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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

#201

Post by capableweb »

TomK32 wrote: post #196
dmarchand90 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but they were not making that much the whole time. If you look back some years they were just scraping by.

Looking at the numbers and releases I must say: If they had streamlined their release process to put out releases more often then the revenue might have been more even and better.

Hard to say, working faster/harder doesn't usually mean the quality will remain unchanged, and their user base probably care more about the quality of releases rather than how fast they put out releases.

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

#202

Post by seanhunter »

criley2 wrote: post #74
program_whiz wrote: post #65

Glad 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.

This doesn't really make sense. They were a donations-run "charity" shop making a free game. They only decided to put it on Steam so they could fund a retirement as well as a future for the game. For any indie devs out there: don't give your game away for free for 18 years if you want to make money. That's really the lesson here. Had DF monetized in 2006 instead of going free, and played the industry game as others d…

> Had DF monetized in 2006 instead of going free, and played the industry game as others do, I would not be surprised to see DF at $100M in 2023.

I didn't play DF in 2006 but I did play it first in about 2011, and can categorically at that point it was so user-hostile and batshit crazy there's no way the trajectory you're talking about would have been possible. Even just the normally-simple step of getting a copy of the game you could run was a bizarro-world nightmare involving multiple trips to the bay12 forum and searching for threads to find the download link etc.

Eg if you look at this example Youtube tutorial series from 2015, the first 2 episodes are all stuff before you actually launch the game. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0sBhCMFBvPlF7wG7OH-N...

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

#203

Post by Agentlien »

criley2 wrote: post #106
xavxav wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had DF monetized in 2006 instead of going free, and played the industry game as others do, I would not be surprised to see DF at $100M in 2023. I don't DF would have existed then, it would be hard to see it gather the same community and the creators probably wouldn't have felt as free to explore their own ideas if they felt it needed to be commercially viable. The thing that made DF's current commercial success is…

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.

We may be in a post-Minecraft world but Dwarf Fortress does not come from one. It predates, and was in fact a major source of inspiration for, Minecraft.

If we're talking about whether the highly obtuse ASCII version of DF should have monetized earlier we cannot point to its highly accessible direct descendant from seven years later.

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

#204

Post by dragonwriter »

mort96 wrote: post #194
endominus wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graph includes state, federal, and payroll tax. They're stacked above the income after tax. They do not add up to $41,535.

I ignored the payroll tax, because I assumed that's not counted as part of the employee's gross income? And I agree that neither income tax nor income + payroll tax adds up to the 33.5%. I don't know if there are more taxes which need to be considered. 13% total tax seems low.

> I ignored the payroll tax, because I assumed that's not counted as part of the employee's gross income

Employee share of payroll tax is, employer share (which is shown reaching down from the bottom) is not.

> 13% total tax seems low.

Given what I've actually paid with a far above median income, 13% soubds reasonable. Its low as a nominal rate, but there are lots of credits and deductions available, and the before-tax median personal income is well below the cutoff for EITC, which can be a huge one. Heck, a large minority of the population pays zero or negative net income tax.

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

#205

Post by capableweb »

jliptzin wrote: post #198

I haven’t played it, and I have no doubt it is an amazing game I would enjoy. But how do people have time for all these games? There are so many compelling games out there, each demanding hundreds or thousands of hours of time to fully enjoy.

Every now and then you find some hours to play. I play games maybe less than an hour per day, some free days I play more, with my most played game being Factorio with 175 hours, and I'm proficient in it + feel like I've spent a lot of time playing it, but I also owned it since 2015 or something like that, so 2922 hours available, 175 spent on Factorio so around 0.06 hours per day, calculated that way.

I tend to prefer "complicated" games that require some sort of time investment to figure out (once figured out, they don't remain as fun for me), but there is no game I've spent more time on than Factorio, and it's "just" 175 hours over the years, which is very low if I compare it to others.

Summary is, you don't have to spend 100s/1000s of hours in any game in order to fully enjoy it.

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

#206

Post by Semaphor »

jliptzin wrote: post #198

I haven’t played it, and I have no doubt it is an amazing game I would enjoy. But how do people have time for all these games? There are so many compelling games out there, each demanding hundreds or thousands of hours of time to fully enjoy.

No children, or children who are old enough, probably helps. As does not working more than 40h a week (or even less). In my case, it’s also home office (= no commute) that helps.

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

#208

Post by hinkley »

TheUndead96 wrote: post #124
masakreTech wrote: post #23

And? - Cherry games with Hollow Knight have made more money and it's just a team of three people.

We can celebrate things separately. One good thing does not detract from another.

Jealous people don’t think that way though, unfortunately.

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

#209

Post by TillE »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #177
moffkalast wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they had a different agreement than standard or Steam just cashed out something north of $3 million from this alone. It's true what they say: Valve used to make games, now they make money.

>Valve used to make games, now they make money You can say that, but really what they moved to is creating a platform that saved PC gaming. I can't imagine where we would be at without Steam. There would be 20 different platforms we would have to install full of bloatware garbage and everything would be horrific as all fuck. Indie games would be having a much harder time, because sure there would be other things out…

The Steam app itself is also pretty great. I didn't fully appreciate that until the Epic Games Store, which runs about as well as a sloppy Javascript app from ten years ago. It's been in the same dire state for years.

Meanwhile Steam is pretty quick, the interface is well organized, and there are tons of useful features from controller configuration to the mod workshops.

I definitely agree that there's an alternate Steam-less timeline where major game publishers migrate entirely to consoles, as they were threatening to do in the mid-2000s. We'd never have all these PC ports from Japanese developers (from Dark Souls to Persona 5) without Steam.

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

#210

Post by jtms »

jliptzin wrote: post #198

I haven’t played it, and I have no doubt it is an amazing game I would enjoy. But how do people have time for all these games? There are so many compelling games out there, each demanding hundreds or thousands of hours of time to fully enjoy.

You should try “staying up late”! You wait for everyone else to go to sleep and then you get a solid 2-4 hours to fully immerse yourself in glorious escapism. The next day, in the midst of suffering from sleep deprivation, you wonder why in the hell you did that and that tonight you will be going to bed early! (And then you don’t)
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