What are they going to do next? Perhaps they will start a studio, hire some more people and work on some new endeavors with this money?
Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
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Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#182> A little less than half will go to taxes...
:sad:
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#183Glad to see this, because they have worked long and hard on this game. For the optimistic, divide ~$4m (post-tax) by team of 2 for ~20 years (they started work in 2002). They've made some money in the meantime obviously, but seeing the final profit doesn't accurately capture the overall investment. Just in case you were thinking of quitting your day job to become an overnight millionaire making indie games.
If they are smart the money will be taken out as dividend and thus only pay capital gains tax.
They'd also likely pay the corporate tax rate in that case, which is 21%. Tack on 20% for the highest cap gains bracket, and you're at 41% federal unless you can work your way out of it with some loophole (e.g. carried losses on the cap gains side, idk what on the corporate side). FICA caps at something like $150k, so they'd actually be paying more than the highest income bracket of 37%.
The really smart move (or evil move, depending how you see it) would have been to start the business within a Roth IRA. Then you'd just pay the 21% corporate tax rate.
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#184Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its possible it still fits the word. The bible is canonical too even though it's basically a pieces of disparate texts. Basically if it's the first and earliest record and the one that everyone looks to as the most accurate source it's canonical.
The whole idea of caring about "canon" is fundamentally bollocks anyway when it comes to stories
Reference?
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#186What are they going to do next? Perhaps they will start a studio, hire some more people and work on some new endeavors with this money?
I think they will just keep working on df the way they have so far for another 20 years before retiring.
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are just used to wealthy people gaming the tax system to a point it's shocking when someone actually pays them.
With this kind of money, you can absolutely get someone to do all the work you need to make your tax mostly disappear. Heck, they probably find your number and call you directly, you would only have to say "Yes, I want to save a couple million dollars". I'm not saying it's good, but at the moment it's just so easy, risk-free and completely legal.
[deleted]
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah. DF became popular because it's free. That is a huge part of the allure.
DF became popular because of the stories it created - and being free helped that expand because people could try-before-buy. As it was, the risk would have been way too high for most people to pay tenbux or whatever BEFORE playing it (many have "donated" way more than that after playing).
Also being free let the developers work on whatever they wanted to rather than the "I paid for this and this bug happened therefore I'm going to yell about it on the internet".
I work in enterprise software, the pressures from paying customers are immense. Sales loves to short circuit processes to get new features in front of the line. Large customers love to short circuit the process. Eventually your processes become customer driven rather than creation driven. And that's fine if you want to make money, but it ain't great if you want to create.
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are in a post-Minecraft world, so I don't think your criticism has any merit. Minecraft was a sandbox single-dev game that broke every mold and trope, and sold for $4 billion. Me claiming that DF could be worth $100M in a world where Minecraft was worth $4B and is likely worth much more now... not a crazy take.
BTW the view on Minecraft is survivorship bias. How many developers with better games failed?
With better games than Minecraft? Not many. Not many at all.
Any game that isn't a building game is immediately disqualified from consideration, since most games focus on you consuming level content made by others instead of expressing your own creativity, and no such game can be considered better than Minecraft. And Minecraft is simply the best building game out there, I'm open to suggestions but I've seen and played a lot of building / digital lego games and none of the rest can hold a candle to Minecraft balance of streamlined simplicity and creative versatility.
If you're looking for a game that is specifically about building and sailing battleships, or cars, or rockets, or cities, then there are better games than Minecraft. But minecraft is more generalist, you can build anything from cute cottages to digital computers in minecraft, it has the broadest general appeal of any building game I've ever heard of.
It was pretty obvious to me from the start, from the beta days in 2010 anyway, that Minecraft would be a massive success. Even in that early state all the elements were there to make it massively successful. And compared to other digital lego games at that time, it was hands down the best there was. I've seen Infiniminer, don't try to tell me that it was pure luck that Minecraft succeeded where Infiniminer languished in obscurity.
Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've also been receiving donations since early on. Last time I checked they were up to 100k per year, but it started much smaller. I donated $20 back in the days when they'd send back an ASCII art scene in email or crayon drawing.
And those early numbers are Tarn only with Zach still having a "real job" (Tarn quit his teaching job relatively early on).
I believe he had a research post doc