An annual report is a customary document that associations in Finland make for each year describing and reflecting on what and how they did that year. It’s also required attachment to an association tax return, which is why I needed to prepare one now.
Revolutionary Games Studio ry supported the development of the following open source projects in 2021:
In 2021 there were 6 releases of Thrive, out of which 5 were bigger updates and one a smaller update focused on fixing things. The first of these releases was 0.5.3 and the last one was 0.5.6.1. We had 33 open source contributors contributing to these releases. For half of the year the association had one part-time employee, who used most of their work hours on open source development for Thrive. The versions released in 2021 so far have been downloaded a total of 66,677 times for free through Github. Even though Thrive was released on two game stores, all of its source code was able to be kept public in the main repository, however the store special versions can’t be made to function entirely without proprietary software, which the Thrive compiling person needs to acquire separate from the store owner. Thanks to the Thrive releases staying small, the releases could be uploaded to our Github page, where they are freely downloadable by anyone.
Thrive Launcher, which is a project to help using Thrive, had two releases (1.2.8 and 1.2.9). Developing these versions we had just 4 people contribute to this open source project. In the future it would be great to get more people working on this project. The versions of the launcher mentioned before were downloaded a total of 67,960 times.
ThriveDevCenter open source project was reimplemented in C# programming language in 2021 and other changes were also made. This project had only one contributor.
To the open source game engine, Godot Engine, that is used by Thrive the Thrive developers contributed many bug reports and also a little bit of source code to improve it.
The association continued supporting the community platforms and tools used for Thrive development. These were: the community forums, developer forums, Discord servers, source code repositories on Github, Thrive’s SubReddit, Thrive Wiki, community translations site, Revolutionary Games Studio’s website, and automatic code checking servers related to Thrive development. Association members or other volunteers selected by the association acted as moderators and administrators for these services keeping them running and as a good place for everyone by moderating the discussions. The community forums had 288 new users register in 2021 and a total of 7.2 thousand posts were made.
The association, after being founded in 2021, took over running the Patreon page made for supporting Thrive development. Exclusive content was produced to the members of the Patreon page and they got access to Thrive development version distribution system to get Thrive versions early, other benefits were also offered, access to these depended on the selected membership level on Patreon. Along with other income sources this was an important revenue source for funding running the association and hiring an employee. At the start of the year the revenue goals on Patreon were way too optimistic and greatly underestimated the costs related to employees. These goals have since been adjusted to better reflect actual costs.
The association published Thrive on two stores, Steam and Itch.io for a small price. These versions are almost the exact same as the ones distributed elsewhere. The Steam version has a few features that use Steam and as such can’t work elsewhere. These releases brought a huge cash injection into the association, but only continuing sales can guarantee that the association could afford a full time employee.
The association organized the first small donation campaign in 2021 which generated funds to pay for some server hosting costs as well as some salary costs that went towards supporting open source work being done on Thrive. There is a summary of the donation campaign on our forums: Donation campaign results summary (2021) The donations total ended up being pretty small when compared to the other ways the association gets funds.
Because the association was founded in 2021, the association opened a bank account and started using other services as well that are needed to function. The association had its first yearly meeting in 2021. There wasn’t a previous year’s actions to approve yet, but a vote on the board members was held. The community around Thrive had already operated for years in a kind of an association type form for many years by the time the association was officially founded. During the first year of the association the activities of this community didn’t really change in a fundamental way, but a centralized way to collect money and use it on the project was established, which sped up the development of the project. In the future we hope that this direction can be maintained in the form of ever speeding up development and that the player and developer communities keep growing. We want to thank anyone who has been involved in keeping Thrive project alive or progressing it over the years.
If I forgot to include something significant that happened last year, please let me know and I can amend.