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Poll: What are your views on this motion? (PLEASE READ BEFORE VOTING)
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I fully support donations and sponsorship, as well as the various other ideas suggested in this post.
63.27%
31 63.27%
I support donations and sponsorship, however I disagree with some specifics which I will describe below.
20.41%
10 20.41%
I am indifferent to donations and sponsorship.
2.04%
1 2.04%
I directly disagree with some or most of the main concepts in this post, and I will describe why below.
6.12%
3 6.12%
I entirely disagree with any motion of donations or sponsorship and will describe why below.
8.16%
4 8.16%
Total 49 vote(s) 100%
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Development Funding and Sponsorship

#26
@Halogene Have you read their arguments? Its about banners for websites and it pays for the servers. And don't worry about selling out, ads in games have always failed anyway. (Quake Live)
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#27
I suppose I'll justify my vote in this post.

As I briefly said on IRC, I'm okay with sponsored servers doing whatever they want in terms of billboarding. I don't like the idea of sponsor messages being visible on non-sponsored servers.

That's why I'm in favor of implementing the measures above (which seem beneficial for announcing other things than ads), and perhaps a "server badge" system with which server admins can put an image in their MOTD and on the dynamic billboard rotation on the maps they run. That way, sponsors can make use of it on their own servers, but other servers don't have to. Having ads on non-sponsored community servers doesn't seem right to me.

I am worried about competition between sponsor and non-sponsor servers though, in that case. Indeed, sponsor servers would benefit from a larger player base, and I don't know what lengths they would go to get there.

EDIT: I'd like to know how this would be perceived in the FLOSS world. We've had examples of dynamic billboards in Red Eclipse and WSW in Samual's post above, but that's completely irrelevant to this discussion, unless those are used for advertisement too.

(07-17-2013, 11:20 AM)frostwyrm333 Wrote: And don't worry about selling out, ads in games have always failed anyway. (Quake Live)

That doesn't really look like an argument in favor of sponsorship, just saying.
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#28
(07-17-2013, 11:49 AM)Mr. Bougo Wrote: EDIT: I'd like to know how this would be perceived in the FLOSS world.


If anyone has a problem with Xonotic or server admins trying to make or recoup money for the servers/service they provide that's that person own problem. I think majority wont care but don't know how many would donate/pay.
[MoFo] Servers - North America - Hosted in Montreal Canada - Admin DeadDred [MoFo]
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#29
(07-17-2013, 12:05 PM)end user Wrote: If anyone has a problem with Xonotic or server admins trying to make or recoup money for the servers/service they provide that's that person own problem. I think majority wont care but don't know how many would donate/pay.

That doesn't mean it's acceptable and ethical with respect to free software philosophy. That's the question I'm raising.
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#30
(07-17-2013, 02:06 PM)Mr. Bougo Wrote:
(07-17-2013, 12:05 PM)end user Wrote: If anyone has a problem with Xonotic or server admins trying to make or recoup money for the servers/service they provide that's that person own problem. I think majority wont care but don't know how many would donate/pay.

That doesn't mean it's acceptable and ethical with respect to free software philosophy. That's the question I'm raising.

There's nothing unethical or unacceptable trying to get compensation to keep the project working/growing or to grow the community. Now turning it into a profit machine while keeping it FOSS is another story.

I'd rather lose some players who think you should be doing this all for free and keep the ones who don't mind donating while playing.

Selling swag and bumpers tickers is a good idea.
Special perks for servers that pay a fee to be featured/bolder/tagged in the server list
Maybe sell banner ads on the forums for servers

How about selling custom/one off maps to servers admin.
Custom player characters (Maybe the server admin could buy the character pack and then the players could pay to be able to use that character on the server that have them)
[MoFo] Servers - North America - Hosted in Montreal Canada - Admin DeadDred [MoFo]
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#31
(07-17-2013, 04:32 PM)end user Wrote: Special perks for servers that pay a fee to be featured/bolder/tagged in the server list
Maybe sell banner ads on the forums for servers
How about selling custom/one off maps to servers admin.

I'd have some objections against anything like that - advertising servers in one way or the other should go by quality (however that can be defined), and not by "which admin/clan/... pays the most" Smile
[Image: 9216.png] Web: YouTubeSoundCloudFlickrzykure.de[unconnected]
IRC: #uc.xonotic #xonotic #xonotic.de #xonotic.pickup
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#32
I think that donating is rather good idea. Thank you Samual for pointing advantages as well as flaws of this thing. I was searching a bit by myself for donating and funding and I found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdfunding I am not certain what's the difference between donating and crowdfunding but more less sems to be the same.

