Here is last year’s action report on the Revolutionary Games Studio ry association.
Main Projects
Revolutionary Games Studio ry supported the development of the following open source projects in 2024:
Thrive
In 2024 there were 9 releases of Thrive, which is a pretty normal amount. The first of these releases was 0.6.5 and the last one was 0.8.0. The big version number bump shows how much closer we are to completing the microbe stage roadmap than before, which we plan to complete in 2025. We had 23 open source contributors contributing to these releases, which is 9 fewer than in 2023. That is a pretty major drop and will be a concern if new volunteer programmers joining doesn’t pick back up. The association had one full-time employee, who used most of their work hours on open source development of Thrive. The versions released in 2024 so far have been downloaded a total of 25,217 times for free through GitHub, which is about 7,000 less than for the releases in 2023. Even 2023 was a year with fewer downloads than the previous year (2022). This could mean that the trend with less engagement with Thrive is continuing even this year, which is no longer a very good situation. Some of the drop could be explained by most 2024 releases not having a Mac version, but downloads of the Mac versions only account about 4% of the downloads for versions where that is available.
All of Thrive’s source code has been kept on GitHub where the programming development workflow also happens in the public. The Thrive releases have been staying small enough so that they could be uploaded to our GitHub page, where they are freely downloadable by anyone. And easily downloadable using our Launcher program.
The versions available through GitHub for free and the versions of Thrive made available on digital game stores were all supported with simultaneous new releases.
In terms of the paid versions that support the faster speed of continued open source development, there was also a pretty significant dip in sales, which is also very concerning as not enough financial support means we cannot afford a developer working on Thrive indefinitely. Compared to 2023 the Steam sales were down 21% in terms of units sold. This is a significant drop in total available funds to the association.
Thrive Launcher
Thrive Launcher is a project to help in downloading and playing Thrive. The launcher had 6 releases in 2024, but most of them were small. The first version of the year was 2.1.0 which introduced some minor new improvements and fixes. The last version was a smaller patch release 2.15, which was already in April 2024. So the launcher development still is pretty neglected, however this is a massive increase from 2023 when there was just a single patch release of the launcher. The versions released in 2024 had one developer contributing to it. We had a few more people working on the translations, but seeing more programmers contributing to the launcher would be good. The reason for the small number of launcher releases is that other work has always had higher priority than the launcher, and with no other code contributors there haven’t been more releases. So far the releases in have been downloaded a total of 36,917 times. That is about 6,000 less than the launcher release in the previous year (2023), which is a bit confusing finding as there’s been more launcher releases in 2024 and seemingly more attention in Thrive in general. This difference likely won’t be compensated for if we account the downloads through FlatHub for the Linux version of the launcher that is not counted in the GitHub numbers.
RevolutionaryWebApp (formerly ThriveDevCenter)
This year the scope of the project previously called ThriveDevCenter was expanded and it was renamed to RevolutionaryWebApp. It is an open source project that has various tools and features for helping in Thrive development. The rename was done as the scope of the application was increased to also handle a blog-style website, however our volunteers didn’t have enough spare time to get it working fully yet to replace our old main website. This replacement was eventually done, but that was in 2025. With the new name, old features were still kept like the features related to Patreon rewards distribution as well as Discord integration features. This project had just two contributors this year. Most of the code was still done by a single contributor, though. Even if not a core part of the Thrive gameplay experience it’d be nice to get more volunteers helping out in improving this web application. With the new website in use in 2025, we plan to make it easier for individual team members to help maintain the content at least on our website.
Godot
Godot Engine is an open source game engine, and the engine that is used by Thrive. The Thrive developers have contributed some feedback and some code to the engine in the past. This was a pretty quiet year in terms of contributions to the engine, however we reported a multitude of bugs discovered during the Thrive update to Godot 4 (from 3). As of the end of 2024 not all of those problems were solved. The last critical bug in Godot 4 was not fixed until 2025 for us (but even that leaves still some more intermittent issues reported by our players which we suspect to be engine bugs).
Community Platforms
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 152 new users register in 2024 (about 70 fewer than the previous year) and a total of 12.6 thousand posts were made (about 2 thousand less than previous year). This is again a continued relatively significant reduction in community activity from the peak in 2022. The total post count remained relatively steady thanks to some very engaged community members but the new user registration count took a big hit.
Patreon
The association continued 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 the Thrive development version (DevBuild) distribution system (a RevolutionaryWebApp feature) to get Thrive versions early, other benefits were also offered, access to DevBuilds and other benefits depended on the selected membership level on Patreon. 2023 was a year with the Patreon member count shrinking quite significantly from the peak in 2022, however luckily in 2024 the fall slowed down significantly and the patron amount has stayed relatively steady when taking the entire year 2024 into account.
Closing Thoughts
In terms of association operations, the year 2024 went smoothly thanks to the association operating for many years already. The day to day activities and impact on Thrive was not very different from 2023. Thanks to being able to keep hold of our full-time developer for Thrive, the fast speed of Thrive development continued despite there being a lower amount of total volunteers. The drop in community activity and support from 2022 has sadly continued with even further drop compared to 2023. If the situation continues we cannot afford to continue having a full-time employee working on Thrive. Hopefully with the release of the full microbe stage this year (1.0.0) we can start to turn around the situation and try to get Thrive back on an upwards directory. Perhaps with a well executed outreach push coinciding with the microbe stage release? Lastly, we want to thank everyone participating in Thrive development or even just being in the community around the game this year and showing your support.