Josh built a fun game for his partner, and now a lot more people are enjoying it.
As long as it isn't horrendous in hosting costs, I'd say that is already a huge return on the project. Giving some great entertainment to folks is a win already in itself.
Using your skills to the benefit of your community (global in this case) is one of the best things you can do. You don't need to profit off it as well to make it an intelligent project.
It's not stupid to skip monetization.
I also don't agree with the idea that any form of monetization is inherently hostile towards players. The game takes up roughly 500px by 800px on a page that is receiving millions of hits a day. You can throw an ad on that page and barely impact the user experience while pulling in 4 or 5 figures per day. There is money to be made there without resorting to adding microtransactions or something actively hostile to users.
A lot of people don’t like that because it takes away from your true focus: content creation or software development.
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"Wordle, brought to you by Nike" or whoever.
A ton of money and no burden for the users at all.
As a changes, I’d like regionalisation. ‘Favour’ was the word a day or 2 ago. That’s not the spelling where I am.
In return I’d pay up front if requested, a one off or small subscription.
I have dramatically underestimated the amount of revenue one can get from serving ads on a modestly popular game that everyone will have forgotten in a month's time.
And therein lies the contradiction - it has become a daily ritual because it doesn't demand continual "engagement" or trick people into becoming addicted: 2 things that will increase monetizability.
My thoughts are it's commendable for someone to share their delightful creation with the world for free. Something pure, with no dark patterns or gray areas. It is a breath of fresh air, and legitimately makes the world a better place for countless people. Thanks Josh!
This statement makes me sad.
This may be a popular sentiment on hacker news but thankfully it is an unpopular view among the best programmers. If everyone thought like this, there would be no Linux, no GNU. We’d all be reading this in Internet Explorer on Windows
Suckers.
It's sarcasm, actually. A rare event here.
Surely, irony is depicted in the open-source, decentralised crowd, berating someone doing something not for money.
I find that sarcasm or irony are pretty frequent on HN, or maybe it's just me who thinks it is so. ;-)
And yes, I see it here too, and try to reward it, though, alas, you and I are few.
A perfectly sarcastic remark. Rare to see here.
"Take my up vote" (or something like that).
Oh wait... Or are you serious?
a. Replies don't know if I'm being sarcastic or not.
b. I don't know if people who upvoted this comment thought I was being sarcastic or not.
Since I consider the opinion of open source developers being idiots unlikely and silly, I am reading your message in a "consider best possible interpretation" way, which is that it's an ironic joke.
I would imagine that's what most people who've upvoted you thought as well.
Basically, if you resort to sarcasm, your "amusing" dilemmas should have obvious answers or you are misapplying it or using it in the wrong context (unless you are really aiming for just being an odd man out in a particular group, also known as a "troll" :).
Maybe he does not care monetization?
Or there is no obvious path to monetization?
If you start an app phenomena from scratch with no inbuilt monetization mechanism designed from the start I would imagine implementing one would be non-trivial? Or is there an "obvious and simple" method to monetize said work?
He should have a sweet reddit IPO coming his way, soon.
Now you won’t be exactly poor, but it’s not the same thing as having won the lottery since you still need to pay for staff, marketing, etc.