The way I see it working is simple:

1.The project beeing announced
2.People who find particular project interesting donate their money

When it comes to level design: I am just wondering how this whole donating/sponsoring will affect mapping in general? Will mappers have to add specific billboards for ads in their maps or what (you mentioned specific shader spots. Could you elaborate)? While sometimes ad billboards look good, sometimes definitely not.

I agree that Antibody is the right person to distribute and store collected funds. I could not think of more trustworty and reliable person to do so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_...g_services Here I found platforms for crowd funding. As you can see there are open source software focused aplications like Bountysource or Catincan...

Edit: Ah: BTW. In the poll I checked the second option. I generally agree with donations and sponsoring but I am not yet fully aware of the consequences of these actions. Will donating speed things up?
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#33
This may be a point for a different discussion...but I think to get more donations we need a bigger community. Is there any way to make it easier to get people to try the game in multi player, possibly making this the primary mode for the game. What are the statistics for Xonotic downlods? I see Nexuiz has been downloaded over 2 million times from Sourceforge, but how many of those ever played multi-player?

Other than me, I am guessing most people dont evaluate games using Wikipedia, but if any did they wouldn't realise that there is loads more to the game than single player... anway, just a thought Smile
More tea please!
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#34
From my experience people ignore SP completely these days, they join the first server and are confused.
There are hundreds on "community players" but they are mostly hibernating as you can see from the poll.
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#35
(07-18-2013, 04:14 PM)frostwyrm333 Wrote: From my experience people ignore SP completely these days, they join the first server and are confused.
There are hundreds on "community players" but they are mostly hibernating as you can see from the poll.

yes, I totally agree (definitely straying away from the thread topic now), but I find this with a lot of games, Starcraft II for example, the multiplayer part of the games needs more clarification.

Anyway back to topic, do we really have anywhere enough players playing on the servers to make any kind of revenue, even with the most aggressive advertising. Maybe this is the key question, it is a moot point if we need tens of thousands of people to be playing each day to make any revenue. I would suspect that there is a value you could apply to each player in terms of add revenue, and this would be something like 0.001 cents. Donations for specific features, via something like kickstarter, could actually help build the community, as it is like free advertising. This also fits much better with open source, if there is any kind of in game advertising, then this will commented on every time someone writes an article about Xonotic, and not in a favorable way.
More tea please!
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#36
(07-17-2013, 07:34 AM)Halogene Wrote: 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.

...

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 are sooo right, Halogene. Is it allowed to ask everyone why we came together here? Did some of you forgot what happened to Nexuiz and why we are?

It was about freedom ... and being fed up with commercial involvement. All of you felt traited because of what Lee V. did to us ... and now you are doing something almost similar to us ... if you force something like advertisements on us Sad

Why do you want to bring the commercial involvement by all means into Xonotic ... when we all know that commercial involvement ruined Nexuiz?

I really don't understand that. Maybe i'm allowed to tell you that we (DieTunichtguten, a vital part of this community) also spend LOTS of money to keep our servers running ... every day. We are not as much involved into development, as we maybe would like to be ... but this is our own fault, because we need to get to work every day ... the servers won't pay for themselves. We never really asked anyone for any donations ... and we did NEVER show any ads on our website or elsewhere.

You may ask yourself now: Why do those insane guys and girls do this?
The answer is easy: Because we love Xonotic. Xonotic gives us freedom. Freedom to do what we want ... freedom to be free and not having to worry about something which is bugging us everywhere in the real world outside there allready, namely: Advertisements.

And we never asked for any reward for the things we are doing, because being part of this great community and having the best way to waste our little spare free-time is the best reward one could offer to us.

Why are you not like us? If you really love Xonotic, please stop poisoning it with commercial interests. I'm sure that a lot of people are not disappointed if the development is not progressing as fast as it maybe could ... if money was involved. But if you really love Xonotic ... why don't you just give it time? It's not a bad thing to be free, but slow. In the end a slow evolution under the banner of freedom seems more profitable to me than the profit of a few people involved in this project.

