Development Funding and Sponsorship

Hey everyone,

Intro

---

We've got a rather tricky question on our hands right now... and it provokes a rather moral question that I think needs to be discussed and sorted out with the community and development team openly. Specifically I am referring to monetization, donations, sponsorship, and the use of funding to drive development...

Firstly I would like to clarify, no one owns Xonotic in the traditional sense, Xonotic will ALWAYS remain a GPL/opensource game entirely with no closed content, Xonotic will never require a fee for you to play, Xonotic will never give someone a more powerful weapon because they gave one of the developers a blowjob (sorry Mirio), and Xonotic will never tell your children that it's coming to the ball game but then never show up. What I want to argue for here is setting up open donations and sponsorship which allows the Xonotic development team to use that funding to purchase software, tools, publishing utilities, server hosting, advertisement or promotions, or even development talent to flesh out tasks which we simply cannot get accomplished otherwise. Without further adieu, let me get on with describing the problem while giving some examples both for and against this motion.

Advantages of Development Funding

---

---

• Currently, it is VERY difficult to find artists who both have the motivation and skill to complete artistic tasks for the game. We have been trying for many years to replace the weapon models in the game, however have found little success, as modelers usually only have time to do 1 or 2 models every year or so, leaving our weapon model set to be very inconsistent in style and quality. We have the opportunity to hire some artists to complete this work with development fund money, which honestly will never get done otherwise.
  
• Same story for many other pickup items, excluding perhaps powerups and some others which actually do have artists willing to complete the work.
  
• Similar story for player models, where I think we can develop a far better player set with funding supplied to Morphed- who has already done a vast portion of models in the history of Nexuiz and Xonotic BTW, he is very talented, just lacking time to complete these tasks without compensation or such. I won't get into details now, but there are a lot of very good ideas circulating on what we can do with the player models to make them better... Although I will later talk about one possible feature of them in this post.
  
• Additionally, tasks which are otherwise rather unlikely to happen may be accomplished, such as completion of the dedicated map repository for all Xonotic maps- perhaps even linking into the game so that clients can automatically download them to their user directories.... although we'll need a way to sign the downloads and authenticate them inside the dlcache directory to prevent hacking or such. The fact is, some times motivated talent does not exist for such tasks without an influence.
  
• Prize money for tournaments, competitions, etc etc... (if sponsorship does not provide such a substitution itself-- see below.)
  
• We could afford to send select developers to conferences or local events so that they can promote the game after 1.0, i.e. for PAX or GDC or other such events.
  
• We could easily pay fees such as Steam Greenlight submission charges ($100), allowing us to submit the game through the Steam Greenlight process. (Although, we might not do this as it might be a waste of money anyway... But please don't worry about that in this thread, that's another discussion for elsewhere)
  
• We could pay the expenses to officially register as a non-profit organization, acquiring the ability to accept open donations.
  
• We can purchase high-end skybox software and hire someone to complete a vast set of perfectly on-theme and high quality skyboxes for the use of all mappers.
  
• We can hire someone to port a more powerful map editor to support Xonotic mapping...
  
• ... Or someone to finish proper implementation of ODE physics library and ragdolls.
  
• ... Or someone who has 3D tracking hardware to create new player animations along with Morphed's playermodels.
  
• ... etc etc etc, there are quite many things which were infeasible previously yet can be reached with a development fund.
  

Advantages of Sponsorship

---

• We get free stuff. No, seriously, that's it. We trade promotion of their service or company in exchange for services given back to us. An example would be prizes supplied by Sapphire for a mapping competition, with proper sponsorship we can do far more events like that where we exchange billboard spots on maps for prizes or services we need to either generate community interest in events or provide services such as a new map repository server host.
  
• Mutual promotion, i.e. gaming communities can sponsor us and advertise our game while we mutually promote them and send our players to their communities as well.
  

