06 Mar, 2012, arholly wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
Hello:
I was wondering, with a number of people on here who are designing their own codebases, why do people not take advantage of thinks like Kickstart to help fund things like servers, paying yourself for development, etc… It has worked for other programs and games (I think the rogue game ADOM used kickstart for something as an example), so why not a custom mud-base?

I believe you cannot use it for things like any of the DIKU bases or things like that, correct?

Arholly
06 Mar, 2012, plamzi wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
arholly said:
Hello:
I was wondering, with a number of people on here who are designing their own codebases, why do people not take advantage of thinks like Kickstart to help fund things like servers, paying yourself for development, etc… It has worked for other programs and games (I think the rogue game ADOM used kickstart for something as an example), so why not a custom mud-base?

I believe you cannot use it for things like any of the DIKU bases or things like that, correct?

Arholly


Hi,

Just by glancing at some of the relevant sections of the Kickstarter terms of use, I can tell that they're pretty hands-off about the nature of your project, i. e., it doesn't have to be a commercial project to be posted on their site. So, in writing a proposal for a Kickstart project, it's up to you to be in compliance with the terms set out by whatever IP you wish to make use of and they're not going to police you.

Now, the part where it gets interesting is, the DikuMUD license prohibits any use of their code to turn "direct profit", and further, KaVir can provide some choice quotes from members of the team who say that donations are very much included in the profit category. Kickstarter allows for donations and purchases of services or items contingent upon project completion, and it seems that either of those is considered profit by those who wrote the Diku license.

If you want to be sure that you're in compliance, you'd have to design your proposal in a way that does not enable you to solicit money directly by using the Diku code. For instance, your project can be an interface for DikuMUD(s) (using all-original code) or the design and maintenance of a website for a game that happens to be Diku-rivative. But I don't think you can say "For this project, I'm going to take a Diku codebase and customize it into something unique. Donations welcome."

As in, you can say that, and you probably won't be sued as you raise a bit of money, but you'd definitely be making yourself an easy target of ostracism and criticism by the MUD dev community.
06 Mar, 2012, Idealiad wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
Probably because there's a tradition in muds of the solo hobby developer doing things in their spare time, notwithstanding a few companies like IRE. Moreover there's only a few mud developers who have the name recognition that would inspire people to give them money. Especially for a mud, where a proper game takes years to make, it would take a lot to get me to fund a Kickstarter campaign for it (and I've funded 10 or so Kickstarter campaigns).
06 Mar, 2012, KaVir wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
plamzi said:
Now, the part where it gets interesting is, the DikuMUD license prohibits any use of their code to turn "direct profit", and further, KaVir can provide some choice quotes from members of the team who say that donations are very much included in the profit category.

This is what Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt has said on the subject of donations:

Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt said:
I feel it is important that i make clear how i see the limits of the licence; You should know i am not against donations as such, and he may sell his merchandise as he pleases, but he may not use the game directly for this. The way i usually define this is if the players get some tangible modification within the game for their donations. Then it becomes commercialized. They pay for a service that is within the game.

I have no wish, nor any legal background for stopping donations made from commercials on the website, that offer no compensation game-wise. Nor have i any wish for preventing people selling merchandise on their website, that is related to the game (titled tshirts, mousepads etc..) .. in fact i recommend that you get your money this way.

Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt said:
I just want to make clear where exactly the licence applies. And that is of course where using the sourcecode we have supplied, or sourcecode derived from our work.

If you give people any in-game benefits for their donations, you are in fact giving a service for the money you have rescieved. That is a commercial transaction, and thus you are commercializing our work. This we object to.

What i wanted to make clear, is that legally and morally we have no control of what you do, that you do not use our work for. Thus, if you want to sell mousepads and whatever from your website, we will not object.

If people want to donate money to you, personally, without having any services rendered using our software, we will not object to this. But if you use our software to render services for money or goods you rescieve, this we object to, as you are then commercializing our software. That we object to.
06 Mar, 2012, Runter wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
I think it could work, but I personally would never fund a kickstarter project that was to use a dikurivative regardless of the license.