Just to clarify one thing: In the whole history of DieTunichtguten we never asked for any monetary reward. We've put hundreds of hours into administrating the servers, running our little community and earning money to pay for the servers. All we've got back were 2 donations since 2009: Those guys asked us, whether we take donations or not ... and we are proud of this, because those guys donated to us, because they loved the things we were doing and not because we forced something on them Smile

I'm pretty sure that not everyone in here now will share my "radical opinion" about freedom: But please take yourself time to ask you why you came here ... especially if you allready moved over to Xonotic from Nexuiz. Thanks in advance!
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#37
I actually support putting ads on billboards in specially designed places on maps. It looks nice if done correctly.

Also: get a Flattr button for Xonotic already! ;-)
My contributions to Xonotic: talking in the forum, talking some more, talking a bit in the irc, talking in the forum again, XSkie
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#38
I actually vote for donations. Dont see any problem to spend some euros each month for a stuff which gimme lulz. And i really dont care how developers would spend this money. No, srly. I pay for support and if beer and h**kers required for coding and modeling-- its ok.
No ads. For god sake, no
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#39
I agree with Vargos. After a while I realized that ads is not a good idea, but donating is ok.

Cyber Killer: No. Not always. Sometimes they look ugly and distractive.

eL_Bart0: Couple of good points there. I admire your generous attitude. This community is very generous in generall. People are creating stuff, puting lots of effort and time to improove the game WITHOUT ANY PAYMENT.

Nobody forces to pay anyone. Looks like it's voluntary. If you want to see something in game and you don't know how to do it yourself: You give a constructive feedback or put some money and wait until its done. Tongue
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#40
(07-19-2013, 08:38 AM)Justin Wrote: Nobody forces to pay anyone. Looks like it's voluntary. If you want to see something in game and you don't know how to do it yourself: You give a constructive feedback or put some money and wait until its done. Tongue

i dont think you get his point. Maintaining a popular server out of your own pocket, is his (or the dtg ) style of contributing to xonotic.

I guess over the years the bill for the dtg server got rather big, so its understandable why he doesnt want adds.
<Samual> I am the most unprofessional developer ever
<bluez> halogene, you make awesome music, but you have no clue about ctf.
<Halogene> I didn't know mappers include some mysterious waypoints so members of the BOT clan can navigate a map?
<divVerent> if you don't pay for a premium account, your movement speed is limited to 100qu/s
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#41
Alright, I haven't had much time to keep up with the thread but i'll try and knock it all out in one go here. EDIT: Aaaaaaaaaaand this turned out to be larger than expected. Welp, no one is going to read this anyway.... Why do I try? Tongue


(07-16-2013, 03:14 AM)Mr. Bougo Wrote: 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.
There are quite a lot of other free software applications which do the same thing, including Warsow which DOES in fact have advertisements built into the maps in the same way we are considering. Hiring developers to code is quite reasonable, we would generally hire people who already are familiar with the community/codebase and thus would be capable and interested in maintaining their contributions as well. Same story for artists, such as LJFHutch and TheShadow for models or such. As for donations, I think what we'll do is display the total amount of donations and the projected/existing development fund, however we probably won't display specific amounts for who donated how much, or how much we're spending/what we're spending it on-- What i'm trying to accomplish with that idea is to discourage competition and jealousy where i.e. one person may get paid more for their work than someone else, and we don't want the other guy to come back later demanding more money or such. My description of "what is a donation" earlier is ideal, but some people may still get jealous, so this is the measure we would take against that. As for spending internally, the entire core team has to approve all spending measures, and the core team has knowledge of all account transactions. (to help prevent one person from getting greedy or such)


(07-16-2013, 11:46 AM)Mirio Wrote: 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.
You didn't reply longer. Big Grin But, anyway, I don't want sponsor names in the titles of servers, but as Mr.Bougo mentioned we did discuss another way to display them via server badges in the MOTD/welcome message dialog. This way, sponsored servers can show a badge there, and other servers can just display their own logo or whatever.


(07-16-2013, 05:07 PM)frostwyrm333 Wrote: 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.
Community size is irrelevant, we've got plans for 1.0 that will flip it on its head in less than a week.


(07-16-2013, 05:13 PM)Biggles Wrote: 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 Big Grin I would pay money for some Xonotic merchandise via a kickstarter campaign Smile
I mentioned Kickstarter already, however the problem is that such a funding technique requires a list of already prepared/designed ideas to be laid out and promised to people. I can't do this right now, so Kickstarter is more of an option for after 1.0 when we'll have more time to do something like that. (An example of a Kickstarter we could do in the future: Quake-like singleplayer and co-op campaign.)