Disadvantages of Development Funding

---

• Potential jealousy. This one is quite blunt and obvious, if one person is getting paid for their work, why is another person not getting paid? Why should I work for free when the other person gets paid to do it? Is their work superior to mine? The answer to this is a very clear NO. Let me explain: Personally, I consider donations to be of many different forms. The work that I or anyone else on the dev team currently submits is a donation of its own, we donate our time and effort, effectively draining our own resources to provide for the game. I see monetary donations under a similar light, although the developers who contribute are doing the work for free, they're the same as monetary contributors. They would distribute their resources to the project with the same sacrifice. For the record, I will not be accepting any money from donations or such, I just want to get some features and goodies which we simply will not be able to get otherwise. To summarize, all donations are still donations, the only difference is that if you contribute directly to the project via code you're bypassing the middle-man through donating money. If you work for free, you're simply being EXACTLY as noble and generous as the people who donate money to the project to pay other developers for work which otherwise would not be done. I would like to take this moment to point out that we do have additional solutions to this problem, which I will explain later in the "method" section of this post.
  
• Who holds the pot of gold? Another blunt and obvious question is, where does the money go? It is impossible to split the money up properly via services such as PayPal, and there are unfortunately no other suitable services for what we need. (believe me, we have looked) Generally the core team has agreed that we will appoint someone trustworthy and well mannered to handle the development fund accounts. Obviously this means I will not be handling any of the money, I get into heated arguments more often than a bigoted New Yorker on a bad day in a bar who just crossed paths with a black homosexual Steelers fan who just hit on his wife AND insulted the Yankees at the same time.... Anyway, I nominate Antibody for such a responsibility, as he is a very trustworthy and reasonable individual who I think would be suitable for such a task.
  

---

Disadvantages of Sponsorship

---

• Advertisements. Yes, this would mean we have to place advertisements into maps on billboards or screens or such in order to successfully promote our sponsors. However, we WILL not place random ads on maps, they would be distributed via our own system and automatically loaded onto maps which support them. The ads we would show would include sponsorship badges/logos (with some kind of link opening support if you wish to visit via browser) for companies such as MaverickGaming, or any other various hosting or community sponsors we have, as well as community announcements (read more about this below). Any server would be able to disable them, and any client would be able to disable them, so they are by no-means necessary and we will not force them onto people who do not want them. Generally though, it would go a long way in acquiring sponsors, and it would be a great system for us to do announcements or community advertisements for events or competitions or such. Imagine us being able to push non-intrusive/passive notifications/sponsorships onto maps where you otherwise see a bland Xonotic logo or such. Another factor to this is that we will be putting sponsorship badges onto startup screen (possibly), gameplay video intros (possibly), and website (certainly) to help promote them there as well.
  
• Another potential problem to some people means that we will be promoting sponsored events publicly, but won't necessarily be able to promote all external community events quite as well without going through i.e. Mirio or such ahead of time so we can properly give the same promotion. To clarify, we don't mind promoting most events, it's just that if you go the independent route instead of working with us that we might not have time to promote your event. (I didn't describe this well, I bet some people will be angry here for no good reason)
  

Donation Methods and Details

---

Currently we are considering 4 methods of donation...

1. Direct/Open Donation: Funding received via PayPal or some other service directly into the Xonotic account openly (allowing anyone to contribute freely). This requires us to register as a non-profit organization in order to properly handle taxes and the establishment of our ability to receive donations directly/openly.
   
2. Kickstarter: Funding received via a campaign on Kickstarter or some other crowd funding method, allowing us to list specific features that people may want and acquire the proper funding to supply the entire development process of those features. (Of course, using any left over to deposit directly into the main development account fund for any other things we may need.)
   
   Future possibilities:
   
3. Distribution: Funding received via commercial sales of the game, such as selling of a Xonotic DVD containing the game. Note: This is entirely supported by the GPL, we'd essentially be selling just a DVD (and possibly a case) for those who are interested in having a special copy of the game. You can absolutely just as easily produce your own version of this, and you're absolutely not needed to buy this, but it would be another way to acquire revenue for a development fund and it might be something that people want to buy.
   
