Okay, so I'm sure there's a lot of Feature Requests we'd all like to see, and as Tom has said they all take time, and thus money, yet we continue to beg for more features without offering anything in return.
So this is what I'm going to do, and I'd love it if others might join in too.
For each Feature Request that I 'support' or '+1' I'm going to set aside ONE DOLLAR. It's not a lot, but I don't think it has to be a lot. When the Feature gets added to BYOND I'm then going to donate that dollar.
However, there are literally dozens of Features I'm keen to see, and I've seen scores of others supporting them too. If we were to each do it we'd barely notice the loss, BYOND would gain plenty, and we'd all get to the features that we wanted!
To mark this Dollar on a request I will be adding a "$" to my posts supporting requests. It'd be awesome if any of you would do likewise.
Just for the record, I'm not some money-bags throwing it away; I have guardianship of a kid, no job at the moment (soon hopefully!), the tiniest of savings, and I don't accept any benefits from the government. If I can put aside a dollar-per-feature I'm sure a lot of you can too ^_^
This 'generosity' idea was inspired by Ripperman5's generosity.
ID:1196372
 Mar 13 2013, 1:35 am
|
|
Well I figured it wouldn't make the hugest of differences, but if they're doing the features anyway, what can a little bonus harm?
When I bought my membership I also donated an amount, as you suggest. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to offer a lot more =( I just thought that recently a lot of "how much does BYOND make?" and "can BYOND last?" posts have been going up, and rather than fixating on the doom I'd focus a little on an alleviation of the situation, if not the solution. | |
Well, the alleviation and/or solution would be the making (and finishing!) of a game that you then market to audiences outside of BYOND.
BYOND operates predominantly on a model that requires communal growth. It gets ad revenue from traffic, it gets membership buy-in from people who stay within the community, it gets subscription revenues from BYOND games using the subscription model. This all rewards BYOND with money if people develop, publish and market. At present, this really isn't happening, basically. Very few games are being completed, even fewer are actually published (see GiaW and company, where perhaps 50% of entries bother to publish) and from that ... almost none, seem to be marketed outside BYOND. So naturally, BYOND gets very little new traffic, naturally loses existing traffic due to boredom, life events, moving on etc, the net result being less revenue, and ... well, death, ultimately. I think regarding the matter of bonus if they are doing features anyway, it would be apparent that they aren't doing the features, because they have business needs to satisfy first and limited man-power. Hence some such features are 2 years old. This was also why I never particularly understood the propensity to "+1" in the first place, as the priority is not decided by existing community popularity, it's decided by "what benefit does this bring to the business side of things". Bigger features (successful or not) like Isometric drawing mode have been added in the hope of making the platform more attractive to new developers from outside BYOND, not because the existing community went "Yeah, we like that". | |
Thank you for explaining that. I feel like I have a much better understanding of it all now. Well I'm going to continue donating a dollar each time a feature I like gets rolled out, because it's not hurting anyone, but I am going to redouble my efforts with my current game-in-development.
Thank you for being so patient and putting in such efforts to thoroughly explain the situation for me ^_^ | |
No problem. This is one of the big reasons of course that NEStalgia has been able to have a good amount of insight and input into upcoming features and business model changes, as their use of the BYOND subscription model and their consequent spell of popularity (from just sending out a few emails, no less!) pulled in something of the order of thousands of dollars of subscription revenue in the first month alone. Of course, the nice thing for NEStalgia themselves, is it pulled them in tens of thousands of dollars in the first month alone. Not bad, and everyone is happy.
That kind of thing is very good for the developer, and BYOND as a business. But unfortunately, pretty rare, in part because people do not even reach the stage of firing off a few emails to indie gaming news websites about their game in the first place, assuming they've even published, and assuming they've even released at all. | |
Stephen001 wrote:
I do like the sentiment here, but I'm going to have to put a bit of a dampener on this before everyone gets into full swing with it I'm afraid. Do programmers really earn that much? I'm not saying they don't deserve that money, but I think a project like BYOND which has been earning so few money in the past shouldn't be thinking about a huge success with a simple change. Start with something small sounds easier than focusing on something big which seems too far. | |
Heh, I didn't get paid anywhere near that much as a programmer for Eye-Bee-M.
| |
indeed.com lists $90,000 as an average wage for software engineers. With a vague simplistic look at that: with 2040 work hours in a year, you're looking at $43 an hour. That 90k figure lumps in junior devs with more senior devs, too.
When you start doing any sort of contracting work, the per-hour rate rises dramatically as you've got to cover all those not-so-little extras that your employer normally would (medical, EI, taxes, holiday, etc.) | |
And of course, employment risk, as contracts may be short lived. That $40 per hour figure I gave is "standard", for the actual breath and depth of experience needed to maintain and develop a 10+ year old codebase that implements a VM, like BYOND, I'd expect a suitable candidate to ask for a rate closer to the $100 per hour mark, as it reflects their experience, other job prospects etc.
That is essentially the situation circa experience and expertise that Lummox is close to. The only reasons for him to get paid less than $100 per hour is 1. he likes the project and 2. he knows there's not a lot of money going around. At which point, $40 is reasonable. For Tom also, the same would apply. Hence $40 per hour is your minimum. You wouldn't get me on the project for less than $40 per hour, and I'm a fairly junior engineer with 3 years experience, and obviously I'm naturally quite keen to work on the project. | |
These figures aren't strictly representative of BYOND, but here's what I reckon ... if you were to budget it, the costs of development break down as.
Your 'running costs' go a little like this. To have me a developer (contractual aside), the hourly rate is $40+ per hour (realistically for me it's actually $100 or so). Any feature that's more than a one-line change, you estimate in man-days of effort. So the minimum amount of time you'd expect a feature to take to implement is one 8 hour day, particularly on a project like BYOND.
So that's $200 minimum required for a feature, or 200 +1s by your suggestion. Unfortunately my understanding is that the position BYOND is in, you'd need all $200 if not more. Less doesn't form 'incentive' like it would in a hobby project, as for Tom and Lummox the project is a living wage, they need it to buy food, pay bills etc and so less than the required amount is a nice gesture but doesn't particularly change their situation. So, it doesn't change their development priorities at all.
Now obviously, 200 +$'s would be the minimum to instil action (Tom might rightly scoff at how low this figure is, actually, given the simplistic method I used), but quite a lot of features would take more than one day. I'm not sure we have 200 posters in the first place! Alas.
The sentiment though, is good, for sure. As an alternative, when buying someone a membership, you can also donate an amount https://secure.byond.com/ members/?command=gift_member_payment&recipient=
So perhaps, you'd prefer to pick a feature you want, and get some kind of estimate publicly (probably not from Tom sadly, as I suspect he's a little too busy to estimate all the feature ideas people like, but you'd want his input eventually) on how long it might take, then if there's some agreement the estimate is reasonable, http://www.gofundme.com/ raise the funds and donate away.