(07-17-2013, 04:09 AM)Mr. Bougo Wrote:
(07-16-2013, 08:04 PM)Samual Wrote: 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?
As I said above, yes, it shows sponsor logos. Again, as said above, that idea was not thrown away, just didn't mention it at that time because we had not discussed it yet. Regarding NSFW content, banning would only happen if a server DOES NOT clarify that it's NSFW and yet provides NSFW content anyway, potentially resulting in someone seeing it that did not want to. Additionally, we can make a clarification later in the server listing that we reserve the right to ban any server that does not meet our standards. Afterall, we're the ones who provide the serverlisting service. As for your last question, i'm going to assume it's related to NSFW content... Yes, we'd have a way of handling that before allowing any servers to do their own billboards or such.


(07-17-2013, 10:47 AM)Halogene Wrote: 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*
You're not the only one, hence why I did this conversation publically. Do you really think i'll let anyone fuck up this game with commercial interest? I will sooner abandon an entire webhost than compromise the standards of the game. But, more on this later.


(07-17-2013, 11:49 AM)Mr. Bougo Wrote: I suppose I'll justify my vote in this post.
...
I am worried about competition between sponsor and non-sponsor servers though, in that case. Indeed, sponsor servers would benefit from a larger player base, and I don't know what lengths they would go to get there.

EDIT: I'd like to know how this would be perceived in the FLOSS world. We've had examples of dynamic billboards in Red Eclipse and WSW in Samual's post above, but that's completely irrelevant to this discussion, unless those are used for advertisement too.

(07-17-2013, 11:20 AM)frostwyrm333 Wrote: And don't worry about selling out, ads in games have always failed anyway. (Quake Live)

That doesn't really look like an argument in favor of sponsorship, just saying.
Sponsor vs non-sponsor servers are irrelevant, I do have a plan in mind to control the serverlist and display in a way which benefits community building, however I will not favor servers that don't have some inherent quality or value of gameplay that is worth favoring. Note: This is quite off-topic, please do not worry about this subject until I bring it up in another thread later when I actually start on the serverlist re-write. Additionally, as I said above, WSW does indeed use sponsor logos in the same way I described, and their community is fine with it. Red Eclipse I think only does game content ads, but not entirely sure... didn't have time to confirm this. I think some maps in the game have fixed sponsorship ads built in though, by the mapper or such... Generally to support their own communities or whatever. EDIT: Alright so apparently Red Eclipse only does fake ads on a few maps, plus some custom maps have their own community branding built in. Finally, as for QuakeLive, that's because they were trying to acquire money through advertisement, and they did advertisements very differently than we're considering (they played a 15 second video at the end of a match Tongue)... We won't be doing advertisements for revenue, but for service exchange.


(07-17-2013, 04:32 PM)end user Wrote:
(07-17-2013, 02:06 PM)Mr. Bougo Wrote:
(07-17-2013, 12:05 PM)end user Wrote: If anyone has a problem with Xonotic or server admins trying to make or recoup money for the servers/service they provide that's that person own problem. I think majority wont care but don't know how many would donate/pay.

That doesn't mean it's acceptable and ethical with respect to free software philosophy. That's the question I'm raising.

There's nothing unethical or unacceptable trying to get compensation to keep the project working/growing or to grow the community. Now turning it into a profit machine while keeping it FOSS is another story.

I'd rather lose some players who think you should be doing this all for free and keep the ones who don't mind donating while playing.

Selling swag and bumpers tickers is a good idea.
Special perks for servers that pay a fee to be featured/bolder/tagged in the server list
Maybe sell banner ads on the forums for servers

How about selling custom/one off maps to servers admin.
Custom player characters (Maybe the server admin could buy the character pack and then the players could pay to be able to use that character on the server that have them)
I don't think it's acceptable to lose players, anyone who dislikes the advertisements should be able to not have them, however I can't state the point enough that we're not doing this for revenue and we won't let sponsors compromise the game in any way.

Selling swag and bumper stickers? Yes.
Selling special perks for servers? Hell no.
Selling banner ads on the forums? Hell no.
Custom/one-off maps to server admins? Hell no.
Custom player characters? I think at this point we've decided we won't be going the Free2Play route, so probably no.