4. Commodity: Funding received via sales of Xonotic branded swag.... Essentially the same thing as above, but with t-shirts, mugs, hats, flash drives, etc etc. Again, not necessary, but possibly something nice to have?
   

Other details:

• Donators will all be properly attributed in the credits and on the website/forums, unless they choose to opt-out of this by remaining anonymous or such.
  
• Donated amounts will be kept private except to the core team, this is not a thing we want people competing and arguing about.
  
• Development fund distribution will additionally be left only to the core team, we do not want people getting jealous with the classic "why was he paid more than me" jibber jabber... and private management is really the only way to do that effectively. Unless you guys disagree and claim we should keep it entirely open... but this really creates a lot of problems for management, so please understand where i'm coming from when I say it's better to keep monetary distributions blind between the people receiving them, this way we don't have in-fighting about payments.
  
• Just because you donate DOES NOT mean you get a special say in how the design plays out. I will not add a stupid gun by default which harms the rest of the game just because you contribute $1,000. We will not remove a map for money, we will not ADD a map for money, we will not do any features which do not otherwise fit our standards.
  
• If development ceases for Xonotic, or some other event comes up at which point we no longer require the money from the development fund, or we simply have more money than we need-- by rule we shall direct it to a charity we see fit. I would even throw around the idea of distributing 10% of all donations directly to another charity, perhaps as an incentive for other people to donate to us as well.
  

Additional Options Worth Discussing...

---

Now, I mentioned Steam earlier, and although I won't get into too much detail-- It is simply not viable for Steam to add our game unless we adapt to the free2play mentality, where we supply a "free to play" game which charges for some extra service, thus providing a way for us to supply Steam with income (and making our game a viable possibility for Valve to adopt to their catelog). Personally, I hate most implementations of this, and I will never stand for someone to gain advantages over another by paying $30 for that special sword you can't get anywhere else. I do however have a compromise to suggest, and it goes along with the design idea for the playermodels by Morphed. Generally, we could provide special armor (like a backpack or special spikes on playermodel arms, or even a special skin background color displayed by default) that has no gameplay implications, but merely shows that this person has contributed to the game development in quite a helpful way. This would provide a certain incentive for donation WITHOUT causing any unfairness- because I don't think anyone will REALLY care that much if someone has a slightly special coloring on their playermodel by default. Again, this is optional, but it is worth considering and it would give us an additional way to support ourselves. Of course, we could also do special forum badges or Xonstat badges or whatever, that's all up to you guys.

Closing

---

I absolutely understand concerns that people may have here, honestly I have many of the same concerns... However, I think that donations and a certain amount of monetization can provide for us many desirable things which outweigh the disadvantages and problems presented.

Please give me all the feedback you can here, we want to do only what is morally and reasonably acceptable with the community/project. I do have another question for you though... If we had donations open, how much would YOU donate? Would you buy commodities or distributions? Any other ways you would be compelled to contribute? It would be nice to have an estimate of how much we could generate.

Note: If I forgot something in this post, please bear with me, I wrote this at 2:50am after being awake for ~18 hours. I will update later if there are more relevant advantages/disadvantages/etc that I have not covered here.

inb4 "tl;dr"

Small note: Especially on the vehicle servers I talked with a couple of people who were asking wether they could help fixing the vehicles by donations. So generally it might be interesting for people to decide for what their money is used for. So maybe if the dev team could set some projects like (Vehicle csq, New fancy feature X, etc...) it could make some people donate for the stuff which bothers them (so something like the kickstarter thing you mentioned).

Other thing: If you want to get donations you probably should not appear like a "douchebag" (the vote options do not really look like you have actually a way to influence the decision to accept donations to me)

However, the only thing I see critical is in game advertising. But if that are only static images that do not change very often it would be fine with me at least. (Though you should claim enough money / free stuff for this. It would be quite annoying to have too many different banners everytime you play...)

Regards,
Ablu

inb4 "tl;dr"

Haha, you really beat me to "tl;dr" by about one minute (on IRC)


Aaaaanyway, first of all, I think it would be very helpful if people not only vote (*after* reading Samual's "essay" first, of course), but also put some of their thoughts here.

