(I just quickly moved these posts over to a new thread. I am doing this with a mobile phone so no fine tuning done yet)
I also could well give a yearly contribution or so, but in any case at first I think we should investigate if the costs could be lowered, e.g.
- Can older threads be closed and archieved to save space?
- Can we do incremental backups instead of full backups?
- Can the backups be taken to another (free?) network drive or
even buy two usb drives and take them there? - Can we limit the size of the attachments without sacrifizing usability too much? Maybe use youtube links for videos?
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One option I think is worth exploring is a subscription fee.
If the fee is split across the number of people signed up to the scheme then the more people involved in it, the less each has to pay.
E.g. $40 (ā¬33.98, Ā£29.10) split over 10 users is $4 (ā¬3.40, Ā£2.91) each. At 40 users it would be $1 (ā¬0.85, Ā£0.73) each.
I think it would be more appealing if there were something that could be offered in exchange for that subscription fee, like advanced access to games, but I canāt think of a good way to do it thatās both practical and relatively fair (i.e. doesnāt create too much of a two-tiered userbase).
As far as Iām aware, archiving doesnāt save space.
Itās more or less like closing, but itās even more restrictive.
See What is the difference between Closed, Unlisted and Archived topics? for more info.
Though that does make me wonder what sort of compression is being used by Discourse, if any. Compressing active topics would slow down the forum, but compressing inactive and/or archived topics would make sense because those are less likely to be accessed.
I think the second option is actually quite a good idea, though I think a portable hard drive would be better than USB sticks. 1TB hard drives arenāt that expensive these days.
The benefit of having a physical copy that can be kept at home (preferably locked up in a safe) is that if the company ever lets you down somehow (e.g. they get hacked, their facility is burnt to the ground, they go bust) you still have a copy of your data.
I was going to say it would be a lot of effort, but thinking about it, after the first copy, it should only need a few hours each week (depending on connection speed) to make it up to date, assuming thereās a way to only transmit a ādeltaā of changes rather than trying to do a copy of the whole drive.
I mentioned it briefly before, but in case anyone missed it, pngcrush can reduce the size of PNGs without reducing the quality by simply optimising the compression, the representation of the image, or removing ancillary chunks (e.g. Exif metadata).
I think it would also be reasonable to have a cap on either the dimensions of uploaded images, the size of uploaded images, or some combination of both.
Personally speaking, I do try to keep my uploaded images below 600-800 pixels across each dimension, and will crop or scale images down before upload, but having paint right at my fingertips makes that easy. It wouldnāt be as easy on mobile.
It might be possible to add some kind of tool to allow users to crop and scale images after upload. I donāt know how much that would help to reduce disk space usage, but it would certainly come in handy either way. Though unless thereās a premade tool available, thatās obviously going to be a fair bit of work to get up and running.
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I really appreciate @filmote @Pharap and @Hanski that you took up this topic
It will take me a while to process this and to be able to contribute to the discussion. Going off track in the previous thread about āwould you pay for a pokitto gameā was not premeditated, I just happened to be paying bills at the time
Just so you know: Pokitto hw sales have so far been able to sustain things, I have not put any of my own money into the forum or other things.
But the situation is precarious, we are teetering on breakeven all the time
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As much as i understand this problem, this would be the first forum i ever saw asking for money.
I already support a few indie projects and i wouldnāt have a problem getting this stuff into a FB group. Discord is not an option though, because you just donāt find anything youāre looking for.
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There are discussion platforms that ask for donations, such as Diaspora instaces, but these are completely volunteer run forums that donāt make money in any other way and need to cover the maintenance costs. An official forum of a commercial product that would ask for (even just voluntary) donations at best wouldnāt look very good, I think that could even hurt the product, it looks as if youāre ripping any extra dollar off of people you already sold something to (even if thatās not the case of course), itās just not a good image. At best I can see something like a premium membership, but again this would need to be carefully done as to not discriminate against normal members and customers. Could be something like extra emotes, avatars, titles, forums themes, some special area like the reddit gold lounge etc.
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Itās uncommon these days because most people rely on advertising for keeping servers running, but it used to be quite a lot more common before online advertising became really popular.
There are still a few forums that ask for donations. I did a quick search and found three. One of the three (about FIAT cars) has been around since 2002 (and certainly looks like something from 2002). The others were about gun ownership and christianity. (Which sounds like the punchline to a bad joke. :P)
It took me a bit of digging, but after a while I finally found an example of a forum that has a yearly/periodic donation drive. (As far as I can tell, itās a forum about flight simulation games. The actual forum is here.) It does accept donations all year round, but the mechanism for donating is very well hidden.
It would be quite easy to create an āI Donatedā badge, and theoretically it should be possible to have it awarded automatically after a donation.
I think it would be best to have only one tier though, which is awarded regardless of amount, otherwise it could encourage people to try to spend more to get a better badge. Unless the lower bound for the top tier was something very low (e.g. ā¬3-5), I suppose that could work?
