Discussion about funding and promoting Gideros

Ninjadoodle · June 2016

Hi guys

There has been a lot of talk about donations/payments/tips etc. for Gideros releases, hiring staff, specific features and so on.

While the idea of donations seems like a good one, the problem is that only a few people will actually take part.

It is then left up to the few people who believe in the software, to help make it grow.

I believe that this is not really sustainable, and not sure whether a system like this will last.

I understand that many of you will not feel the same way, but personally, I would be happy for Gideros to be on some kind of subscription model, in order to support it's development.

There could be many options -

- Set fee for each new release
- Yearly subscription price
- One of payment for the software

and so on.

If this is not an option, then there is always subscribing or paying for specific export features.

For example, you can download Gideros for free, but if you want to export to HTML5 - you have to buy the exporter and pay a yearly subscription to support development.

I believe that if something like this isn't put in place, it will be left up to a handful of individuals to support the software/exporters, and keep it up to date. If those few individuals choose not to donate - things will fall apart.

Lately I've been sort of undecided about whether I want to continue with Gideros, because I don't know where its heading, and I don't believe the donation system will last. These are just my feelings on the issue, and I don't mean this post to send negative. I really just had to get this off my chest, so hope you guys understand.

If you have any thought on this, I would love to hear them

antix · June 2016

I won't hold it against you @Ninjadoodle

If you are going to have a subscription based service, you're going to have to have a bigger team with members dedicated to maintain the website, documentation, tutorial base, fixing bugs (quickly) etc. It's really a giant onion when you start peeling back all the layers.. so complex. You also have to have a large enough subscriber base to support all of those maintainers financially.

In my opinion there are a lot of things that need to be addressed before Gideros can be sold as a subscription based service. I really don't have any answers, maybe somebody with a few more cards in their deck does?

SinisterSoft · June 2016

A subscription service was tried (originally) re the licence system and it didn't work.

A few of us need extra bits in Gideros so we enhance those bits and because it's open source they are included in the official release. I myself so far have only added a couple of minor things, such as the swapping of sprite pointers so that you can sort the draw order more easily, I also added a LuaJIT patch that is an enhancement of what Arturs (ar2rsawseen) and Atilim did a while back - the main thing I seem to have been doing recently is nag people like Nico (hgy29) for things to enhance what he is adding (loads btw) so they are more useful with relation to programming games. You can thank me for nagging him to add the new Pixel sprite type and also for the auto yielding in the new fake thread system (coming in the next update) - no other Lua games system has this feature and it is REALLY, REALLY good. So, a lot of what is being added is free.

John is doing a lot of hard work promoting Gideros (I've been to an event and he was there), he is also updating the documentation, adding video tutorials, etc... that is mainly what any subscription money is going to as he has given up at least 2 days per week to dedicate to Gideros.

I've suggested that John writes a couple of Gideros books (eg a beginners guide and an API tutorial), these could be self published on Amazon for a profit - so donations don't matter as much.

I also suggested to John that there could be a version of Gideros that runs faster - using optimised code from the advanced Arm and Intel compilers - these can produce code that runs a lot faster than standard open source compilers. But would people be willing to pay for this faster code?

Another thing could be edge build subscriptions, eg - an edge build is made on the Friday of each week - the main build every 2 months or so. You pay to have the features faster. Would that work?

antix · June 2016

John is a flipping machine! He does such a fantastic job, as do the others who beaver away behind the scenes.

Having to pay for faster running code is an interesting solution but most likely wouldn't affect that many people. Correct me if I'm wrong but most products made with Gideros that I have seen don't really tax devices enough to warrant paying for more speed. Larger demanding apps would however benefit from this kind of compilation fee.

