And it's 15k divided by 2 before tax isn't it? Pretty amazing story of just doing what you love and eventually getting rewarded.
The game is made for the love of making it and what little money they made was always just about allowing them to keep doing what they love. The resulting good will from their 20 years of labor and refusing to sell out paid off in the end when they needed it. Honestly, I'd have bet that if they released the "premium" version for free on bay12 but $30 on Steam they'd still make the majority of what they have.
Instead he just hung onto it, and eventually used it for his own bud delivery company, once recreational cannabis was finally legalized.
He was much happier that great three-letter domain name be used for something he loves, strong kind bud, instead of something he hates, weak piss beer.
https://bud.com/history-of-bud-com/
>In 1999 I was contacted by a lawyer Steven M. Weinberg, representing Anheuser-Busch, makers of Bud beer.
>We chatted by phone: “So, you’re a college student!”
>Actually I graduated the year before.
>He continued: “Well, how does $50,000 sound for bud.com?”
>I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated. I remember reading that the marketing budget for Budweiser beer that quarter was $16.1 million. BUD was the company’s stock symbol.
>I wasn’t going to sell lightly, and they weren’t going to bid against themselves, so we didn’t get anywhere.
The story about his fight to register the four-letter domain name fuck.com is also hilarious:
On the other his reasoning for not selling was really unrelated to any of that. His response was standard squatter logic - I registered it first and you have a lot of money + will actually use it heavily so I'm not selling unless it's for tens of thousands of times what I got it for. It wasn't like he responded "I think I will get more than 50k of use out of it" or "It's more than 50k of inconvenience for me to change my email" it was straight up "I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated". Kind of ruins the inspiration when the thing he actually held out for was rent seeking.
On the third hand Budweiser is indeed really shit beer...
I have a story similar to this. My friends and I had a joke about some famous person in high school (in the 90s). We registered a domain with his name and used the domain extensively.
10 years later the guy tried to sue us for control of the domain. We were actively using it though and it was just an inside joke. Random internet people with no clue about the situation would have thought we were just squatters.
He knew that bud.com was worth more than $50k to Budweiser.
Bud.com would still be on every can and case of beer they produced.
Says they didn't like the beer, anyhow. If Budweiser came with a 15 million buyout offer I might see your point, but $50k is barely enough to buy a reliable car after taxes, registration, and insurance.
Public resources like domains are tricky. We want them to be used not treated as a get-rich-quick opportunity where people who registered a bunch of generic things try to get millions for sitting on domains. I'm glad in the end this one actually got used but when the story from the source itself gives a completely different reason it's hard to be excited about it regardless how much you care about Budweiser in particular.
In comparison for example (though not specifically domains) "Dwarf Fortress" didn't sell rights to the name because they were actually using it, intended to continue using it, and didn't want to dilute the value they had actually put into the name that made others want to buy it. In the end they made millions of dollars with success of the game's newer launch off that brand identity they had built. That's an inspiring story of not selling a name.
bud is probably worth 100,000s if not a million.
Corps will drop millions for celebrity endorsements. Why settle for less?
If they didn't have any revenue coming in at all, then they should have a quite high deficit in the company that they can subtract against the income now to reduce taxes.
Because of the losses, right?
How do you think money works?
Also it very unlikely publisher get 30% for title like DF. More likely there is some recuperation if publisher invested into new version and then then 10-15%.
PS: I work in game development.
I know a franchise whose games ran with 99% compatibility in proton except the cutscenes which used a proprietary codec. Proton then got a patch and just shows a static image during cut scenes while the rest of the game works perfectly. The developer can fix it by reencoding the cutscenes. No need for explicit Linux support.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/b0mzog/offic...
Usually % that goes to a publisher depend on stage of development, risk publisher taking, whatever you give up your IP and your agreement on recuperation. E.g. if you keep your IP, but publisher cover most of development costs after prototype then they will likely take up to 50% after Steam cut.