It makes sense to allow it to be awarded more than once though.
That way it still encourages continued support, but doesnāt reflect how much was donated each time.
One other idea while I think of itā¦
A few years ago there was a special edition Arduboy which featured the names of forum members on the board, and more recently the FX chip incorporated usersā logos onto the board.
Thinking about this made me realise that one day, if thereās ever another revision of the Pokitto board, it might be possible to do the same for the Pokitto, but instead of just distributing the board space in some unorganised fashion, the board space could be sold/auctioned, so people who pledge money can have their name/logo enshrined on an area of the board.
Sort of like selling ad space, but itās just advertising members of the userbase instead.
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One more thing (sorry), this time in regards to saving disk space.
@jonne, you may want to take note of this.
Often .webms are smaller than .gifs.
As an example, I just grabbed a copy of some of the GIFs @spinal and @jonne just uploaded and ran them through ffmpeg with ffmpeg -i image.gif image.webm.
| Image | Before | After | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Joe 2 | 571 KB | 107 KB | -464 KB |
| Lines | 29 KB | 23 KB | -6 KB |
| Kong II | 98 KB | 227 KB | +129 KB |
| Turbo Frog Seducer | 534 KB | 202 KB | -332 KB |
| Prelude to a Dream | 2,153 KB | 1009 KB | -1,144 KB |
| Prelude to a Dream | 7,738 KB | 2,982 KB | -4,756 KB |
| Canabalto | 295 KB | 128 KB | -167 KB |
| Lode Runner | 98 KB | 58 KB | -40 KB |
| Karateka | 741 KB | 100 KB | -641 KB |
As you can see, sometimes the .webm ends up being larger for whatever reason, but the vast majority of times itās moderately to drastically superior, particularly with larger .gifs.
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This is quite significant space saving if the quality is about the same !
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I donāt know if itās definitely lossless, but I certainly canāt see any notable artefacts.
The quality is almost certainly tunable.
Iād upload an example as proof, but Iām concerned that might be a bit counter-productive.
Ok, I am kind of ready / sort of ready to comment
We started from āwould you pay for a Pokitto game?ā
Lots of people said āno, I would not pay for a Pokitto gameā
Ok. And I believe that. Because when Neo Retro game asked for a donation, I think I was the only one who donated. When I made Rayne the Rogue mugs and stuff, about 2 people bought those. I used 60 usd for the music of Pysconian, tried to make it as good as possible - @torbuntu was the only one who donated 5$.
Our magazines have been top-notch, still most of the regulars here did not buy them.
When I said āthe real dilemma is that just running a forum like this costs moneyā what I mean is that people have gotten so accustomed to getting things for free, that they can only see the issue from their own perspective. Ok, so you can download and play Apex or Fortnite for free. Great. But what has that got to do with a project like Pokitto? Or someones Pokitto game. Absolutely nothing.
What I am talking about here is revenue streams. I sell you a Pokitto. You pay 49ā¬ for it. For that you get a forum for free for eternity ā¦ Its not going to work long term.
This is not a question of being greedy. Its a question of laws of nature. Energy can not be extracted for free. It has to come from somewhere.
Lets look at the issue of paying for Pokitto games again. Ok, so you do not want to monetarily contribute to such projects. Fine.
How then can something be sustainable long term?
Please understand that I am not looking for a fight here. I am just giving my perspective from the point of view of someone, who makes the whole backend run - as an honest to god, tax paying company.
I was not originally even asking for money for Pokitto. The question was āwould you pay money for a Pokitto gameā and if it was a game like Joe2 that is looking incredible already and has taken countless hours my answer would be yes. IMHO people who categorically say no are not appreciating what they get and donāt think of the whole picture. Even a token contribution to the game dev is something. I know this from experience. It is more a gesture than real reimbursement.
Now we can get back to discussing the forum upkeep costs.
Edit: I have only myself to blame for everything. It was me who did not think about revenue streams before the Kickstarter. But I am not the only one. This is exactly the reason why Aurelien ran into problems with Gamebuino Meta.
Edit 2: i went off topic again, this time in this thread, sorry. In my mind, all of these things are interconnected
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Thatās not completely fair, youāre missing one big factor in the equation.
How many Pokitto have been sold thanks to the forum? Nothing is free, but the profit that came from the forum is a real thing.
Itās like Facebook would close for the server bill because someone forget to add advertise revenue in the annual balance.
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Valid point. In fact, that is a big reason why Pokitto is still alive.
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Iād be interested to know how many Pokitto owners do not visit the forum, there seems to be only a few of us here regularly.
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Surely thatās the point of this thread?
To investigate all the options and weigh up whatās more likely to be successful.
Letās consider it hypothetically for a momentā¦
Letās pretend I decided to make a Pokitto game, and by some miracle I actually finished it.
Then I decided to put it up on somewhere like Itch, and itās set up to be āpay what you wantā.