I think the post covers pretty much all of the important issues, so I'll just adress some points I thought about while reading:

• Development Funding: Samual's arguments for funding sound pretty convincing to me, and it might really help the development of the game. And by that, I do not even mean *coding* - I'm not sure if hiring someone to add/rework code will work with Xonotic, as I have looked into the gamecode and found it to be rather complex -, but also artwork and similar stuff. If we can get a new set of weapon and playermodels for one of the next releases by funding, it would help the game a lot, and also prove that development funding actually works for our project.
  
  
• Sponsorship: This sounds like a interesting concept, *but* only once we have a (almost) feature-complete game and a large playerbase to fully take advantage of sponsorship. I know there have been mapping contests which were sponsored by some companies, but I'm sure sponsorships work better the more popular the game gets. Also, sponsorships won't help the *development* of the game, which is kinda, you know, important to get more players. However this does not mean we shouldn't already try to gather sponsors; I see sponsorship as something which could go hand in hand with funding.
  
  
• Disadvantages (Funding): The section on "what is a donation" is very well-written; thank you for that, Samual! Maybe we should put it on the website if we allow donations =) Jealousy inside a community can be very problematic I'm sure, and we should stress that you can both donate by code/art or by money, or not even donate at all - the latter I find also important, since donations are still voluntary. We should not allow some "hey, I donated stuff and you didn't so fuck off" mentality.
  Also, having Antibody manage our financials seems like the best choice one could make; of course he would still have to accept that responsibility =) ... did you talk about that already??
  
  
• Disadvantegs (Sponsorship): I don't see a real problem with in-game advertisements, as long as it does stay in the background, so to say. That means, playing 30sec of advertisement when starting up the game is a no-go, having company logos in every corner of the map is a no-go, and so on. Since I'm pretty sure that's not what is intended, I don't see any compelling arguments against sponsorship.
  
  
• Methods: From what I know, Kickstarter always has some "donate at least $ X, then get Y if the kickstart project succeeds" thing on the project, where Y is some special one gets for donating a certain amount of money. I can't think of anything we could put there (for the reasons mentioned - there won't be that superweapon which only a limited amount of players can use), therefore I'm more inclined to the direct funding option. But Kickstarter may be a good idea to fund specific features later on, maybe when we have our set Xonotic merchandise.
  That goes in line with the "Commodity" option - in my head I already see people walking around with Xonotic shirts, and that Xonotic mug on my desk .. merchandise sells!
  Having copies of the game distributed could get some $, but also some players - am I the only one who thinks that selling Xonotic in game shops might be a good way of advertising the game? =)
  
  
• Other details: I'm all for keeping the funding details internal (who funds what by how much?), as otherwise we will probably have nasty discussions (flamewars?) on our hands. I'm not saying this *will* happen in our community, but it certainly could, and nobody wants that.
  The charity idea is pretty nifty, of course we would have to select one charity (or more than one?) which somehow fits to our community, and also one which all donators can appreciate.
  

That's about it from my side, I'm now looking forward to a fruitful discussion

EDIT: Completely forgot about that issue with Steam: Even the suggested option to make this game "Steam-compatible" sounds pretty scary to me - I simply do not want to have some players on the servers who tell you (even implicitly), "Hey, see my shiny armor? That's because I actually bought this game!". And if there is no way to have this game on Steam without keeping that from happening; well, fuck them (Steam/Valve, that is). "All players are equal, but some are more equal than others?" Any way I think of this, I have strong objections against it.
However, since this is not part of the general "donation/sponsorship" idea, I still vote "Yes, I fully support that shit".

About sponsoring and advertising... I can't see this not coming under criticism. Honest question: what other free software has sponsorship with visible ads in the product? I can think of Firefox with Google being shipped as the default search engine, but that's actually functional. I can't think of any more examples.
EDIT: Also, does that mean those ads would be visible in community-created media such as screenshots and videos? Does that pose no problems?

How realistic is it to think of hiring developers for code? Has it been discussed by the team? Who does the maintenance? (Actually, I have the same question about maintenance for all other contributions.)