Oh, and it should be mentioned that kickstarter generally runs on a pay to perk model. You pay now, get exclusive perks later. That does sort of sound like from KaVir's quotes something that would be against the spirit of the license there at least.
06 Mar, 2012, plamzi wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
Idealiad said:
Moreover there's only a few mud developers who have the name recognition that would inspire people to give them money…


I'd go a bit further and say that there are none. To me it seems that Kickstarter is very much about tangibles, or humanitarian projects, and they have to be extremely unique in nature. I've seen people with long track records in mobile game development (a much much hotter field) get crumbs. Can't see how any MUD will get more than a handful of followers/friends to give negligible amounts.
06 Mar, 2012, Dean wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
You'd need a very, very good sell to get anything at all from a MUD-centric kickstarter.

@plamzi: I would suggest there a number of reasons why mobile games get very little in general on kickstarter. :tongue:
06 Mar, 2012, arholly wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
Thanks KaVir, that clears that up. And it was more of a point of curiosity than anything. There are a number of software related projects there, so I was wondering why the community didn't try and take advantage of it.
06 Mar, 2012, Tyche wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
I thought kickstart was for new and creative projects. ;-)
07 Mar, 2012, Runter wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
plamzi said:
Idealiad said:
Moreover there's only a few mud developers who have the name recognition that would inspire people to give them money…


I'd go a bit further and say that there are none. To me it seems that Kickstarter is very much about tangibles, or humanitarian projects, and they have to be extremely unique in nature. I've seen people with long track records in mobile game development (a much much hotter field) get crumbs. Can't see how any MUD will get more than a handful of followers/friends to give negligible amounts.


I've seen "interactive function" companies developing various low tech games get quite hefty sums on kickstarter to develop games based on broad ideas. If you have a genre enough people are interested, and pitched it the right way with a good enough presentation I think it's possible… especially since a large group of people spend on kickstarter in principle alone. You just have to find people who support retro things. Which isn't very hard considering how many hipsters there are on kickstarter.
07 Mar, 2012, Idealiad wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
@plamzi, Runter is correct. For example, Andrew Plotkin, an IF writer, earned over $30k to leave his job to make an iOS text adventure. A recent project to create a sort of play-by-post RPG, not too different than a RP mud, earned $18k (this was the Written World).

There definitely are people in the mud community I would give money to if they started a campaign. I would fund based on what I know of their history, their previous projects and so on, and what their proposed project would be. Again, there aren't many of these people, but they're out there.
07 Mar, 2012, Runter wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
* interactive fiction
30 Apr, 2012, Nathan wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
That's precisely the problem, I think the whole point of kickstarter is that people are funding you based on what is promised not whether they've analyzed you for results.

If you started with a solid codebase and a theme people wanted to play that wasn't readily available that would help. Ideally, you'd need to innovate beyond the norm, if you can make some part of your game particularly interesting, enough to merit playing it just for that aspect then you might have a chance.

It would help a lot if you already had something to show in the case of Kickstarter. Evidence that you have your feet on the path to success is somewhat important.

Idealiad said:
@plamzi, Runter is correct. For example, Andrew Plotkin, an IF writer, earned over $30k to leave his job to make an iOS text adventure. A recent project to create a sort of play-by-post RPG, not too different than a RP mud, earned $18k (this was the Written World).

There definitely are people in the mud community I would give money to if they started a campaign. I would fund based on what I know of their history, their previous projects and so on, and what their proposed project would be. Again, there aren't many of these people, but they're out there.
28 May, 2013, duwnel wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
Having been involved in a few Kickstarter projects, there's definitely something interesting with the whole thing, especially given KaVir's comments from Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt.

