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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 retiremen

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 do, I would not be surprised to see DF at $100M in 2023.

kilgnad 4y ago
Nah. DF became popular because it's free. That is a huge part of the allure.
- opportune 4y ago
  Highly agree, if DF just came out of nowhere and launched their old versions before having enough cachet/community to get studios to help them get it polished, it would at best become a cult classic years later, but most likely just be completely ignored. Without all the slowly increasing cultural awareness and community building leading it to becoming de facto “the most complicated game that is also a simulation and art” it just looks like a really complicated, technologically anachronistic game for neckbeards. Which it still is, but it’s had time to build awareness that it’s also exceptionally interesting, and that that niche isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Also they wouldn’t have been able to keep it a single-person programming project focused almost entirely on expanding the core games features and simulation aspects if they released earlier. Way more time would have been spent on productionization and getting it good-enough rather than done, and more hands would be involved, making it less of a passion/art project of an inventor, and just a regular old commercial endeavor.
- bombcar 4y ago
  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).
  - pixl97 4y ago
    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.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      And even so Tarn has been pretty responsive to major bugs (and even minor ones) - but it is really nice to have the expectations set.
  - kilgnad 4y ago
    The free part was super important because, if the buyer doesn't know much about the game, those text graphics are a huge deal breaker when combined with payment.
rob74 4y ago
OTOH, if they would have asked money for it from the beginning, it may never have gotten as far as it did. The market for a commercial game with text graphics was pretty small even back in 2006...
- criley2 4y ago
  Minecraft released in 2009 with a price of $13 a copy. How'd that work out for them? I am a bit older as a gamer so to hear that "2006 the market was small" is crazy to me! I grew up playing MUDs and believe me, the market for text games in 2006 was a lot bigger than it is today! From my perspective, monetizing the kids from the 80s/90s who loved text games with the best text game of all time as they turn 20s and 30s in the 2006... that's the best time in history to sell a text game. I think that as part of DF being monetized, the graphics would be replaced, as it was for Steam, and potentially had it been done in 2D back in the 2000s, they could have envisioned and scaled into a 3D implementation by now. Who knows!
  - ironSkillet 4y ago
    I get your argument about Bay12 potentially making more money had they commercialized earlier, but I think the comparison with Minecraft isn't so clean. DF is orders of magnitude less approachable than Minecraft, so there is not even a remote possibility of generating any kind of mass appeal to gamers.
    - criley2 4y ago
      Lack of accessibility is a design defect, one which I assume would be resolved as they grew and invested. Notch didn't make all the right calls either. Letting other people have some control is almost always a good thing.
  - poulpy123 4y ago
    1/ they obviously didn't do it for the money 2/ Minecraft is an extreme outlier 3/ how many 2006 games with ASCII interface and costing have been successful ?
xavxav 4y ago
> 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 it's previously un-commercial approach. It's a true labor of love and that shows in every aspect of the game.
- criley2 4y ago
  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.
  - mikrl 4y ago
    Minecraft is also stupidly accessible. The only dwarf fortress players I know IRL are also skilled with and interested in computers. Normies aren’t sinking 6 weeks (what it took me) to ramp up on DF, and certainly wouldn’t have in 2013
    - xipho 4y ago
      > stupidly accessible Don't underestimate what tiles do for a game in terms of (perceived) accessibility. Anecdotally my kids (under 11), who will almost certainly abandon the game after playing it, are demanding that we get it because they like what they are seeing, they like drama (dwarfs into zombies), they like building and crafting (infinite possibilities vs. MC). Now it's true that I've been talking about it, so they are feeding on my hype, but they are also genuinely intrigued by it. I think the viral potential of DF went way up with the recent release, it might not be completely unheard of as common amongst the broader gaming populace in the future.
  - croes 4y ago
    Minecraft was 2009 and had a graphical interface. I doubt that in 2006 a game with an ASCII-Interface would have been a great success if people had to pay for it.
rkachowski 4y ago
There are many games that monetised in 2006 and are not worth $100M. The indie gaming scene in 2006 was almost entirely freeware with a few exceptions. Indie games as a steam category - let alone industry - was unthinkable. Monetisation was essentially building a flash game to sell to an ad network, there's really no amount of industry game playing that could have been done.
program_whiz 4y ago
The major lesson is "don't make indie games if you want to make money". There are 34 games released per day on steam. Most will have revenue under $1000 (and probably most will have revenue below $100). Unless you have a talented team, marketing plan, and lots of capital you can burn for a gamble; or are willing to just do it for fun for years and don't care if it succeeds -- don't quit your job to make indie games. Otherwise you're playing Russian roulette. For every hollow knight, Dwarf Fortress, Celeste, there are 1000s of other titles you've never heard of.
- bombcar 4y ago
  To be fair, you'd have to somehow account for what percentage of those released each day are just shovelware crap. The actual "indie games" to look at would be the ones where talented people put time and effort into something. A vast majority of those will still fail, but then you have at least a true basis.
ineedasername 4y ago
2006 was pre-Minecraft territory. Monetizing DF at that point in time would have been highly unlikely. Also the game wasn’t built yet. Maybe they could have monetized earlier than this, but what does it matter? Maybe trying to monetized earlier would have killed the project or resulted in a game very different from today. Either way it doesn’t matter: there are different paths to success and not every one of them is an option for every game. DF found one though, and that’s what matters.
seanhunter 4y ago
> 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-NFQKMeCQiS8aM https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0sBhCMFBvPlF7wG7OH-N...