I quite like the idea of having newer features faster, this is pretty much what the kickstarters were doing right?

keszegh · June 2016

me personally am more eager to support now that it's open source. before that my policy was that i pay for it whenever i start to have profit from my apps. as it remains a hobby, there is no real profit, so i did not pay. however, the first kickstarter added desktop export which i've been waiting for a lot, so i paid happily. and i supported the second kickstarter although i did not need html that much, and i think it's partly due to the community feeling of being open-source. this made me pay way more than i would have ever paid for any non open-source software.

so overall if you want to support gideros, you can donate easily, and i think others will too as it's evident for everybody that the work is supported by them and not from some abstract invisible money (as in the case of startups). of course the money would be not much without the enthusiasm of the core developers. let me thank for their efforts.

keszegh · June 2016

btw we just need to spread the word and expand the number of people using gideros. that seems to be the best strategy in long term.

Ninjadoodle · June 2016

I agree 100% - the guys working behind the scenes are doing an amazing job!

What I'm afraid of tho, is what happens if a couple of the really hard workers abandon the project (since they are not getting paid for it).

There is really only a few people doing most of the work, and from what I've read - the donations are not really where they should be, in order to keep someone like @john26 employed (please correct me if I'm wrong).

As far as the HTML5 export goes for example, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed, if it is to be used for commercial purposes.

The only person working on that particular exporter is @hgy29. If he happens to not have time to update the exporter, things will not move forward. This is inevitable as he's only one person and working very hard.

I really think that there need to be some form of payments, otherwise it will be up to a few people to pay for features to be kept up to date. The same thing happened with the Kickstarter. One particular individual donated most of the money needed to push it over the line ( I think it was more then half the asking price).

Obviously, some features can't be updated for free, so I still think that a good idea would be to charge for extras / exporters / plugins - with the core product being free.

I don't know what the answer is, just throwing around ideas

Please don't get me wrong, Gideros ROCKS, but as much as I love all these extra features being added - I don't think a one of Kickstarter fund is a good idea.

Case and point - HTML5 export. As much as I love the idea of having this extra feature, this needs to be continuously funded and maintained. If this doesn't happen - it will become unusable for anything but doing some quick online tests.

Scirra (Construct 2) for example, releases new bug fixes for their engine every 2 weeks - just to stay on top of the ever changing browser scene (It used to be weekly I think, but they're building a new engine).

Please don't hate me haha, for posting this, I just have some concerns and wanted to talk about them.

I LOVE Gideros, and I believe that there really isn't as many people donating as people think.

talis · June 2016

@Ninjadoodle the same risks apply to the paid version also.
What happens if the subscription scenario will not work and it will not cover the expenses.
This model has already been tried but of course it doesn't mean that it will fail again.
What i try to say is, there are risks in every business model . Though there are common tasks for us in all of those business models too, if we don't want it to fail again;
-Donate, support, buy, spread the word or help in your own possible way...
As far as i saw this community is already doing a good job in all those.

Hope that this time it will work and we will continue to receive those marvelous features.
=D> =D> =D>
Edited : Hit the post button by mistake.

SinisterSoft · June 2016

How may people here think that paying for earlier (maybe not fully tested) releases would be something they would do?

Don't forget that the latest update will be 2 months after the last one - but one of the bugs (related to rendertexture) was fixed back in April.

If so, how regular would you want these updates? Each friday or every other friday? How much would you be willing to pay for something like that?

pie · June 2016

I think that if we act as a community this model won't fail.
I know that we have to rely on the availability and kindness of the core team (thanks guys) but if we all do our part (ie. keeping the forum alive answering to questions we can answer, spreading the word and supporting the core team with money and/or additional features if we have the skills to do so) we will continue to grow (as user base and as a community).
And who knows, maybe there is some other potential member of the core team waiting to be found around the world.

It's a matter of faith, but as soon as Gideros was open sourced I noticed a lot of new users - even "the crown competitor" had to change its business model - I don't know if that was related, but it happened..

Unfortunately it's hard to make a living out of mobile apps, but this is not Gideros'fault.
My support in terms of money will be greater if I ever publish a killer app

. In the meanwhile I will continue to support Gideros with everything I can spare - even if I could have the same software for free.

