Re: [E-Announce] Eressea Crowdfunding

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 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, which 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