You said you are in favor of hiding donation amounts from the public, does that mean hiding every single detail about donations? No totals either? That might be worth clarifying, because total opacity seems a little sketchy to me.

You said you are in favor of hiding donation amounts from the public, does that mean hiding every single detail about donations? No totals either? That might be worth clarifying, because total opacity seems a little sketchy to me.

Good point! Total amounts should be put on the website, together with the list of donators... just not the actual amount per person.


EDIT by Halogene: Seems some users can't post here due to permission restrictions (at least I can't...) can someone that has the relevant powers fix this?

...also why the heck can I edit posts when I can't post? o.O

EDIT by MrBougo: okay, that should be fixed. The permissions on this section are kind of broken.

Im definitly okay with donations ... but get ads in the game and we are going to have a problem.
We are not paying lots of money every month to run servers that are being infected by ads.
Just wanted to drop those words here before you consider such things and its too late to stop it in the end.
Everyone hates ads ... trust me ... ads and an opensource game is just no good match ... please keep that in mind.

Everyone hates ads ... trust me ... ads and an opensource game is just no good match ... please keep that in mind.

I'm sure someone will create a Xonotic AdBlock extension (or pk3).

I also wonder about the license of the ads. To ship it with most linux repositories it must be free to use.

Everyone hates ads ... trust me ... ads and an opensource game is just no good match ... please keep that in mind.

I'm sure someone will create a Xonotic AdBlock extension (or pk3).

If noone is volunteering to do it: I will do it ... promised
I think we allready have enough advertisements on the web ... we dont need more of it in Xonotic.

Donation is ok for me, i have fun while playing xonotic with other guys, so i can pay some moneys to make game better (i hope), and have more and more fun.
Can't say anything about sponsorship, because im not an expert in this issue, but some baners or ads while connecting to servers, no problem. Selling some stuff with Xonotic logo is a nice idea, already want t-shirt or hoodie
P.S. I suck even in voting, fakin missclick on 2nd, my vote is for 1st.

For the most part support the ideas, though if putting the game on Steam requires that it support some sort of microtransaction system then I'd rather not see it on Steam at all. Even if it's just adding cosmetics in-game. In-game advertisements are for the most part a definite hell no as well, save maybe a special instance (like if the game ever becomes popular enough for spectators to watch streams of it) of some in-game billboards in the maps if it can be done without it clashing with the game's presentation. Right now I'm thinking direct/open donations and kickstarter would be the most practical for most of the people on here. Physical copies of the game later on would be pretty neat as sort of a collector's piece, though I don't really see that doing too well.

I definitely support most of that stuff to make Xonotic to have a bigger playerscene and make the game better overall! Much of Samuals post sounds just very fine to me. Its a money-talks world after all, its hard, nearly impossible to get certain benefits made by professional hands without some money, i know this for sure. Artists has a big ego

I have actually never used steam (yeah, im still stuck in the 90's) so i cant comment on that. Dont know what benefits this would bring, also no idea about disadvantages.

And i dont either really like _excessive_ amounts of advertisements, but it doesnt need to get to the point of being excessive! The way its done in the map 'fuse' is completely fine by me.

In general, have nothing against this Donation project, i could throw some donations every now and then to help things go forward I personally see the benefits definitely outweighing disadvantages by this. Lets do it! It just money, it always comes back ;3

It appears that some people were unable to post a reply here, apologies for that, MrBougo fixed it now (it was a problem where normal users could post but not moderators... stupidly enough )

Firstly let me say, it looks like most of you skimmed over the part about advertisements and didn't pay any attention there. That's disappointing. Let me restate some things and clarify some other things about advertisements again.

• Advertisements will be forced onto NO ONE. Clients will have an option to opt out (cl_adverts), and possibly entire servers will have an option to opt out. (sv_adverts)
  
• Advertisements will not be included/bundled into the release, they will be hosted on our servers and the game client will download a textfile listing all of the possible advertisements on initialization. After this point, the advertisements are placed onto special shader spots on maps.
  
