2008:     $32318.46
  2007:     $19052.28

That's pretty damn good for such a cult game. I'm not sure there's really any better way to monetize it than rely on donations.

I'm going to give a very boring answer with regards to monetization strategy: they should sell licenses to Dwarf Fortress, or Dwarf Fortress Supporter Edition, which is distinguished from DF Vanilla by saying that it's the supporter edition and maybe some cosmetic change somewhere.

I would price it at $19, where it would be towards the top-end of indie games on Steam; by the standards of people who enjoy Dwarf Fortress, Dwarf Fortress ROFLstomps the depth and quality of any other $19 entertainment option.

I would then immediately solicit inclusion in a Humble Bundle, in the expectation that Humble Bundle would leap at the chance. One could envision a rougelike or Df-alike bundle; I anticipate that Humble Bundle would give DF top billing in whatever deal was negotiated. I would model that Humble Bundle as doing > $800k in sales, of which DF's take would be > ~$80k. Throw in "and we'll use Humble as our exclusive e-commerce provider for 12 months" since I think it is fairly clear that the authors don't want to be in the e-commerce business; that gives Humble ~10% of their gross revenue for next year.

Stage 3 of the master plan: get the game onto Steam. This might require $X,000 worth of production-ready art and video assets to satisfy Steam's requirements; $X,000 will not be a material amount of money to Dwarf Fortress, LLC.

The above unsolicited opinions are coming from a place of love for small software businesses generally and Dwarf Fortress in particular. Strike the earth.

End result being that it's no different from current model (free/pay-if-you-want), but now there is a somewhat high anchor for the donation price, and a more polished presentation to a broader audience. The catch--without correct marketing (along the lines of "losing is fun") for their obfuscatory UX, they will catch endless amounts of flak and backlash. People who search out DF are predisposed to, or learn how to, enjoy the UX. Once you start selling DF and foisting it onto broader audiences, the expectations shift.

I think this analysis assumes that Dwarf Fortress has reached only a small fraction of its total addressable market (that is, the space of players who can enjoy DF without large improvements to new player onboarding). Any fixed-price offering risks cannibalizing Patreon subscriptions, whose expected LTV is probably _much greater_ than $19.

Their chosen tradeoff makes more sense if you think of it as "subscriptions versus one-offs" instead of "sales versus donations".

Even given that I stopped playing and probably will never find the time to touch DF again (unless singularity) I would still buy that Supporter Edition.

And thanks patio11 for that plan, sounds fascinating, as always.

I guess I saw his proposal as more about customer acquisition; those of us who already know and love the game can send Tarn $19 any time we want, right here: http://www.bay12games.com/support.html

It's a little known story, but there used to be 80+ people working on dwarf fortress years ago. One of them came up with a plan very similar to yours. However, when things didn't work out and he wasn't able to pull it off he went mad. He ended up killing a secretary with a plastic plant, cutting himself with a shard from a glass which was knocked off the table. He went back to his cubicle where he bled to death. The rest of the staff arrived later and upon seeing this also went mad. Only the two brothers survived because someone accidentally built the cube walls so their area no longer connected to the rest of the office and they never found out about it. They toil away on it to this day.

Sincerely, what you say sounds great from a bussiness perspective but maybe not from a lifestyle perspective (putting myself in Tarn & Zach's shoes).

Maybe something like that would be the kind of thing that would transform a work of passion into a boring bussiness full of obligations (to users, press, investors, Steam and whatnot). Worse even, after reading interviews with the Adams brothers I guess following a road like that maybe would even burn them after some years and end game development.

It's the difference of doing something for the money that can be extracted from it in contrast with doing something for passion and the joy of doing it. In some cases (or maybe for some personalities) these overlap, but in other cases they don't and it's ok, every person is different.

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