Looking at construct license pricing, I have to say that if we all pay yearly the same fee we may be able to "hire" the core team full time.. and maybe have a new release every week

but at this stage unfortunately I - and I suppose many of us - cannot afford it.

hgy29 · June 2016

In my opinion gideros needs a larger active user base, by active I mean those who invest themselves here on the forum and occasionnaly donate.

Last two kickstarters proved us that even if gideros seems to be used by thousands of people (by accounting downloads or total number of people registered on the forum), only a few of you (say 50 or so) actually animate gideros forum. And our job as maintainers would be meaningless without you. I really appreciate seeing all your posts, they make this forum the nicest I've ever been registered to. Thank you all for this.

As for my investment into gideros project itself, I mainly add things I actually need for my company's projects, mostly because I code for gideros on my work time. But not only: I became so much fond of the tool and you are such a good community that I somehow feel like I want to help whenever I can. When this can be done on spare time, then no problem, but when it requires much more time, well...

I spent a lot of time on a few recent gideros features: 3D and HTML5 being among the biggest. At least I had a little compensation for HTML5 part (while I am at it, the biggest investor was my wife, so actually me in the end, I felt like it had to be funded no matter what given what I had already done).

But back to the first point: with a broader audience, we would have more people ready to help, either in code or in donations.

totebo · June 2016

I agree that the more users is the way forward, regardless of how monetisation works. One way of getting more users is showing off kick-as games made in Gideros, that look good and have made it big in the app stores. Maybe with a dev story behind them. I think success stories are important to show new users who haven't heard of Gideros before.

The tool itself is bloody brilliant, so I reckon the biggest challenge is PR rather than technical.

SinisterSoft · June 2016

If a standard logo was available, that you could display maybe in the front end if you like - would anyone here display it in their games?

totebo · June 2016

For sure. Maybe the Gideros branding needs a facelift?

SinisterSoft · June 2016

@totebo - you seem like a good artist - maybe you could submit something?

antix · June 2016

If you are going to do something like that then maybe it would be good if there was say a predefined class that you could include in your game and have SceneManager show that first.

I don't know what's wrong with the existing logo, I like it

SinisterSoft · June 2016

Maybe different styles of the same logo - or it split into parts so it can be animated together or something?

antix · June 2016

Does it need to be anything other than some simple "powered by Gideros image" with the website showing at the bottom? Really the whole thing could just be an image couldn't it?

grotly · June 2016

There are 2 things that can help Gideros become better known at the moment (besides spreading the word, obviously):

1. Rebranding (website, logo, maybe a motto). A professional look always helps.

2. Few examples of games "made with Gideros", but I mean really good looking games, with killer graphics and a good story, preferably with good rankings in stores. 2-3 games like that presented on the website's main page and spread around the key forums will surely give Gideros a boost. There are many good games made by gideronians, but not perfect games. Or at least if they exist, they are not visible. Gideros needs a few perfect games to market the engine.

If these 2 points are done, the rest will hopefully come (who knows, maybe an investor). People need to see and feel first what Gideros can do by looking at the games, then by looking at the docs.

I remember the demo projects from GregBUG for his particle engine, those examples were almost perfect for marketing the particle engine. Something like that is needed for Gideros.

Number 1 is easily doable, but for 2, we need Markus Persson or Andreas Illiger

antix · June 2016

I personally don't think Gideros needs to rebrand. The website so needs work but still looks comparable with other framework websites. The logo is fine and I personally find those moto tagline things corny.

Great games made with Gideros with AAA graphics and stuff will come, it's a matter of time. I've been honing my skills with Lua and Gideros for the last 8 months and hope to create something great in the foreseeable future. I'm nearly ready to find a graphics artist for my project so things are really ramping up for me right now. @totebo is working on something that sounds pretty darn cool, maybe it will put Gideros in the spotlight.

SinisterSoft · June 2016

I was thinking of the components of the logo gfx - so we can do something interesting with them re animation...

john26 · June 2016

Dear All, thanks very much for taking the time to write these detailed and interesting posts about Gideros and how we can make money from it. It really shows we have a dedicated group of users which is very motivating!

