As much as I hate microtransactions for finance-raising, one thing I really appreciate that other indie games do on platforms like patreon is that donating gets your name in the game.
First, we make it clear this is for the purpose of funding more focused development on Thrive, emphasizing how much of the proceeds will go towards development.
Second, in credits, we set the font size of donors equal to the months that they’ve been subscribed, highly recommending setting up a constantly running task that pulls from the steam API, drops it in a file that’d be referenced each game build to keep from having to manually update it.
Later on, once we start the space stage, we might also have an option to have alien species presets with their chosen name to help populate the game world as a one-time purchase, as a thought.
Just a little bit of pride for supporting the game.
Similarly, we can have the credits at runtime poll the currently installed mods for the creator handle, so the players see their mod authors in the credits as well, as a little bit of pride to encourage mod creators. This also makes modders more visible when streamers use their mods too, and encourages streamers to show the credits so they aren’t swamped with requests for mod lists. Giving excuses for streamers to run longer videos and show credits which support devs and mods, and encourages some watchers to repeatedly re-watch the credits part to get complete mod lists giving streamers more revenue, which also boosts views of Thrive.
Right now in the game the credits list patrons by the tier they are are supporting at with the VIP patrons being listed first in a single column. So that makes it pretty clear who are the biggest supporters. Also if we sorted the list of patrons by how long they’ve been a patron it would be very hard for people to find their name as it would be in a totally unpredictable order for them. Though I guess a slight font size difference or like a badge next to the name indicating the patronage duration would be possible.
But have you seen anyone whatsoever talk about their name being in the Thrive credits? I haven’t so I don’t see spending development time on this to be a useful return on investment.
I think that an equivalent time spent on doing outreach (by posting on socials, making promotional videos) would actually be a lot better. We’ve recently had a couple of streamers / let’s players play Thrive and that has had a massive impact on our financial stability. So to me it still seems the best way to get more money for Thrive is to simply just try to get the word out about Thrive and try to get some streamers to play Thrive.
There is already a script for updating the credits from Patreon data but I only run it before each release, because running it more often wouldn’t really do anything as devbuilds are available only to patrons so the general public wouldn’t even have a chance to see the credits update between releases.
I’ve never seen this feature, but I guess technically if we add mod info specification for a credits section we could pull that info and show it in the credits scroll. But this would take a fair amount of programming time to implement.
We would need to have Thrive streamers first. And do streamers even usually wait through all of the game credits after playing?
I don’t think that’s how any views or stream monetization algorithm works…
Mainly my suggestion in this point is adding steam subscription in addition to the patreon and font-size boost on duration. And I agree, I really don’t think sorting them by donation duration is a good idea, sorry if it came across that way. But no, I don’t hear many people talking about the credits, at least not online, but that’s not the point of credits anyhow. The point of credits is more being able to point at it with your friends & family when you’re with them and being like, “See? Proof I helped make this!” And occasionally, “Hey, you like X about this awesome game? Here’s proof I’m part of what’s behind it.” So for donors, it’s proof they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is in game support.
Eh, in that case, forget it. I thought it’d be an easy implementation, just poll the mods list and drop in user names. I thought it’d be a quick reference-grab, but if it’d be difficult to implement, nevermind. And yes, it’s a feature that doesn’t exist elsewhere. As a designer, I pride myself on doing more than just copying existing ideas.
A quick hunt, we have a few streamers covering Thrive on twitch, but it seems were’re doing better on YouTube.
Encouraging them in turn encourages further streamers.
Last I checked algorithms (which, admittedly, was a couple years ago, and I know they’re often changing), one of the key values was ‘total watch time’, so anything that encourages re-watching (such as rewinding to jot down a mod list), gives the streamer’s finished videos more watch time.
Can you show any indie game that has successfully added a 5$/month subscription to get extra early access versions of the game?
I think that if we tried that we would get a mix of:
Nobody would actually care so there’d be just a few people signing up thus it’s basically wasted effort to implement the feature
A lot of people would perceive it negatively and give negative reviews due to appearing to wanting to get paid a ton extra for us to update the game
Well it is relatively quick if there’s just an author field in the mod info file that is grabbed and put into the credits, but for mods with multiple authors and stuff like that (like the recent Oblivion remake in a different engine), that wouldn’t work so we’d actually want to give mod authors much more control over how a list of authors for the mod would be presented in the credits. It wouldn’t take super long to program but would anyone want this instead of for example fixing the pressure sliders to be logarithmic?