(07-18-2013, 05:13 AM)Justin Wrote: ...
When it comes to level design: I am just wondering how this whole donating/sponsoring will affect mapping in general? Will mappers have to add specific billboards for ads in their maps or what (you mentioned specific shader spots. Could you elaborate)? While sometimes ad billboards look good, sometimes definitely not.

I agree that Antibody is the right person to distribute and store collected funds. I could not think of more trustworty and reliable person to do so.
...
Edit: Ah: BTW. In the poll I checked the second option. I generally agree with donations and sponsoring but I am not yet fully aware of the consequences of these actions. Will donating speed things up?
Basically, mappers will place textures on their maps with a name of ad_slot_5 or whatever, and each number represents a certain size of texture to place. We'll define it more later, but basically they'll replace the textures where you currently see xonotic logos or such. The mapper does not pick which ads go on the map btw, he just picks the size and location of them, and we fill them dynamically from a distribution server. Additionally, we'll provide shaders and premade models to make them look nice (see i.e. Fuse's billboards, which has that nice screen shader.) -- Antibody is actually not interested in that it seems, but we'll find someone equally acceptable for that job, no worries. As for consequences of donations and sponsorship, it generally means faster development and features or bonuses that we would not get otherwise. Good artwork just does not happen by merely waiting.


(07-18-2013, 12:04 PM)Biggles Wrote: This may be a point for a different discussion...but I think to get more donations we need a bigger community. Is there any way to make it easier to get people to try the game in multi player, possibly making this the primary mode for the game. What are the statistics for Xonotic downlods? I see Nexuiz has been downloaded over 2 million times from Sourceforge, but how many of those ever played multi-player?

Other than me, I am guessing most people dont evaluate games using Wikipedia, but if any did they wouldn't realise that there is loads more to the game than single player... anway, just a thought Smile
Like I said before, don't worry about it.


(07-19-2013, 06:05 AM)Biggles Wrote:
(07-18-2013, 04:14 PM)frostwyrm333 Wrote: From my experience people ignore SP completely these days, they join the first server and are confused.
There are hundreds on "community players" but they are mostly hibernating as you can see from the poll.

yes, I totally agree (definitely straying away from the thread topic now), but I find this with a lot of games, Starcraft II for example, the multiplayer part of the games needs more clarification.

Anyway back to topic, do we really have anywhere enough players playing on the servers to make any kind of revenue, even with the most aggressive advertising. Maybe this is the key question, it is a moot point if we need tens of thousands of people to be playing each day to make any revenue. I would suspect that there is a value you could apply to each player in terms of add revenue, and this would be something like 0.001 cents. Donations for specific features, via something like kickstarter, could actually help build the community, as it is like free advertising. This also fits much better with open source, if there is any kind of in game advertising, then this will commented on every time someone writes an article about Xonotic, and not in a favorable way.
Again, don't worry about players/community size. And another thing, WE'RE NOT DOING ADS FOR REVENUE... Did ANYONE read the clarification post?... and yes, I explained about Kickstarter above.


(07-19-2013, 07:03 AM)eL_Bart0 Wrote:
(07-17-2013, 07:34 AM)Halogene Wrote: 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.

...

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 are sooo right, Halogene. Is it allowed to ask everyone why we came together here? Did some of you forgot what happened to Nexuiz and why we are?

It was about freedom ... and being fed up with commercial involvement. All of you felt traited because of what Lee V. did to us ... and now you are doing something almost similar to us ... if you force something like advertisements on us Sad

Why do you want to bring the commercial involvement by all means into Xonotic ... when we all know that commercial involvement ruined Nexuiz?

I really don't understand that. Maybe i'm allowed to tell you that we (DieTunichtguten, a vital part of this community) also spend LOTS of money to keep our servers running ... every day. We are not as much involved into development, as we maybe would like to be ... but this is our own fault, because we need to get to work every day ... the servers won't pay for themselves. We never really asked anyone for any donations ... and we did NEVER show any ads on our website or elsewhere.

You may ask yourself now: Why do those insane guys and girls do this?
The answer is easy: Because we love Xonotic. Xonotic gives us freedom. Freedom to do what we want ... freedom to be free and not having to worry about something which is bugging us everywhere in the real world outside there allready, namely: Advertisements.