• If adverts are disabled, these shader spots will be replaced with normal Xonotic logos.
  
• An additional possible feature is allowing for servers to provide their own list of advert images to supply into maps... I'm not sure that we'll enable this possibility by default, but it's certainly not impossible for us to create a way for server owners to insert their own billboard images.
  
• Advertisements will not generate revenue directly for us, they will not be random ads or cheesy ads either, they will be gaming related badges or directly Xonotic related community event icons which blend in well with the map. See the duel mapping competition with Sapphire and Maverick badges, that was perfectly acceptable... This will be nearly the same, except you'll be able to disable them with a quick flip of a cvar if you dislike them and don't care about supporting the game in that way.
  
• Sponsors will agree to certain licensing agreements to allow the advertisements to be placed into the maps and recorded without issue, same as the duel mapping competition.
  
• EDIT: Oh and yes, the shader spots will be needed to be added to maps manually... So, quite a large portion of maps may not even support this for a while, at least until they're recompiled with the new billboard display functionality built in.
  
• EDIT: Another note, it's inevitable that if we have custom adverts there will be NSFW material displayed on them on some servers. In this case, we may either: A: Allow them, but requiring them to be defined as NSFW and allowing users to disable them with cl_gentle or such, or B: Disallow them by banning servers which do this. Additionally, if we allow them requiring a NSFW definition and the server owner does not properly define them, we will ban the server in that case as well.
  

I do believe that was everything about advertisements... just want to state something once again: WE WILL NOT DO RANDOM/OFF TOPIC/OUT OF PLACE ADVERTISEMENTS THAT INTRUDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE GAME. I hate those too and will try to make them as acceptable as possible (coming from an adblock user)-- If you still dislike them, as I said: Everyone will have an opt-out feature. Please understand something though, we cannot do sponsorship without such advertisements... Sponsors will not agree to help us unless we also promote them, and thus we cannot expand to new servers or get mutual promotion or ANY of those other benefits without paying in some way.

I will reply to the rest soon, have to go for a bit (only had a quick break from working)

Speaking of ads:
How about "selling" server names of official servers?
i.e. "<Sponsor>s CTF server"
(+ URLs/advertising in MOTD)


Personally I don't care if a server is named after a clan or a sponsor.
--
No time to read everything now, will reply longer in a few days.

I would donate happily, I spent so much time in this game as if it was an MMO.
However, the active community is quite small, so you could raise about a couple thousands $ at most every year maybe.

I havent spent a huge amount of time thinking about this (well the time it takes to finish a cup of tea), but couldn't we (you) start a KickStarter (or similar) campaign?

Just like my school exams, I didnt read everything before I started writing I would pay money for some Xonotic merchandise via a kickstarter campaign

Some more information about advertisements:

Code:

[20:29:13pm] <Samual> well what I was thinking was billboards which are dynamically filled with content we provide to clients upon their initialization/startup
[20:29:24pm] <Samual> the content would include:
[20:29:24pm] <@Dokujisan> ok
[20:29:35pm] <@Dokujisan> that could include a floating billboard
[20:29:48pm] <CUdyin> aka red eclipse and quake live style... oh wait, ql had to switched to freemium
[20:29:49pm] <Samual> ... it could, but it would be kinda weird depending on the map :P
[20:30:18pm] <Samual> #1: sponsor badges to promote the people who support us-- this is the only real "ADVERTISEMENT" part of the ad system really
[20:30:31pm] <Samual> #2: game events, such as duel tournaments or mapping tournaments or other news
[20:31:05pm] <Samual> #3: video/podcasts that are available, such as a new gameplay trailer or frag video
[20:31:23pm] <Samual> or #4: asking for developers/people to help contribute to the game
[20:31:45pm] <Samual> I would probably basically provide a slider in game which would allow people to select percentages on how often they want each of these to appear
[20:32:05pm] <Samual> and providing the option to disallow them at all, and instead only show a xonotic logo
[20:32:12pm] <Samual> THAT is what I would prefer to do
[20:32:16pm] <Samual> and I don't think that's evil at all
[20:33:04pm] <Samual> so in this case, i'd probably do......
[20:33:24pm] <@Dokujisan> ok so a publishing channel
[20:33:28pm] <@Dokujisan> not a static thing
[20:33:33pm] <@Dokujisan> sounds great to me
[20:33:39pm] <Samual> 40% sponsors, 30% game events, 20% videos/podcasts, and 10% development help request

