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Dear friends of Eressea,
It's been a while since I wrote an announcement, but one of my New
Year's resolutions for 2014 is that Eressea should stay active, and I
want to be more involved again.
To cut a long story short: As an experiment, I will be accepting
donations on Patreon (
http://www.patreon.com/enno) that will go
towards bug fixes and new games.
Eressea will be 18 years old in August. I still remember the
beginning, when the game took over my life. I received hundreds of
mails each week (thanks to a high-traffic mailing list called
eressea-kom), and spent most of my free time (and some lectures)
developing Eressea, discussing Eressea and playing a huge faction.
These days are long gone, because there is just not enough time in the
week for two full-time jobs.
Times are changing, but Eressea remains. I no longer need to sneak out
of a girlfriend's bed on a Sunday morning to kick off a turn rerun,
and that's real nice; Eressea is fully automated and has very few
remaining bugs. Do you remember the last turn rerun? Because I can't,
it's been so long. Not only has my life become easier, but the cost of
running the game has also gone down. Eressea currently costs me less
than 50 Euros annually, most of which is for hosting. From time to
time I have to replace a worn out keyboard, but that's it. I need to
give Thanks to all of you who support Eressea through Flattr, your
donations are currently more than enough to cover all of these expenses.
Of course I'm not getting rich through any of this, but that was never
my intention. I know a lot of Indies, and while I might be among the
more successful ones, Eressea cannot compete financially with the
advertising revenue of a single flash game on Newgrounds, like the
ones my friend Hyptosis makes. Accordingly, I think twice about
whether I really want to fix bugs on a given weekend, or rather go see
a movie with friends.
Recently people have suggested crowdfunding as a way to finance a new
game. Wouldn't a Kickstarter for E4 be a good idea? I'm not convinced.
The number of potential Players for Eressea is small, and the number
of those that would participate in a Kickstarter campaign is even
smaller. A Kickstarter would probably not cover the development costs.
I do think that crowdfunding is a good idea, though, it's just the
Kickstarter model that doesn't work for me. On the other hand, there
is Patreon, a new service that a lot of blogs and web comics have
recently been talking about. Instead of pledging for a project you pay
a monthly contribution to support a creator, whch makes this behave
more like a membership fee where you pick the price, with no lower
limit. I think this is a great idea and I have made an account.
My URL is
http://www.patreon.com/enno, and you can consider the whole
thing an experiment for now. I plan to offer goals and rewards as soon
as this has gotten some traction, and chances are there will be a new
game if enough people join up.
Thank you for being a fan,
Enno
- --
Eressea Fantasy Strategy PBEM Game, Twitter: @eresseadev
http://www.eressea.de/
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/eresseapbem
Flattr your GM:
https://flattr.com/thing/681354/Eressea
Become a Patron:
http://www.patreon.com/enno
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