And we never asked for any reward for the things we are doing, because being part of this great community and having the best way to waste our little spare free-time is the best reward one could offer to us.

Why are you not like us? If you really love Xonotic, please stop poisoning it with commercial interests. I'm sure that a lot of people are not disappointed if the development is not progressing as fast as it maybe could ... if money was involved. But if you really love Xonotic ... why don't you just give it time? It's not a bad thing to be free, but slow. In the end a slow evolution under the banner of freedom seems more profitable to me than the profit of a few people involved in this project.

Just to clarify one thing: In the whole history of DieTunichtguten we never asked for any monetary reward. We've put hundreds of hours into administrating the servers, running our little community and earning money to pay for the servers. All we've got back were 2 donations since 2009: Those guys asked us, whether we take donations or not ... and we are proud of this, because those guys donated to us, because they loved the things we were doing and not because we forced something on them Smile

I'm pretty sure that not everyone in here now will share my "radical opinion" about freedom: But please take yourself time to ask you why you came here ... especially if you allready moved over to Xonotic from Nexuiz. Thanks in advance!
Please, do not be insulting, this game would not even exist anymore if I did not love it and push it as far as I did. Now, with that out of the way... There is a huge difference in the commercial involvement of Nexuiz and Xonotic. Firstly, look at this thread. I did this entirely openly with the community, whereas Lee Vermeulen did everything behind our backs (including the backs of key contributors). Second, I WILL NOT COMPROMISE THE STANDARDS OF THE GAME FOR MONEY. I stated this before, but we will not change the gameplay or display of servers or any other attributes of the game by request of any contributor. I'm not in the business of running a business, i'm in the business of making an awesome game. That being said, to get certain things we need resources, and acquiring resources entirely for free is very difficult. Not everyone is like DTG in their ability to support their community themselves and provide such a service, not every opportunity is thrown to us for free without us having to dig for it. Third, didn't I mention already that advertisements/sponsors would be either opt-in or opt-out? (i.e. not forced on ANYONE, including server admins could completely disable them). Fourth, the unfortunate truth is that this is not an issue of development time, but development opportunity. I've been doing opensource development for a long time, and the fact is that there is a lack of good artists that will contribute under our criteria for free... We *WILL NOT* get a consistent weapon model set unless we have donations, and similarly we *WILL NOT* get sponsored for tournaments or competitions or whatever by Sapphire or such without proper attribution and compensation. The whole point is to make the service trade worthwhile to the sponsor, and that just doesn't happen without something like the attribution I've been discussing.

It's basically this, we either use sponsorship in ads (with opt-in or opt-out features so anyone can choose whether they want them or not) to acquire services, or we have to pay for those services with donation money or with our own resources. Personally, I would prefer to get the services for free with attribution via sponsorship in the least intruding way possible than to pay for it out of my own pocket. (or out of the pocket of community members)


(07-19-2013, 07:25 AM)Cyber Killer Wrote: I actually support putting ads on billboards in specially designed places on maps. It looks nice if done correctly.

Also: get a Flattr button for Xonotic already! ;-)
Flattr will not work for us, we've looked into it (too burnt out to go into details now).. We'll probably be using PayPal.


(07-19-2013, 11:30 AM)Cortez666 Wrote:
(07-19-2013, 08:38 AM)Justin Wrote: Nobody forces to pay anyone. Looks like it's voluntary. If you want to see something in game and you don't know how to do it yourself: You give a constructive feedback or put some money and wait until its done. Tongue

i dont think you get his point. Maintaining a popular server out of your own pocket, is his (or the dtg ) style of contributing to xonotic.

I guess over the years the bill for the dtg server got rather big, so its understandable why he doesnt want adds.
And he can choose not to have ads on his server or his client, or anyone else can choose the same thing.

Note: I'm not disagreeing with you Cortez, but just saying: I've probably invested more money in the form of my personal development time alone than the entire cost of running DTG. Our existing contributions are irrelevant, the point of this discussion is what we can acquire in the future, and i'm saying as someone who has been doing this development for a long time now, we won't have the same opportunities without sponsorship.
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#42
Thanks for addressing those posts.

My questions have been answered, but I'd still like some comments on what you think of the importance of our image in the FLOSS world. Since there are no examples of fully free software with non-functional sponsorship ads, how can you be sure that our reputation as a fully free project would not be tarnished? (as a reminder, Warsow's assets are proprietary while the engine and gamecode are FLOSS, so it isn't fully recognized as "free software")
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#43
I fully support donation driven development but am apprehensive about sponsorship, billboards/sponsorship would probably require the distribution/fetching of nonfree images(logos etc).

