Thursday, March 14, 2019

Why I started a patreon account

When I first considered making a patreon account is when someone on reddit mentioned that I should do it.  I already knew several other creators who had made one.  A lot of them in the free/software culture space didn't' seem to get much money from it, so I figured it would be a waste of my time.  Then I changed my mind. I read all kinds of things, like wait till you have a big following to make one, or do it as a last ditch effort. 

I read this horrid page where some guy sounds like he is begging for money, yet he still got over 1,000 a month, that is less than minimum wage, but still, he got the money because he is semi-famous.  I realized more and more it has nothing to do with cool rewards you get from subscribing or the merit of the work being created, but rather, how popular the creator is, that is how many people know about his or her work, that more or less determines it.

Free software has a marketing problem.  We make so many cool things, but people would rather pay micropayments for mobile games, waste money on a fancy graphics rig and play games that are boring (with terrible game play) or buy indie games on steam, only to deal with the fact that none of these options have the modifiability or customization options of free software games.

Why do we do it?  Traditional proprietary software offers easy monitization options for the developer, including micropayments, pay once and we are done (as long as you still have the account/drm key/ disk), or pay a subscription fee for monthly online access(mostly replaced with micropayments for cosmetic items or even to get through the game faster).  The developers take these options, but if they fail to market the game properly, they still make little to no money at making the game.

But here is the thing, making a game free software with free cultural assets does not really change the monitization options all that much.  You might think, OMG! its so revolutionary, but it is even less revolutionary than the old Red Hat business model. You can still sell virtual items on a server and charge for "premium accounts." Yeah, the source code and art work is free, but server admins time and hardware is not. As far as single player offline games go, there is always the pay up front before the game is finished model.  That is people pay before it is even done. Once a game is done, you don't need to pay over and over every time you make a copy of the disk or put it on a different computer.  Its not like the developer is actually doing any additional work because you made another copy of some game, you did the work, not the original developer.  Same thing if you decide to modify the game.  It just makes sense for people to be paid for actual work done, rather than the printing of fake money.

So in conclusion, I think that we should pay live people for work they actually do, rather than dead people who arn't doing anything anymore, and despite what they ancient greeks thought, we don't put coins in dead people's eyes anymore.

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