Running a campaign on Kickstarter (specifically) requires that the rewards for involvement be in some way tangible. For instance, if you're producing software, you could promise a copy of the application. You could not, on the other hand, offer a code to unlock a feature of the application (though you could bundle this with the aforementioned copy of the application). Since, in the case of a MU* in which the developer is hosting the application, there'd be no way to incentivize donation by means of in-game bonuses. Therefore, you might be limited to offering things like mouse pads, custom t-shirts, etc. Or you might get creative, and have someone create a small comic book one-shot based on your game world in a limited run. Now, consider this statement:

Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt said:
What i wanted to make clear, is that legally and morally we have no control of what you do, that you do not use our work for. Thus, if you want to sell mousepads and whatever from your website, we will not object.


Not saying you should, not saying you shouldn't. Just consider both sides. I think the best argument against a Dikurivative kickstarter campaign is that it's just not fresh; if I saw Diku, I'd probably just ignore it because, after a while, they mostly just taste like chicken.

Nathan said:
That's precisely the problem, I think the whole point of kickstarter is that people are funding you based on what is promised not whether they've analyzed you for results.


Absolutely right. The huge deciding factor is what comes with your donation. There's no risk of funding something that doesn't have a chance of making it, so its success is a minimal factor in people deciding whether or not to support it. Instead, there are two factors that determine investment in angel funding type schemes: belief in the project as a good thing (that is, that you believe that it is a project that should be funded), and belief that the reward for the donation is worth the investment. The former can be boosted by name/reputation, but can also be increased through advertising, and word of mouth (Social Networking is huge in the success of kickstarter programs). If I have a facebook profile like The Drudge Report, which at the time of writing has 98,064 followers, and I want to run a kickstarter campaign for $20,000, I need to convince 1/5th of my followers to donate $1. I can double that amount by offering my first-tier reward at $2, and here is where the latter comes into play.

When you have a first-tier reward under $5, you're looking at a cup of coffee from that shop that shows up on every corner. So, compare your offering to that if you would rather have your offering than a cup of coffee, it's probably going to get the low-level donors (the ones who pop in and donate a dollar or two) to cough up that extra couple of bucks for your cause. But let's say it's not something that you can bear to give up for just a few dollars maybe it costs you more than that to make. @craigmod took a rather interesting view and correlated the data from a selection of Kickstarter programs to determine the optimal reward levels for their Kickstarter campaign "Art Space Tokyo". Their data seemed to indicate optimal levels at $25, $50, $100, $250, and $500, concluding that "people don't mind paying $50 or more for a project they love."

Nathan said:
If you started with a solid codebase and a theme people wanted to play that wasn't readily available that would help. Ideally, you'd need to innovate beyond the norm, if you can make some part of your game particularly interesting, enough to merit playing it just for that aspect then you might have a chance.


You have to know your audience. Let's face it this is an old-school medium, and we don't necessarily want to push this as something better than, for instance, the latest PS3 release. We can, however, push a project like this as a nostalgic throwback. Consider Yacht Club Games' Shovel Knight Kickstar... for instance, which was billed as a "Ground Breaking Love Letter to 8 Bits".

Kickstarter is a tool, and the success of a MU* project is like any yet unattempted or yet unsuccessful project it's only as good as you make it. Take advantage of every aspect of the site, advertise, and offer good swag. And if all that doesn't work, promise 5% forward onto another project if you exceed your goal by 10%. Kicking it forward is a huge boost, especially to games related projects.
30 May, 2013, Ssolvarain wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
The Kickstarter for a Planescape: Torment sequel hit its goal in what… a few hours?

I guess it just depends on the project. Some people are willing to shell out some cash for old-school stuff, if they remember it fondly enough.
26 Jun, 2013, dnicolai wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
I have thought of a simple work-around for this if you REALLY want to kickstart something. Start up your own video game company and kickstart that. You can host whatever you want and so long as you make a few "real" video games then there is really nothing that they can do. You're just hosting your game on your server that you also use for business, that's totally legit.

You can even set up a kickstarter for your MUD if you're kickstarting a MUD Hosting Server. In fact, that might be a great way to go, because then you can host your MUD as much as you like ;)
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