Releasing something for free with a Patreon/donation link

How much of an insane idea would be releasing something for free (as in MIT/BSD/whatever repo on github) but making donation button/patreon link available?

I'm talking about coding assets here.

I have two potentially interesting projects that are collecting dust on my hdd. The issue is I'm not sure if I have the drive to turn them into a proper asset store project, handling support and all that stuff. I prefer coding. I also don't know anyone who can handle that kind of thing for me.

Additional issue is that my inner moral compass for some incomprehensible reason has issues with selling coding projects I consider to be simple (although hourly contract work is apparently fine and selling art is fine too)... and I consider anything that takes less than a month and less than 5 years of experience simple.

What do you think about it? Ideas? Advice?

 

Just do it. Create patreon account. Put stuff on Github and add prominent link to your Patreon support page. Then focus on marketing maybe start with a signature link on forum here.

Then you'll have your answer.

 

Hah ^_^.

"Just do it and see what happens", in other words.

I guess this is reasonable enough.

 

lol. I doubt many see it the same way.


I think Patreon works best if people feel like they're "making something happen", that otherwise wouldn't exist. Like e.g Quill 18 afaik is a fulltime youtuber/streamer and game videos earn him x times more than programming tutorials. So for him to make programming tutorial videos financially viable there must be another revenue stream like Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/quill18creates

Now keep in mind that he has massive exposure on youtube already, to funnel people towards his Patreon (over 370000 subscribers) and it's still a relatively small monthly sum compared to other Patreon projects.

I don't have high expectations of Patreon or donations generating much revenue for you unless you really work hard towards making that your income and offering something that people will be "buying/funding" through their Patreon donations. If you'd create an asset every month that your patrons get, and higher tiers offer better support or something like that, I could potentially see it work, if you put in a lot of effort into marketing it to the right people. If you throw up 2 projects on Github under MIT that'd be a very noble thing to do, but I doubt it would generate much "financial appreciation". But if you were going to release them like that anyway, then of course a donation button won't hurt!

 

The Patreon projects I support all involve active development, whether that is patches or new releases every few months. I'm thinking if the idea is to just raise some additional money for it a donate button would be more appropriate but not necessarily a Patreon account.

 

@tiggus is definitely right. I was thinking you were planning on creating more and more stuff. Patreon is basically "support someone's ongoing efforts"

 

Actually that was roughly the idea. In addition to those two projects, I had some stuff I'd love to experiment with, plus unity could use a replacement for some of its major systems.

 

Patreon works for continuos development stuff. I wouldn't use it for a single project.

I've got a PayPal donation button on my website and linked from my YouTube tutorials. Works out well. But the absolute number of people who donate is low. Advertising revenue is more relevant then donations.

 

I started to point towards the Bay 12 Games one and then I realized it says "Dwarf Fortress and video other games".

https://www.patreon.com/bay12games

 

@neginfinity I believe some have tools hosted on itch.io with donation options.
I remember seeing one artist that had some sprite fx work. I cant recall what kind of donation processor it was though.

 

Well... hiring someone for a month is pretty darn expensive, even if they're inexperienced. And if I can save some or all of a month by grabbing something affordable off-the-shelf then I'm happy to do that. And that's not even considering things like hardware/licenses and the time I'd spend helping an inexperienced hire to achieve something.

I definitely see the issue with support, though. It's the one thing that's stopped me putting a bunch of stuff on the Asset Store. I'd love to share my efforts, but the potential time cost of packaging and then supporting them properly is a significant concern. I don't want them to become a distraction from my major goals.

 

Doesn't mean that minimum contract duration is a month. You could hire someone experienced who can finish the work in 3 days, instead of dealing with inexperienced hire which will muck around for a month.

 

I feel like that's a niche that needs to be filled. I'd be interested in a no-support assetstore section as well, both as customer and asset developer. The risk for customers could easily be minimized with a hassle free 1 week self-refund policy.

 

Yeah, but if I was looking to hire someone I'd just do that... My point was more that if something takes a good developer of 5 years experience a month to develop (figures from your post) or something like that, and it's a thing I need, then I'd be happy to pay for it as long as the cost of use (purchase + integration + any licensing issues) is significantly less than the cost of doing it again myself. It might be "easy", but we still all only have a finite amount of time to get stuff done in.

Plus, personally, I'd rather spend my time on the interesting problems than the easy ones.

 

Damn. Now I'm no longer sure what to do.

Projects that are collecting dust will probably go to bitbucket/github/patreon, though. I mean If I failed to turn them into an asset store package over course many weeks, then it isn't gonna happen, besides that was what I originally planned to do...

However I'm having second thoughts about "simple stuff" now, thanks to you ^_^.

 

LOL - refund for digital products. Yeah -
What would be the protection mechanism for the asset publishers?

 

I don't understand your concern.

Obviously by refunding an asset you'd lose the right to keep using the asset. If you still keep using it, at that point it's exactly like you'd have pirated the asset. I assume transaction fees and bandwidth cost to not be a cost factor, or if it is, to be deducted from the refunded amount of money. The only way I see how an asset dev would lose something is, if someone asks them a question and they answers it. The whole point of a dedicated non-support store with hassle-free but time-limited self-refunding is to avoid the need for devs to answer any questions. I consider the part where people ask questions to be the key factor that makes asset development long term financially unviable for many projects. And I'm 100% sure if such a system was in place there was cool stuff we could be buying right now, that currently we can't buy because the people who have interesting projects that collect dust, don't want to get sucked into the time-sink of delivering ongoing support for a "propperly" released asset.

 

Steam has them, and they're fairly successful. HOwever, steam also integrates their drm into their products.

 

This ^
Yeah - it only works on steam because of the integrated drm. The game is removed from a library when refunded.
Without drm - the asset would still be available to use anytime. This would be easy to spot for a visual asset, although asset providers shouldn't have to monitor this, but for an editor extension - I have doubt it would not be used after the refund transaction was complete.

 

If someone were going to keep the asset after getting their refund they would have just pirated it to begin with.

 

Just look at the intricate licensing questions that legit devs ask on here and look at the rampant piracy in other places. I firmly believe that pirates are gonna pirate, and legit devs will play by the rules even when they are not enforced by drm.

 

That's only one aspect of support, another is updates - bug fixes, compatibility with new versions, etc. That said, there are things where that isn't such an issue. And if the stuff we're sharing is something we're also still using then we'd be doing that stuff anyway.

There's still the initial packaging/documentation effort, but at least for this kind of scenario that could become a once-off thing.

 

As others mentioned, Patreon is not the way to go and I don´t think you would have success with one-off items.

Either paypal donations button, Adsense on the page, or another thing I see sometimes used is a pre-download video ad, so they are forced to view an ad before the download starts. You could also put it on itch for free with an option to donate. The actual donation rate on itch is pretty high.

 

As I said, the idea was to put a codebase for free, include some tools I've written and keep updating it. So it is not "one off" thing, because software development is never finished. I just feel that charing upfront payment doesn't feel really "right" for me for some incomprehensible reason.

Or I could use all those options at once, I suppose.

 

What kinds of projects are you thinking about btw if you don't mind me asking?