Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

monogame.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 266 posts

Re: Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

#61

Post by oefrha »

juujian wrote: post #2

I don't want to assume, but I don't recollect any contributions of that magnitude from large studios (spare Valve). This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.

I mean, this indie developer sold more than lots of (most?) AAA studios, and AAA studios have a lot more operating costs than an indie. Donating one dev year is a lot easier when you sell 50 million copies and hire no one than when you sell a couple million copies and have 100 employees plus investors. (I have 3000 hours on this game, so definitely not biased against indies or something.)

Re: Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

#62

Post by larusso »

When ever I hear and see Mono Game I think back at the time I decided to dig a bit into XNA. I was a huge Xbox 360 fan and liked the idea of the indie platform they tried to setup. At the time the decision moving from Flash was either XNA in c# or Unity. Back then Unity used JS as a scripting engine. I wanted nothing to do with that. I also thought that MS is a saver bet. Well XNA is dead but the legacy lives on in parts in MonoGame. Unity well, would have been a better choice. But in end I had to work with Unity anyways be it not as a game developer implementing game logic.

Re: Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

#63

Post by didip »

juujian wrote: post #2

I don't want to assume, but I don't recollect any contributions of that magnitude from large studios (spare Valve). This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.

Because no middle managers will get promoted for doing this. All large corporate structures are the same: What's the incentive for the mini warlords to expand their mini empire? Nothing else is worth doing (to them).

Re: Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

#64

Post by PurpleRamen »

pwdisswordfishy wrote: post #26
doug_life wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“In Feb. 2024, Stardew Valley reached 30 million copies sold, and if we assume each copy sold for $15, that means that the game could have generated a revenue of $450 million. A modest 10 percent profit margin puts ConcernedApe’s earnings at $45 million, a number that is likely to increase in the future.” Source: https://dotesports.com/stardew-valley/news/how-much-money-di...

Why would 1 unit of this game have a "profit margin" of 10%? It's a video game. He's not selling canned goods.

Besides tax and the store's cut, the games also regularly sales and prices-changes. So you can't just extrapolate the price today with the amount of units sold and assume this to be the revenue.

Re: Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

#65

Post by mjg2 »

raincole wrote: post #55
mjg2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call anything Epic Games does charity: it's all empire expansion for them.

So? What Valve does isn't charity either. It's weird that you even mention this word.

Why is Valve's behavior relevant? I mention charity because that's what donations are. It's no secret Epic Games follows Microsoft's patterns for control of the industry.

Re: Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

#66

Post by orthoxerox »

barrenko wrote: post #49

A true Christmas story! Somewhat unrelated, could someone provide insight into the following - "MonoGame is a "bring your own tools" kind of framework, which means that it provides the building blocks to build your own engine and tools, but it isn't quite an engine itself. If you are expecting a scene editor (like Unity or Unreal), MonoGame is not that. If you love coding and understanding how things work under the h…

Yes, this is basically correct. When you start writing a game with MonoGame, all you get is basically a class with two methods, Update() and Draw() that MonoGame will be calling in a loop, plus a bunch of libraries for input, graphics, audio, content loading etc. you can use in your code. It's a step beyond something like bare raylib or SDL2, but it's a far cry from Unreal, which lets you think in terms of game entities from the very start: "here's the map, here's where the player will spawn, here, add some buildings and you can run around them".

With MonoGame/XNA/FNA, LOVE2D, libGDX, HaxeFlixel you are getting a bunch of tools instead, which is probably not bad if you like coding and your game doesn't fit into one of existing popular genres.

Re: Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

#67

Post by Wowfunhappy »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #43
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A winning lottery ticket would have an even better return on investment. Good luck with that business strategy. (To be clear, Stardew Valley is a great game. But "making a breakout indie game" really does feel akin to winning the lottery to me, even if the game is fundamentally great.)

Your chances are much more higher building your own game than playing the lottery endlessly. You forget that guy who made Stardew Valley had to self-teach everything he knew, till he got to the point he quit his full time job. I don't see in what universe you have a better chance to win the lottery, than to build a successful indie game if you truly put your heart into it. Some of the greatest inventions didn't come…

The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.

If you want to create indie games—and you can make it work without quitting your day job—go for it! But I don't think it would be smart for EA or Ubisoft to, like, stop making big-budget games and make indie games instead. If you can make a breakout hit, you can make a huge profit—but you have to make a breakout hit, and that comes down to a lot of luck.

---

Now, I do think it would make sense for EA/Ubisoft to try more mid-budget releases, which explore something new instead of continuing a 10+ year franchise. A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the publishers were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped? Although caveat, I also haven't been following gaming as closely as I once did.

Re: Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

#68

Post by lostmsu »

mpeg wrote: post #6
juujian wrote: post #2

I don't want to assume, but I don't recollect any contributions of that magnitude from large studios (spare Valve). This indy developer (is that label fair?) is putting AAA studios to shame.

Stardew is probably one of the most (if not the most) popular game ever made with MonoGame AAA studios don't really use MonoGame.

Second would be Terraria (originally made for XNA).

Re: Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

#69

Post by vunderba »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #32
jasonlotito wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it incredibly rare? Yes. It's incredibly rare. And suggesting otherwise is silly. Go ahead. Compare all the indie games released and see how often they succeed. Sure, you can find successful ones, but you are ignoring those that do not succeed. There is a name for that, you know—survivorship bias.

I'm not claiming it's every indie game I'm saying its not quite as rare as you suggest, I look at new releases on Steam all the time, there's less indie games than you think being released. More than there probably should be, but its not like tens of thousands a day or week or even in a month. Its about 800 a month. That's rare if anything, not "incredibly rare"

Indie games (which is just a tag you can add to your game) notwithstanding - the number of games released per month appears to be closer to double that.

https://steamdb.info/stats/releases

Re: Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

#70

Post by throwaway638637 »

jasongill wrote: post #17
selfawareMammal wrote: post #3

How much money does he have in order to make such a big donation? Has stardew valley made that much?

Stardew Valley is in the top 5 selling indie games of all time, with 50 million units sold. It's owned and run entirely by one person (the donor in OP's link) - he ended his relationship with a (small) games publisher a few years ago, and runs everything himself.

Does this mean he does the mobile games himself now? I remember he had outsourced those for a while.
Post reply on HN