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After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

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Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I have been on Linux for 10+ years but really haven't played much games yet, I did buy Portal on Steam for Linux ages ago. But, I hadn't heard of Proton until just now from you all! I guess I'll go see how to get that up and running.

Another long-time linux user here: During the pandemic I finally decided to get a little bit more into gaming and figured I'll try it on linux to see if it'll work and if nothing else, the technical challenge would be fun. Fortunately I like games after all, because there wasn't any real challenge to getting things working the wine/proton folks have done A LOT to make this stuff just work. I play overwatch and other…

I still haven't looked this up yet, so is Wine now Proton? Can you share the history here?

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#112
post #73

Wow, this is such a #goodnews story! > "I'll have to rework… my, uh, whole life, figure out what the heck's going on there. I don't really have any ideas or plans right now. I've just been thinking about dwarf stuff." > "My wife has plans," Zach said. "We live in a tiny little house, so buying a new house, that's a major goal."

This is a goodnews day. This, fusion announcement, and the Apple forced to allow 3rd party stores. Haven't had anything like it in a while. Just bought the game out of respect even if I don't get to play it.

Oh good point on the other good news announcements!

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#113
Now that money worries are (hopefully) not an issue anymore, I really hope they consider releasing the source code.

Due to being written in C++, mods are quite restricted in what they can do (especially in comparison to more recent games like Rimworld that are trivial to decompile due to using C#). Especially frustrating because performance really isn't up to par - a lot of the old generational forts from a decade+ ago are really only possible now if you tailor your gameplay to account for performance issues.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? I don't get the reference.

Because no one explained. Notch made Minecraft and at one point was making £300k a minute in sales. After a few years of very intense life changing profits he eventually sold Minecraft for £4B and turned into a bit of a weirdo largely blamed on his sudden rise in wealth. If you read his blog you'd understand there was a lot of subtlety and complex relationships and emotions, but the gist is that.

No post body was provided.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#115
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No he didn't.

He said he found gay pride parades offensive, suggested that there should be hetero parades in response, and then said that anyone that disagrees with him should be shot. He's certainly entitled to his opinions on being offended by pride parades, but suggesting those that don't agree should be shot certainly crosses the line. That is just one example. He also has been very anti-trans.

Here's some stuff I found.

> In 2017, he voiced his support for Gamergate, an alt-right and sexist movement that largely targeted women, LGBTQ, and other minority groups in the industry. At the time, he referred to feminism as a “social disease,” claiming on Twitter that feminists were “overtly sexist against men.” At one point, Persson said that anyone who opposed “heterosexual pride day” should be “shot” and also tweeted “It’s okay to be white” after claiming groups pushing for more diversity and calling out white supremacy were being racist against white people.

> Persson followed that up just a few days later with a series of transphobic comments in which he suggested that trans men and women were “mentally ill.”

Aside from the thing about "should be shot", which is stupid, I agree with a lot of those takes from him. Heterosexual day is cringe though just like homosexual day is. His Q comments were cringe too, aside from his related comments telling people they shouldn't trust the media.

In other words he's just a normal person who holds views everyone in the world held until 5 minutes ago.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? 300,000 units * $30 = $9M - 30% Steam tax = $6.3M in a single year take out federal taxes (just gonna call it 36% and ignore SFJ/MFJ), leaves them about $2M each. I'm sure they're some sort of a legal entity in WA state and will owe the b&o tax too. They deserve it absolutely but $2M each does not put them in a position of "fuck you" [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI

If they’re smart they hopefully have incorporated and will only need to take money out of the corporation to pay themselves to cover their expenses. So they won’t pay tax on the full amount up front and will have most of the money pretax for future business expenses

That's not how corporate income tax works though; the company pays taxes on all that sales income less expenses, and then they would likely take dividends at a preferential tax rate and pay yet some more tax. I doubt they've been carrying much of a loss over the past 20+ years to offset this.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#117
post #109

So this happened to a guy that worked for me. Loved video games, super talented front end dev. Made a horror game in Unity at evenings and weekends with his best friend. Launched it on Steam. Very low sales. But he learnt a huge amount about marketing and game design based on player feedback. Designed a second game, put all the marketing learnings into it, 48 hours after launch the biggest streamer on twitch was stre…

If you are still in contact with the guy, could you ask him what the marketing learning actually were? Everyone has their own take on marketing and it's honestly really difficult to get the concept with most posts about it being so fluffy. I'd honestly love some cliff notes or a bulleted list from someone who has actually succeeded, especially if they ( like me ) had no marketing experience beforehand.

Getting a big twitch streamer to play his game was the only marketing he needed. Although their time is up for sale I think some amount of them do genuinely enjoy gaming and will try out something that is interesting to them.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#118
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said he found gay pride parades offensive, suggested that there should be hetero parades in response, and then said that anyone that disagrees with him should be shot. He's certainly entitled to his opinions on being offended by pride parades, but suggesting those that don't agree should be shot certainly crosses the line. That is just one example. He also has been very anti-trans.

Here's some stuff I found. > In 2017, he voiced his support for Gamergate, an alt-right and sexist movement that largely targeted women, LGBTQ, and other minority groups in the industry. At the time, he referred to feminism as a “social disease,” claiming on Twitter that feminists were “overtly sexist against men.” At one point, Persson said that anyone who opposed “heterosexual pride day” should be “shot” and also t…

> In other words he's just a normal person who holds views everyone in the world held until 5 minutes ago.

You're either being disingenuous or live in a very small information bubble, because the majority of the world never held those opinions in the entire history of the planet.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#119
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works great on Proton so: 6 hours in with ~20 dwarfs and decent automated production

Do you also experience mouse input lag? My input is constantly dropped. Test drawing ("free-hand" mode) a line of mining quickly. Are any squares missing?

I'm getting some input lag on Linux, via Proton, but I just pause the game and it gets snappy again. That's been working for me so far.

Re: After 20 years the Dwarf Fortress devs have to get used to being millionaires

#120
post #28

Congrats to them! Very rare to see people who follow their dreams no matter what their field become millionaires. On a side note, I feel like I should like Dwarf Fortress, but every time I look at it, it seems completely daunting.

Yeah. I like the idea of this game. But I'd love the idea if I could romp around in it with a friend or 15. But multiplayer is hard baked in from the start. This game will never happen.

So someone else will copy what they've done and add multiplayer and get that bag.

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