I think it's worth putting some numbers on the donations. Since 2016.4 was released on 11 April, the total donations were £318 and 22 people have given donations. I'd like to thank everyone who has made a donation!

Another statistic is the number of Gideros downloads and here the news is good. Gideros 2016.4 has been downloaded over 4200 times according to Github. You can see the statistics here:

https://jsfiddle.net/ar2rsawseen/n9ffvktL/

You can see the trend is definitely more people using Gideros which is very exciting.

So what to make of these figures? Well £318 is not much, in fact it's just enough to hire a C++ programmer to work for a single day -- and that is the total Gideros income for 2 months so we're looking at about £160 per month. So clearly this is not nearly enough to pay anything like the going rate for a part time C++ programmer. But my original aim was more modest, to pay only the minimum wage in the UK for one person working 40% part time (I am working on Gideros 2 days per week). This equates to £500 per month so the donation of £160 per month is much lower even than minimum wage. I'd be better off working in McDonald's by a factor of 3!

But I am not discouraged by this! This was always going to be a voyage of discovery, it was never likely we would immediately find the winning formula to make money. New businesses rarely make a profit in the first year or so and many take on considerable debt to begin with. I have at least not borrowed any money though my income is obviously less due to doing part time in my science job.

Also I feel I'm learning a lot. I'm definitely not an expert on Gideros yet, I've actually been spending a good chunk of my time learning parts I didn't know before and just improving my computer science skills in general.

It seems there is considerable scope to get more donations. That headline figure of 4200 downloads would imply only 22/4200 = 0.5 % of people who download Gideros make a donation. In fact I think the number of unique users is far less than 4200 as it includes repeat downloads. Still even if every Gideros user is downloading 10 times that's still only a 5% donate rate. If we can get that figure up, and perhaps increase the average donation too, we can improve the income significantly.

Over the next few months we intend to try various things to encourage more people to donate. One idea I had is to have a "thermometer" graphic on the donate page which fills up as people donate. That way people can see how many donations have already been made and so add to it if it's not much. Other options include having a download button in the installer and in Gideros Studio itself.

So that's the story with voluntary donations and there's plenty of scope to adjust how that works. What of other options? First it must be remembered that Gideros is open source so we can never control it as much as a proprietary code. Nor would we want to! We are all dedicated to the open source philosophy. There's nothing in open source licenses to prevent us charging for the binaries but of course, having bought a binary any user could redistribute it either free or for a charge. In practice, I think this would be quite rare as most users would want to obtain the code directly from giderosmobile.com rather than some other website.

My own thought on this (if we go down that route) would be to charge only for the most recent version and make older versions free. As soon as a new version comes out the previous one becomes free and so on. That means new Gideros users can access a free versions (and newbies won't notice the difference compared to the latest version).

If people really do want the latest version for free, they can always compile it themselves from source which will always be available on Github. But compiling Gideros is complex and it really doesn't make much sense to save, say, £10 but putting in days of effort, so I think this would be rare.

It's not a bad idea. What do people think?

Another option is subscriptions but I'm not so keen on this. When Gideros was commercial, it had a subscription model but most people just used the free version, the only disadvantage being a splash screen (which many actually liked!). Also, I prefer to give users something directly for their money, so they pay specifically for 2016.4, say, rather than just paying every month and sometimes not getting anything in return. If we don't release, it makes sense you don't need to pay! (just my opinion, I guess some people would prefer the convenience of a subscription, please let us know!)

And for subscriptions there is the extra hassle of licence managers which are probably not going to work with open source anyway. (it would be perfectly legal and ethical for someone to distribute a version without the licence manager -- and there might be sufficient motivation to do so)

Other options include things like nag screens which go away when you pay or some sort of feature restriction until you pay (crippled software). Again I think these things don't fit very well with open source and they are complex to administer and what do you cripple?