Code:

[20:38:32pm] <Samual> ANYWAY,
[20:38:38pm] <Samual> the part that we can't overlook is....
[20:38:43pm] <Samual> we get no other sponsors without this
[20:38:48pm] <Samual> this is our way to get sponsors
[20:38:54pm] <Samual> without it, they don't get any promotion back
[20:38:59pm] <Samual> and don't see it as a worthwhile investment
[20:39:09pm] <Samual> so we lose potential help that we can get
[20:39:15pm] <Samual> another thing that is really useful,
[20:39:18pm] <Samual> mutual promotion
[20:39:27pm] <Samual> i.e. we promote a gaming community, and they promote us in exchange
[20:39:38pm] <Samual> our players go there and talk about our game,
[20:39:45pm] <Samual> and then some of their community joins the game as well
[20:39:47pm] <Samual> etc
[20:39:57pm] <Samual> mutual promotion works really well, and we can't do it without such a system

Additionally, tripod pointed out to me that Warsow and Red Eclipse (both "free" games) both do a similar type of advertisement that I am talking about:

http://a.pomf.se/2Qs8.jpg
http://a.pomf.se/7Pd4.jpg

Of course, QuakeLive also does advertisements, but in a completely different way from what I would like to do.

It appears that some people were unable to post a reply here, apologies for that, MrBougo fixed it now (it was a problem where normal users could post but not moderators... stupidly enough )

Firstly let me say, it looks like most of you skimmed over the part about advertisements and didn't pay any attention there. That's disappointing. Let me restate some things and clarify some other things about advertisements again.

• Advertisements will be forced onto NO ONE. Clients will have an option to opt out (cl_adverts), and possibly entire servers will have an option to opt out. (sv_adverts)
  
• Advertisements will not be included/bundled into the release, they will be hosted on our servers and the game client will download a textfile listing all of the possible advertisements on initialization. After this point, the advertisements are placed onto special shader spots on maps.
  
• If adverts are disabled, these shader spots will be replaced with normal Xonotic logos.
  
• An additional possible feature is allowing for servers to provide their own list of advert images to supply into maps... I'm not sure that we'll enable this possibility by default, but it's certainly not impossible for us to create a way for server owners to insert their own billboard images.
  
• Advertisements will not generate revenue directly for us, they will not be random ads or cheesy ads either, they will be gaming related badges or directly Xonotic related community event icons which blend in well with the map. See the duel mapping competition with Sapphire and Maverick badges, that was perfectly acceptable... This will be nearly the same, except you'll be able to disable them with a quick flip of a cvar if you dislike them and don't care about supporting the game in that way.
  
• Sponsors will agree to certain licensing agreements to allow the advertisements to be placed into the maps and recorded without issue, same as the duel mapping competition.
  
• EDIT: Oh and yes, the shader spots will be needed to be added to maps manually... So, quite a large portion of maps may not even support this for a while, at least until they're recompiled with the new billboard display functionality built in.
  
• EDIT: Another note, it's inevitable that if we have custom adverts there will be NSFW material displayed on them on some servers. In this case, we may either: A: Allow them, but requiring them to be defined as NSFW and allowing users to disable them with cl_gentle or such, or B: Disallow them by banning servers which do this. Additionally, if we allow them requiring a NSFW definition and the server owner does not properly define them, we will ban the server in that case as well.
  

