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Comment by AngryData | Hacker News Reader

Why? Dwarf Fortress only exists because it was given away for free for decades, bringing in tens of thousands of dollars in donations, and eventually leading to a fandom popular enough to bring others onboard with the project to produce a GUI and paid steam release version.

If something you build brings in a lot of critique, it is likely something of great value. Because something that doesn't have value won't bring much critique at all.

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Tens of thousands dollars of donations over decades is a very small amount of money even outside US.

The premium version of Dwarf Fortress made over $7.2 million in its first month alone.

"first month" is really obscuring the decade or beforehand. That's 20 years of development before the premium version launched

It made an additional $23 million after the first month.

So that's 360K/year over 20 years?

And a lot more from subsequent months, but I don't think it's a problem that this wildly successful videogame made its developers decently rich.

Oh I fully agree. I hope Tarn an Zach make millions more and can keep working of their life's work for many years to come.

Their donation revenue was alright for a pretty significant chunk of that time. For the first decade it was ~$5k/month, which jumped up to ~$10k/month for the second decade before the Steam release.

Toady wasn't exactly raking in the cash, but he didn't need another job.

it was ~10k per month if I remember correctly. They used to post monthly updates

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