A little less than half goes to taxes. Is that normal?
They made 7m in personal income in one month, how would that not be normal
Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
51–60 of 322 posts
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What ways are you thinking of? They could have incorporated and posted losses for 2? straight years before the IRS started auditing; those losses could have been deducted against this revenue. What other angles are there?
can't they book expenses? income taxes are to be paid on "net profit" and not gross receipts, right?
how can you pay half of revenue as taxes? this assumes tax rate is 50% and there are no expenses?
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#53Please incorporate ChatGPT into this game! Imagine the storylines!
Once we get that kind of generation into games it will be incredible.
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#54> The fairytale ending is reality, but you didn’t kiss the toad. Some philological pedantery: In the canonical Brothers Grimm version of The Frog Prince, the frog does not turn into a prince when kissed but when smashed against a wall.
From now on, I will switch to this version for my child's story before sleep
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#55The 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…
Most games are developed, a bit of effort/money directed on promotion/marketing, dropped, and then onto the next project. So I think these numbers are more of a reflection of developer than consumer trends. Games that are developed in a different way often show [very] different trends. One of the most extreme examples I can think of is Kenshi. Its SteamDB [1] numbers are something else! It was made by one guy who worked as a security guard to make ends meet while making it.
Of course making games has to be a labor of love though. I mean the guy had double digit player counts for years, and sales likely reflective of that (if not worse), while he continued to keep developing a game that he was clearly building for himself at least as much as for "the market."
And as for Dwarf Fortress, it's kind of in a mixed zone, because it got the sort of big marketing/promotion push that's usually reserved for "fire it and forget it" type titles, and the consequent drop in players it entails as you ended up doing things like attracting players who thought they were buying 'The Sims - Ultra Detailed Dwarven Edition With Retro Graphics' and quit after 30 minutes. But I really don't think that's the developer's plan. So I suppose we'll see!
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#56> The fairytale ending is reality, but you didn’t kiss the toad. Some philological pedantery: In the canonical Brothers Grimm version of The Frog Prince, the frog does not turn into a prince when kissed but when smashed against a wall.
Sounds like polymorph from DND to me.
> The transformation lasts for the duration, or until the target drops to 0 hit points or dies.
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Polymorph#content
[Edit] trimmed quote
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#57I'm super happy for these guys. They really have struggled with donations for many years. It's nice to see them get the bag.
For those commenting on the sales drop off, it is a problem for AAA titles that a half-finished product gets sold to the public and then abandoned because it's easier to just move onto the next thing.
But I want to counter that with the story of No Man's Sky. I highly recommend the Internet Historian video on it [1]. The short version is for various reasons the game over-promised and under-delieved on launch but Sean and HelloGames have now spent years continuing to develop the game with free and significant updates. I can only imagine this still drives sales growth or it wouldn't be sustainable. But it's really repaired HG's and NMS's reputation. NMS has a real cult following now.
And then of course there's Minecraft whose long tail of sales is truly mind-blowing.
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
It works https://re-actor.net/dwarf-fortress-how-to-run-the-game-on-m... But you need the actual files downloaded obviously. So you either have to have a PC where you can download the game files from Steam (Windows VM works too) and then copy over to your Mac. Or you can buy the game from itch.io (it's the same but you also get self-extracting archive + you get a Steam key as well) https://kitfoxgames.itch.io/dwarf-f…
With steamcmd (the steam client CLI) one can download whatever version of their owned games they want.
In theory. In practice, it's a headache getting that thing to work.
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#59That's incredible! Congratulations to the generous indeed. I played the old game many years back and was once also a monthly supporter, but these days I have less time to play, so I bought the Steam version primarily to support Bay 12. It's so nice to see such great support. I wonder what the monthly level of income from Steam will be in the future.
Me too, I might try a fortress this summer on vacation, but for now, I gave them my support for their love and dedication
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#60Very happy for them and everyone involved