Apparently Toady has had several 6 figure opportunities just to license the name that he's turned down.
The game is made for the love of making it and what little money they made was always just about allowing them to keep doing what they love. The resulting good will from their 20 years of labor and refusing to sell out paid off in the end when they needed it. Honestly, I'd have bet that if they released the "premium" version for free on bay12 but $30 on Steam they'd still make the majority of what they have.
It reminds me of Justin Hall's story about holding out and refusing to sell "bud.com" to Budweiser.
Instead he just hung onto it, and eventually used it for his own bud delivery company, once recreational cannabis was finally legalized.
He was much happier that great three-letter domain name be used for something he loves, strong kind bud, instead of something he hates, weak piss beer.
>In 1999 I was contacted by a lawyer Steven M. Weinberg, representing Anheuser-Busch, makers of Bud beer.
>We chatted by phone: “So, you’re a college student!”
>Actually I graduated the year before.
>He continued: “Well, how does $50,000 sound for bud.com?”
>I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated. I remember reading that the marketing budget for Budweiser beer that quarter was $16.1 million. BUD was the company’s stock symbol.
>I wasn’t going to sell lightly, and they weren’t going to bid against themselves, so we didn’t get anywhere.
The story about his fight to register the four-letter domain name fuck.com is also hilarious:
I'm torn on this story. On one hand I'm really glad he got to keep using it personally out of the gate and eventually was able to later use it again for the intent it sounds like he gave when registering, couldn't ask for anything more for a short domain.
On the other his reasoning for not selling was really unrelated to any of that. His response was standard squatter logic - I registered it first and you have a lot of money + will actually use it heavily so I'm not selling unless it's for tens of thousands of times what I got it for. It wasn't like he responded "I think I will get more than 50k of use out of it" or "It's more than 50k of inconvenience for me to change my email" it was straight up "I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated". Kind of ruins the inspiration when the thing he actually held out for was rent seeking.
On the third hand Budweiser is indeed really shit beer...
I'm not torn. They were actively using the site. They weren't sitting on it simply to sell it. But of course, everything has a price... it was just significantly higher than $50k.
I have a story similar to this. My friends and I had a joke about some famous person in high school (in the 90s). We registered a domain with his name and used the domain extensively.
10 years later the guy tried to sue us for control of the domain. We were actively using it though and it was just an inside joke. Random internet people with no clue about the situation would have thought we were just squatters.
"famous person tried to sue me for a joke domain I was using but wouldn't sell because we liked using it" is a very different story than "guy says the reason he didn't sell is he knew they had a bigger marketing budget". Your story actually sounds awesome. His could have been if it were "I loved what I was doing with it more than 50k" instead of what he says it was. In the end it worked out to a similar outcome, kinda? That's where the torn piece comes in, it worked out but not for the inspiring reason it sounds like at first.
I'm not sure why you care about annheiser-busch so much.
He knew that bud.com was worth more than $50k to Budweiser.
Bud.com would still be on every can and case of beer they produced.
Says they didn't like the beer, anyhow. If Budweiser came with a 15 million buyout offer I might see your point, but $50k is barely enough to buy a reliable car after taxes, registration, and insurance.
Things have a price when the buyer and seller agree on a price. If only the seller thinks it's worth more than 50k, it's not really worth more than 50k.
Who said anything about he should have had to give it away? All I said was the story was an uninspiring one about domain squatting for money not an inspiring one about someone who refused to sell because of their love/use for the domain. What they had to do at the time this was occuring was very unrestricted but these days it'd be governed by the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy where you really don't want to give something like that as your reason for not wanting to sell to a good offer. After all domains are not owned by you just because you are currently registered them, they are owned by ICANN.
That's not squatters logic any more than you're a squatter in your own home if you refuse to sell even if a generous offer comes along because you value your home a lot more than even an above market offer, but you'd still likely sell at 100 times valuation. Again, that doesn't make you a squatter, just someone holding on to something and saying "If you really want this, you're going to have to offer me something grand, and I know you can afford it, otherwise I'll hold on to it".
I mean there are a lot of differences here, primarily that you by definition don't own domains you lease them to use, but yes that'd also be its own flavor of extremely uninspiring story. Holding out to get the value something is actually worth to you before you give it up is great and interesting but that's not the reason they gave.
It doesn't seem like a very similar story at all. One is a story of hard work for many years on something one loves; the other is cybersquatting eventually (kind of) turning into a business?
In America, healthcare (insurance and out-of-pocket) can be a major contributor to cost of living for anyone with anything more than the occasional cold. It's especially bad for self-employed people like the Adams.
What? A company pays it's workers a salary and that's a loss for the business no matter if the people it's paid to are using it for food and rent.
If they didn't have any revenue coming in at all, then they should have a quite high deficit in the company that they can subtract against the income now to reduce taxes.
To be able to maintain carry forward losses, you have to have capital.
The boys didn’t have capital. They paid themselves what came in.
If they had been maintaining losses, they wouldn’t have a house because they would have had to sell it.
Not necessarily. But they probably didn't have a good lawyer and accountant. It's certainly possible to have a corporation run a loss while its employees keep their houses. I mean that's pretty much the entire point of corporations.
Why would a worker who owns a house and every year is owed more and more in unpaid back salary from a company they are working at for free, ever need to sell their house to cover the debt that the company has to themselves?
Steam revenue share over $10,000,000 is decreased to 25%.
Also it very unlikely publisher get 30% for title like DF. More likely there is some recuperation if publisher invested into new version and then then 10-15%.
20% is going to the publisher. They paid for the Steam version, including hiring the graphics and sound people. They're also handling customer support for the paid version.
Of course for legendary game like Dwarf Fortress it doesn't make sense and it much lower, but for normal indie game 30% is not a limit so most of developers get less than 50% of sales after Steam and publisher cut.
Usually % that goes to a publisher depend on stage of development, risk publisher taking, whatever you give up your IP and your agreement on recuperation. E.g. if you keep your IP, but publisher cover most of development costs after prototype then they will likely take up to 50% after Steam cut.
being on steam is pretty valuable. people are more likely to buy a game on steam than off of a random website. steam will show your game to people who like similar games. there are cloud saving features, mod integration, updates etc.
There is also pretty good Linux support. So if you wanted to tick the Linux box you only have to make sure your game works under proton which generally just means avoiding proprietary anti cheat and Microsoft specific codecs/fonts.
I know a franchise whose games ran with 99% compatibility in proton except the cutscenes which used a proprietary codec. Proton then got a patch and just shows a static image during cut scenes while the rest of the game works perfectly. The developer can fix it by reencoding the cutscenes. No need for explicit Linux support.
$3.7mm/15 years is shy of $250k/yr TC. There's something to be said for being able to work on your life's passion, but not all of us can think up funny amazing dawrf simulators, and even if we did, there's already a really really good one. https://xkcd.com/2347/ applies. Unless people start being a whole lot richer and a lot more generous, newer load bearing pieces as appropriate for our newer world aren't coming about. Instead they're Facebook and Google supported.
The game is made for the love of making it and what little money they made was always just about allowing them to keep doing what they love. The resulting good will from their 20 years of labor and refusing to sell out paid off in the end when they needed it. Honestly, I'd have bet that if they released the "premium" version for free on bay12 but $30 on Steam they'd still make the majority of what they have.