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Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress

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21–30 of 322 posts

Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress

#24
post #21

A little less than half goes to taxes. Is that normal?

Yes. There are ways they could have minimized that payment but it doesn’t seem that the team is primarily money motivated in the first place, so may as well just make the process simple and pay up.

Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress

#26

Please incorporate ChatGPT into this game! Imagine the storylines!

I would like AI generated images of monsters, heroes, items and events

It's such an obvious usecase. Can't wait for a workable implementation somewhere.

Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress

#27
post #12

I was about to throw some money down their way, but apparently the steam version does not work on Mac M1/M2. I'm too young/uninitiated/whatever/visually_oriented to play the older version.

People apparently have gotten the windows version to work through wine, there's some guides in the steam forums for the game.

Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress

#29

Please incorporate ChatGPT into this game! Imagine the storylines!

I disagree vehemently and violently with this suggestion. Dwarf Fortress's charm results from human-crafted procedures interacting in unexpected and fascinating ways.

If ChatGPT (or other AI bullshit generators) were used instead, it would change the experience entirely.

Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress

#30
post #10

The drop-off after launch is pretty wild.

For normal commercial games there is a formula of how you can estimate first year and lifetimes sales of specific title: Sales in first 2 months * 2 = Sales in first year Sales in first year * 2 = Lifetime sales Since DF is very special project it's will likely have much longer tail of sales, but most likely math would be about the same during first 3-5 years. PS: I'm game developer and this is industry standard to e…

And that's for regular releases. I'd be surprised if the initial drop wasn't much stronger for something that has already been a living legend for many years. That initial wave of "oh, I've heard so much of them, probably won't play even with a graphical mode, but I still want it in my library" is one of a kind. The long tail will probably be much flatter, but only compare to regular releases once you separate out everybody who bought in roughly the same way those nice hardback Shakespeare collections are bought.
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