kilgnad 4y ago

Nah. DF became popular because it's free. That is a huge part of the allure.

opportune 4y ago
Highly agree, if DF just came out of nowhere and launched their old versions before having enough cachet/community to get studios to help them get it polished, it would at best become a cult classic years later, but most likely just be completely ignored. Without all the slowly increasing cultural awareness and community building leading it to becoming de facto “the most complicated game that is also a simulation and art” it just looks like a really complicated, technologically anachronistic game for neckbeards. Which it still is, but it’s had time to build awareness that it’s also exceptionally interesting, and that that niche isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Also they wouldn’t have been able to keep it a single-person programming project focused almost entirely on expanding the core games features and simulation aspects if they released earlier. Way more time would have been spent on productionization and getting it good-enough rather than done, and more hands would be involved, making it less of a passion/art project of an inventor, and just a regular old commercial endeavor.
bombcar 4y ago
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).
- pixl97 4y ago
  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.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    And even so Tarn has been pretty responsive to major bugs (and even minor ones) - but it is really nice to have the expectations set.
- kilgnad 4y ago
  The free part was super important because, if the buyer doesn't know much about the game, those text graphics are a huge deal breaker when combined with payment.

rob74 4y ago

OTOH, if they would have asked money for it from the beginning, it may never have gotten as far as it did. The market for a commercial game with text graphics was pretty small even back in 2006...

criley2 4y ago
Minecraft released in 2009 with a price of $13 a copy. How'd that work out for them? I am a bit older as a gamer so to hear that "2006 the market was small" is crazy to me! I grew up playing MUDs and believe me, the market for text games in 2006 was a lot bigger than it is today! From my perspective, monetizing the kids from the 80s/90s who loved text games with the best text game of all time as they turn 20s and 30s in the 2006... that's the best time in history to sell a text game. I think that as part of DF being monetized, the graphics would be replaced, as it was for Steam, and potentially had it been done in 2D back in the 2000s, they could have envisioned and scaled into a 3D implementation by now. Who knows!
- ironSkillet 4y ago
  I get your argument about Bay12 potentially making more money had they commercialized earlier, but I think the comparison with Minecraft isn't so clean. DF is orders of magnitude less approachable than Minecraft, so there is not even a remote possibility of generating any kind of mass appeal to gamers.
  - criley2 4y ago
    Lack of accessibility is a design defect, one which I assume would be resolved as they grew and invested. Notch didn't make all the right calls either. Letting other people have some control is almost always a good thing.
- poulpy123 4y ago
  1/ they obviously didn't do it for the money 2/ Minecraft is an extreme outlier 3/ how many 2006 games with ASCII interface and costing have been successful ?

xavxav 4y ago

> 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 it's previously un-commercial approach. It's a true labor of love and that shows in every aspect of the game.

criley2 4y ago
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.
- mikrl 4y ago
  Minecraft is also stupidly accessible. The only dwarf fortress players I know IRL are also skilled with and interested in computers. Normies aren’t sinking 6 weeks (what it took me) to ramp up on DF, and certainly wouldn’t have in 2013
  - xipho 4y ago
    > stupidly accessible Don't underestimate what tiles do for a game in terms of (perceived) accessibility. Anecdotally my kids (under 11), who will almost certainly abandon the game after playing it, are demanding that we get it because they like what they are seeing, they like drama (dwarfs into zombies), they like building and crafting (infinite possibilities vs. MC). Now it's true that I've been talking about it, so they are feeding on my hype, but they are also genuinely intrigued by it. I think the viral potential of DF went way up with the recent release, it might not be completely unheard of as common amongst the broader gaming populace in the future.
- croes 4y ago
  Minecraft was 2009 and had a graphical interface. I doubt that in 2006 a game with an ASCII-Interface would have been a great success if people had to pay for it.

rkachowski 4y ago

There are many games that monetised in 2006 and are not worth $100M. The indie gaming scene in 2006 was almost entirely freeware with a few exceptions. Indie games as a steam category - let alone industry - was unthinkable. Monetisation was essentially building a flash game to sell to an ad network, there's really no amount of industry game playing that could have been done.

program_whiz 4y ago

The major lesson is "don't make indie games if you want to make money". There are 34 games released per day on steam. Most will have revenue under $1000 (and probably most will have revenue below $100). Unless you have a talented team, marketing plan, and lots of capital you can burn for a gamble; or are willing to just do it for fun for years and don't care if it succeeds -- don't quit your job to make indie games. Otherwise you're playing Russian roulette. For every hollow knight, Dwarf Fortress, Celeste, there are 1000s of other titles you've never heard of.

bombcar 4y ago
To be fair, you'd have to somehow account for what percentage of those released each day are just shovelware crap. The actual "indie games" to look at would be the ones where talented people put time and effort into something. A vast majority of those will still fail, but then you have at least a true basis.

ineedasername 4y ago

2006 was pre-Minecraft territory. Monetizing DF at that point in time would have been highly unlikely. Also the game wasn’t built yet. Maybe they could have monetized earlier than this, but what does it matter? Maybe trying to monetized earlier would have killed the project or resulted in a game very different from today. Either way it doesn’t matter: there are different paths to success and not every one of them is an option for every game. DF found one though, and that’s what matters.

seanhunter 4y ago

> 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-NFQKMeCQiS8aM https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0sBhCMFBvPlF7wG7OH-N...