It's worth comparing the money from donations with what we got from Kickstarter. For the WP8/desktop Kickstarter we raised £4000. But that was 6 months work for a nominal 2 people (in fact many more helped) so works out at £333 per month per worker. Still low but higher than the donations so far. So funding for particular new features may be the way to go rather than donations. In fact, I think I would not use Kickstarter again as they take a substantial fee and did not do much to earn it! They provided us with no publicity and essentially all the money came from you, our active users in the forum. So we might set up crowdfunding right here on the website, equivalent to how Kickstarter works.

Then there is also support. If people have particular problems, bugs that need fixed quickly either in their Lua code or in Gideros itself (or a new feature), we could invite them to fund one of us directly. We could then charge the going rate of £300 per day for a C++ developer.

Finally there is Patreon. My understanding of this is that it is for creators rather than creations so I would put myself on Patreon as an "artist" (!) and invite people to fund me so I can work on Gideros. This is a bit different than funding Gideros directly and is not the same thing as a subscription to Gideros (nor a Kickstarter). This could coexist with Gideros donations perhaps.

So these are some of the options we may try out in time. Please let me know what you think of each. However, it's important we don't want to confuse people by changing too quickly. Over the next few months to a year we will stick with donations and try to fine tune it to get more people to donate. And we'll continue to try to expand the user base which may be what will really bring success.

totebo · June 2016

I like the idea of a donate button in Gideros Studio; in the menus, on the export screen, everywhere it makes sense to have one. Visibility shouldn't be an excuse for people not to support Gideros.

I'm not sure about paying for only the new version. Gideros is so fully featured already, that there might not be a major incentive to get the latest version. In fact, it may be an additional reason to wait one version, apart from making sure the latest build is stable.

Gideros is a great tool and I think it's worth paying for. I liked the idea of paying for each export platform. The free version could include only local testing, and each additional platform could be paid for. This would make sense to me, since each platform is a different way of monetising the game. I don't think the risk of someone recompiling Gideros without these hooks is something to worry about. I'm guessing most Gideros developers, including me, use Gideros because it's fast and abstracted, and wouldn't have any real incentive to spend time editing Gideros to avoid paying. I can spend that time making a great game instead!

SinisterSoft · June 2016

I think that a printed API guide available on Amazon would be a good seller. Plus people who want the latest version of the API guide could give their old version away to new programmers or libraries/school computer clubs. The programming guide could also be finished off to bring in income. Amazon has a self- publishing system.

Is there any reason why the printed API guide isn't available?

I also think that people may subscribe to regular edge-builds - so they get new features faster than the stable release.

antix · June 2016

For a printed API guide to be released it would need to be complete

SinisterSoft · June 2016

Yes - there must be a way for (when the website API is up to date) of harvesting the data and formatting it in form suitable for a book.

antix · June 2016

Even a not so nice format would be okay as long as all the material is accurate and present. I fondly remember my old RKM's from Amiga days. Isn't the website API Reference section generated automatically already?

Maybe we need to start looking for a format that everybody is reasonably happy with. That means going forth and looking at how others present their API manuals I suppose.

SinisterSoft · June 2016

The actual documentation has to be written manually, but it's held in a database (I think).

I loved the old Amiga hardware manuals along with the Motorola 68k reference manual, the good old days!

antix · June 2016

I long for those days again

Which database is the documentation stored in (if it is)?

hgy29 · June 2016

I'd love to see a monthly Gideros magazine, with code snippets, tutorials, advanced topic, success stories and so on in it, like the one we had in the 90's about atari and amiga. I used to read STMag, in which we had Dave Small talking about its experience as a hacker and the development of its Spectre GCR emulator.

Anyone could write a little something to go in it, and I'd be ready to pay for each issue.

john26 · June 2016

Actually I have already written a 500 page reference manual. It was a reward for the WP8/desktop kickstarter. I could produce a new edition to reflect the many changes that have happened since. The manual was made by exporting the online reference in LaTeX format. However, I had to make a LOT of fixes as the exporter didn't get everything right. To create a new edition I'd probably just alter the LaTeX manually.

Here are some extracts from the book

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3dv2jsluc6j6926/chap1and2.pdf?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jh4vi5ohcj1axl4/contents.pdf?dl=0

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