[surmoi]

I worked for too long on mobile games, ads mediation company are indeed the worst, IronSource included. It's a nightmare to work with their black box SDKs, and god knows what they do in that, in addition to tracking and showing ads (do you know some ads can take up more than 200MB ? That's sometimes more than the game I worked on...)

I hope this will incite more developers to look into open source game engine such as Godot and find better way to monetize games than ads.

[bdefore]

I feel like there's room to innovate on monetizing gaming hobby projects without ads. And that Kickstarter and Early Access have polluted the well by asking for a one-time payment for an unknown final quality.

I'd be more inclined for something more of Patreon subscription model, with a game loop that had a very overt 'Hey if you enjoyed this latest update, consider becoming a supporter. If I get xxx supporters this month I'll keep making more cool stuff' with a clear connection to what would come. Regular monthly updates so long as monthly supporters exceeded a certain number.

[surmoi]

I like this approach, I often thought of having it integrated into a game directly. Players could browse and select to sponsor from a few features I'd plan to integrate and thus allow them to have some say on what they'd like to see first as a community.