I also support the idea of feature bounties.
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#44
Perhaps we should split this discussion. Seeing the opinions of the community, it doesn't make much sense to me to have sponsorship and donations in the same thread. And it especially doesn't make much sense to have the two polls merged into one.

People are in favor of donations and less so of sponsorship, and this biases the poll results.
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#45
Well I think i've already found a consensus, and we'll bring up individual issues as they come up later on. Note, I did this all in the same thread because it's all relating to the same moral implications.

Our plan of action from here will probably be (Pending final decision by development team for each of these individually):
  • Register Xonotic as a non-profit organization, set up open donations via PayPal, provide a way to display the following information publically: (A): List of donors (if they're willing to be shown), (B): Current level of money inside the development fund, ©: List of all the things that the development fund has gone towards WITHOUT specific transaction amounts. This way we keep transparency in that you can see what we're spending the money on, WITHOUT promoting jealousy or the like.
  • Begin using development fund to pay for new weapon model development.
  • Set up a billboard system and implement it on all maps, but do not show advertisements on them for now. Currently we'll just use them for game news or event promotion, and once we get a better feeling for how this is received we will decide whether to promote sponsors there as well. (I'll discuss on a new thread about this in that case)
  • Implement server badges on connection in the server-info dialog window that will come up (containing MOTD, server information, etc).

I think that's pretty much it for now regarding these subjects... Thanks for the input folks.
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#46
(07-20-2013, 02:36 PM)Samual Wrote: [*]Set up a billboard system and implement it on all maps, but do not show advertisements on them for now. Currently we'll just use them for game news or event promotion, and once we get a better feeling for how this is received we will decide whether to promote sponsors there as well. (I'll discuss on a new thread about this in that case)

I'm really looking forward to see that ingame .. finally Mirio will have another way of announcing quickcups, in addition to forums and IRC Big Grin
[Image: 9216.png] Web: YouTubeSoundCloudFlickrzykure.de[unconnected]
IRC: #uc.xonotic #xonotic #xonotic.de #xonotic.pickup
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#47
(07-20-2013, 02:36 PM)Samual Wrote: Note, I did this all in the same thread because it's all relating to the same moral implications.

Really? Is that a conclusion you made from reading this thread and other discussions, or is it an opinion you formulated before posting this thread? Because I would say that's not true at all. Gettng voluntary donations from the community and benefits from opt-out ingame advertising are not equally moral.

Anyway, I like your plans and I hope we can focus on the moral/ethical aspects of advertising in a later discussion.
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#48
(07-20-2013, 03:50 PM)zykure Wrote:
(07-20-2013, 02:36 PM)Samual Wrote: [*]Set up a billboard system and implement it on all maps, but do not show advertisements on them for now. Currently we'll just use them for game news or event promotion, and once we get a better feeling for how this is received we will decide whether to promote sponsors there as well. (I'll discuss on a new thread about this in that case)

I'm really looking forward to see that ingame .. finally Mirio will have another way of announcing quickcups, in addition to forums and IRC Big Grin


Hell no. Unless he does it in a serious way.
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#49
I´m really not happy about implementing billboards in every map. This looks just like we are trying to force people to read the ads. And still, if the ads got replaced by Xonotic logos or similar it would look ridiculous with all those logos in the map. If ads are just displayed where it looks appropriate, like on Fuse and Warfare (to mention some) where those billboards are already an integrated part of the map, that´ll be ok.

If any advertisement at all then please do not make it obtrusive! The best thing would be though to avoid them completely.
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#50
(07-21-2013, 09:32 AM)Justin Wrote:
(07-20-2013, 03:50 PM)zykure Wrote:
(07-20-2013, 02:36 PM)Samual Wrote: [*]Set up a billboard system and implement it on all maps, but do not show advertisements on them for now. Currently we'll just use them for game news or event promotion, and once we get a better feeling for how this is received we will decide whether to promote sponsors there as well. (I'll discuss on a new thread about this in that case)

I'm really looking forward to see that ingame .. finally Mirio will have another way of announcing quickcups, in addition to forums and IRC Big Grin


Hell no. Unless he does it in a serious way.

How is it not serious please?
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