We're not in a contest to make BYONDimes here... we just think it's a good idea for them to circulate more. If BYOND commerce increases, more people will deposit and withdraw dimes, and Dan and Tom might actually start making money off this labor of love, and they might be able to devote more of their waking hours (upping it from 127% to 135%) to making it better. Everybody wins!
As far as open source goes... it makes sense in a community revolving around C++, which is 1) old enough to have huge libraries and archives of code established and 2) general purpose enough that generic snippets are useful and almost required to get started. BYOND is new and not particularly general purpose. With BYOND to do the "grunt work", snippets are not as important as workable technique. We don't exchange a lot of raw code here, but if you want to talk technique, you'll find lots of replies quickly. In such a young community as BYOND, it's better to teach a newbie the hows of coding than the whats... truth be told, not 10% of BYOND's current potential has been tapped. Snippets limit us to doing only what has been done before. By giving everybody a map and encouraging them to explore on their own, we all learn more. Again, it's hardly competitive, because we come together on the forum to share what we've learned. [EDIT] I do think, however, that we could all be doing more to help newbies... myself included. If every post I spent replying to someone I disagreed with, I instead spent helping someone with a problem or writing a resource for the whole community, I'm sure this forum would be better for it. | |
What do you mean the 50 plus 10% ....
Seems a bit much..... sense most games I see charge very little to play. | |
Lesbian Assassin wrote:
In such a young community as BYOND, it's better to teach a newbie the hows of coding than the whats... truth be told, not 10% of BYOND's current potential has been tapped. I agree wholeheartedly. I can't wait to see some of the games that our current crop of newbies will come out with as they learn. We have some really creative minds in this community and more joining every day. Lummox JR | |
I work for a mail order company. We charge shipping and handling based on the average cost of getting an order from our warehouse to your door. As we have a rather large warehouse, there's a certain amount of fixed overhead involved in putting any order together.
If you order $1 worth of merchandise, it's going to cost you $7 to get it from our warehouse to your delivery address. People who call up and ask us to send them $1 worth of merchandise are frequently outraged, and call us crooks and cheats and thieves and liars. If you call up and order $20 worth of merchandise, how much would you expect us to charge in order to process and ship the order? You might say "$140", guessing it follows the same proportion as the $1 order. You'd be wrong. It will still cost you the $7. As I said, there's a certain amount of fixed overhead. If you have a $40 order, it would only cost you $8... $1 more than it cost to get the $1 order packed and shipped. Charging someone $7 to process a $1 order seems blatantly unfair... but it's necessary. Small orders are not very cost-effective... and we have to decide, do we pay the cost, or does the customer? Actually, there's no decision involved... the customer pays all of our costs. As a privately owned company, we have no money, except what we're paid by our customers. Dantom is the same way. Yes, it's not very cost-effective for you and me to take out a dime here and a dime there... because, in order to keep existing, Dantom has to keep it cost-effective for themselves. If Dantom disappears into the night, we all lose. This nickel-and-dime stuff (dime-and-dime, actually) is just a reflection of BYOND's youth. Once the commerce model is solidly proven, and there's more professional quality finished games out there, you'll see most games falling either into the completely free or completely pay models, with dollars flowing as equably as dimes do now. Yeah, if you earn $10.00 and withdraw it, you're going to end up only making $4.00... but if you wait until it hits $1,000 dollars, you're going to end up making $895.00. Giving just over 10% of the proceeds to Dantom is a small price to pay if their blood, sweat, and tears helps you earn a living. In fact, that price only applies if you take advantage of BYOND's built in commerce support... if you use a third party, or make your own system within BYOND, you don't have to pay them a dime (no pun intended), since they're nice enough to make BYOND free and clear, with no restrictive licenses. | |
I'm like that. Right now, I'm in a no-helping, withdrawn phase -- mainly because I'm depressed about the situation of my mathematical talents (well, actually, the lack thereof).
I had a spurt of helpfulness a while back, though, as people might be able to see.