I do believe that was everything about advertisements... just want to state something once again: WE WILL NOT DO RANDOM/OFF TOPIC/OUT OF PLACE ADVERTISEMENTS THAT INTRUDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE OF THE GAME. I hate those too and will try to make them as acceptable as possible (coming from an adblock user)-- If you still dislike them, as I said: Everyone will have an opt-out feature. Please understand something though, we cannot do sponsorship without such advertisements... Sponsors will not agree to help us unless we also promote them, and thus we cannot expand to new servers or get mutual promotion or ANY of those other benefits without paying in some way.

I will reply to the rest soon, have to go for a bit (only had a quick break from working)

Sounds good, I agree with this.

Additionally, tripod pointed out to me that Warsow and Red Eclipse (both "free" games) both do a similar type of advertisement that I am talking about

Does it also show sponsor logos?

Anyway, you say in your post that this is the only way to publicize sponsors ingame. Did you throw away the idea of a server badge after we discussed it?

EDIT: I had missed your edits above. Good point about NSFW content. I don't really like the idea of banning offending servers though ("obscenity" court cases anyone?). I would much rather have a warning when you try to join a server which is tagged as such by the master server.

Would you have such a system in place before billboards are useable?

Accepting donations, yes - if we can get new/shinier content into the game this way. Like opening a donation run for a specific set of features or content with a donation target. It would have to be decided what happens with the money if the target isn't reached, but there are solutions for that (transfer money back or make main targets and sub-targets that are small enough to be reached easily).

But I have a bad feeling about sponsorships. I very much love this game for its non-commercialized style. Even if we make sponsor logos and ads "blend into the game atmosphere", it will still add a commercial touch to the game. Also, as Samual already pointed out, opening a channel to allow content from outside of the game to be displayed in maps calls for abuse. Also movie makers or even people that record bits of standard game footage would end up having copyrighted logos in their videos, which might cause legal implications in some cases.

Also, has anyone thought about that sponsors could end up influencing game development decisions? If we implement a sponsoring process, we must make sure NOT to make ourselves dependant on sponsors. It easily leads to sponsors making the implementation of certain "features" (like, forcing ads to be enabled...) condition precedent for continued sponsorship.

I don't like involvement of companies in Xonotic development at all, as their decisions will always aim at maximizing return of investment instead of making this game more awesome.

Accepting donations, yes - if we can get new/shinier content into the game this way. Like opening a donation run for a specific set of features or content with a donation target. It would have to be decided what happens with the money if the target isn't reached, but there are solutions for that (transfer money back or make main targets and sub-targets that are small enough to be reached easily).

But I have a bad feeling about sponsorships. I very much love this game for its non-commercialized style. Even if we make sponsor logos and ads "blend into the game atmosphere", it will still add a commercial touch to the game. Also, as Samual already pointed out, opening a channel to allow content from outside of the game to be displayed in maps calls for abuse. Also movie makers or even people that record bits of standard game footage would end up having copyrighted logos in their videos, which might cause legal implications in some cases.

Also, has anyone thought about that sponsors could end up influencing game development decisions? If we implement a sponsoring process, we must make sure NOT to make ourselves dependant on sponsors. It easily leads to sponsors making the implementation of certain "features" (like, forcing ads to be enabled...) condition precedent for continued sponsorship.

I don't like involvement of companies in Xonotic development at all, as their decisions will always aim at maximizing return of investment instead of making this game more awesome.

You do realize, we're already entirely supported by sponsors right?... That's how we have web servers, that's how we get prizes in competitions, that's how we get community promotion. I'm just saying there are very few sponsors who like to do this for free without recognition. Additionally, I already addressed copyright and abuse problems, we'd be fine with that. Finally, I will never let someone external influence the decision of how gameplay functions or such, I already explained this above as well. Donate $10,000 if you will, I still will not add pony playermodels for example.

Donate $10,000 if you will, I still will not add pony playermodels for example.

How much does it cost?

How much for HLAC replacing laser? Only 17 votes, kind of disappointing.

I can't help it, I still don't like the idea of enabling ads in-game, no matter how much it would help to motivate sponsors. I feel very uncomfortable with extending the involvement of companies in the Xonotic project. I think it's a step into the wrong direction, with this game being community-powered and all. But as long as I'm the only one... who cares *sigh*