This would have an extremely negligible impact on total watchtime. As if someone watches a 3-hour stream and then jumps around in the credits until the mods list and then watches the mod list for like a minute max, that’s less than a percent of increased watchtime.
Rimworld did something similar with their “name in game” purchase. A key point is it really doesn’t change the content of the game, just a pure “support the authors, and have a little recognition for it.” Just be fully clear and honest. The negative press is for most indie stuff is locking content behind a paywall when the content promised hasn’t even been provided yet. What I’m suggesting isn’t content-blocking.
100% Valid point. Probably easier to populate with a "Mod name, Mod author (optional if supplied), Mod credits blurb (optional if supplied).
But yea, I wouldn’t suggest wasting much dev time on it if it’s more than a 20-minute addition. I wrote it assuming it’d be easy. Logarithmic pressure sliders would be more valuable.
Yea, but on a 20-minute YouTube video with 200+ mods for a “ultra-gorgeous hyper-realistic mod experience”, it could double view-time. Not something valuable now, but could definately be later. And as an open source project, todays’ mods could be tomorrow’s core-game feature.
But again, only recommending if its an easy 20-min addition. If it’d take longer than that, don’t see it being worth the value.
I mean there’s technically nothing preventing us from adding this kind of purchase, but I don’t think we can really do that on Steam as we’d need to collect people’s names when they purchase to know what to put in the game. Did Rimworld somehow do this on Steam or was it on their own website (I expect it to be this case)?
We can do that too but selling stuff on our own website requires us to handle all international taxes etc. that comes with direct selling to consumers. So it is quite a lot of work and if we only get like 10 people buying it the overheads and effort in developing the system might be more than we could earn, unless we charge like 100$ for it.
The youtuber would 100% cut out the non-interesting part of the credits (which is basically all of them in a 20-minute video unless they also talked about a “review” of the game at the same time) and at most like have a list of mods they have in the video description.
In terms of development time this is like 30-60 minutes of time with if someone else implements this taking about 15 minutes of my time for reviewing. So this isn’t a super big feature to do, but there’s an absolute ton of these one hour features on our backlog that could be done instead to improve the game.
This is actually pretty interesting as I’m wondering how they pulled it off, as there’s no way on Steam (that I’m aware of) to ask extra info from soneone who purchased your game or DLC on Steam. The only way I see this working is having a DLC which grants access to the game when started asking you to fill in your name to be added in the credits. And that’s like at least 5+ hours of programming work as that need setting up the DLC, checking in game if the player has that DLC and communicating with a server to know if the player has already filled in their info or not. And not to mention how much work this requires on the ThriveDevCenter side as it will need to connect to Steam to verify that the requests to be included in the credits are coming from legitimate users who have purchased the DLC. And then throw on top of that testing this all because if someone pays a ton of money to be added to the credits we really need to make sure they get in.
So that makes this at least a 3+ day feature to work on and even more if there’s any bugs detected during testing of the feature it gets even longer so I’d budget at least a week of time for this very involved system to be built.
To be fair, all that said, Rimworld, it has about 200x the users Thrive has.
THAT said, when it added the name-in-game feature, it wasn’t even on Steam yet and had a following smaller than Thrive currently has if memory serves.
THAT said, Rimworld’s name-in-game also made it so random enemies would also get the names, which was neat.
THAT said, we’re already pulling lifeform names from a pre-populated list, and we’ll probably do so for aliens down the road as well, so it’s not unrealistic for Thrive as well, and it’s already well-prepped for it.
THAT said, Rimworld takes place in nearly exclusively what would be the equivalent to our tribal phase, so you had time to get to know these characters (if you captured and converted them) which added to the allure.
THAT said, we could honestly learn a lot from Rimworld concepts for our tribal stage and presentation. They ARE counted as an “overwhelmingly positive” game, and I’m pretty sure the name-in game is something that financially helped them develop into the game they are.
THAT said, doing it as a subscription vs a single payment vs tiered payment options (What Rimworld originally did before changing into a single payment later after the game was more established), is a marketing question beyond what I feel comfortable making judgements on.