By some other miracle, a few people buy it, I get ā¬10 (about Ā£8.56). I am now ā¬10 richer.
I spend that money on household bills. All is well.
Except, none of that money went towards keeping the forum running. The forum wasnāt anywhere in that equation.
This is why I say the two issues are separate matters. The money is flowing in a different direction.
Unless Pokitto Oy is taking a cut from game sales (like Steam does), then selling games does not keep the forum running.
So letās consider the situation again, but this time Pokitto Oy takes a cut. Letās say itās a 30% cut (the industry standard in 2019).
I make a game, blah blah blahā¦
I get ā¬10, but Pokitto Oy takes ā¬3, so actually I get ā¬7 and spend it on pasta and coffee.
Congratulations, thatās 3/34ths of the monthly target, only ā¬31 to go.
But unfortunately itās not that simple, because thereās a lot of other things to consider:
- How many sales would there need to be each month to keep the forum running?
- Would we have enough users buying games to reach those targets?
- What happens when thereās a dry spell with no new games being released?
- Will old titles still bring in money several weeks down the line?
- What if 99% of users donāt donate when prompted?
- What percentage cut would Pokitto Oy realistically need to take for this model to be sustainable?
- What if users donāt actually want to sell their games and would rather give them away for free?
Thatās not to say other options wonāt have their flaws, thereās no silver bullet, but to me this seems like one of the riskier options, particularly based on what we know about the current userbaseās behaviour. I.e. nearly half of people saying they wouldnāt pay for games, and half again not wanting to sell their games.
The thing is, most of us are game/software creators, so weāre not just thinking about it from the view of the player, weāre also thinking about how we feel about the games/tools we create, and a decent percentage of us donāt care about the money, we just want to make the world dance games that people enjoy.
The enjoyment taken from creating a game and seeing other people enjoy it is far rarer and more valuable than mere money, and the forum provides the platform for that exchange, so it is only natural that people will want to keep the forum ticking over, even if they donāt want to sell their games.
It is not a paradox to want to help financially support the forum and to not want to accept money for oneās creations. It presents a problem, but what are programmers if not problem solvers?
Actually I donāt think it has to do with webm particularly, though it might. I just ran a short 10-second GIF (3.5MB) through EZGifās optimize settings and told it to compress with a lossy compression and it reduced it down to about 100Kb without any noticeable difference between the two.
So if a GIF is rather large we can try running it through EZGif or convert it to WebM format to save some space.
PS: I only ever post a video directly to the forum if the video is less than 1Mb in size, otherwise I upload it to youtube and embed it. If @jonne would prefer that all videos (even ~200KB one) be embedded then I can do that as well.
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If youāve got a copy of ffmpeg, have a go at converting that GIF to WebM, you might be surprised.
Or if you donāt have ffmpeg, Iād be happy to have a go and tell you what the result is.
WebM is actually a container format (based on Matroska) which can contain video in either VP8, VP9 or AV1 formats. VP9 at least is quite a sophisticated and efficient encoding format which supports lossless compression.
Bear in mind that GIF was invented in 1987 and hasnāt been updated since 1989, whereas WebM was created in 2013 and last updated in 2019. Humanity has learnt a lot since the 80s.
Looking into it, the problem with EZGIF is that it seems itās an online-only GUI tool.
I suggested pngcrush and ffmpeg precisely because theyāre local command line tools, which means they could be run automatically on the server without relying too much on users to be conscientious about what theyāre uploading.
Perhaps thereās a GIF equivalent of pngcrush, or maybe ffmpeg could be relied upon to reduce GIF sizes?
Actually ffmpeg is what Iām using to convert a screen-recorded MP4 to GIF. Problem I see with WebM is you wouldnāt want WebM files to automatically play while browsing because they can contain audio whereas GIF is strictly video. The benefit for the games page GIFs to be automatically playing is it gives the page more life and helps attract the userās attention to a specific game.
At this point i feel the urge to comment again.
I really did my best to support pokitto all the way. I really did my best to support indie games and small game and hardware projects (browse through my yt and you will see only the top of the iceberg). I regularly donate money to small projects, not getting anything back from it, just to be supportive because i believe in it.
I also have to pay bills, especially for my house and my daughter who will eventuality start studying this year.
Apart from that i also donate regularly to at least two charities a month. We just had a devastating flood catastrophe, my whole workplace is destroyed and i donāt know how to go on regarding my work in two weeks from here.
Of course i donated some money for those who lost everything in the flood.
I keep buying merch, buying games i already got for free, only to buy additional physical releases. I really spent a lot of money not only for having fun with my gaming hobby but to support people and honor their work. I got scamned big with crowdfunding projects, so i never backed anything again.
I just canāt support everything though and a forum is just a thing i wonāt spent money for. A lot of discussion and information went into discord anyway, so as i donāt have the time to hang around there for hours i certainly might miss things.
If pokitto is a thing to reach a bigger audience then it should be:
- Easily available
- Should need some more marketing (especially on social media)
- should appeal not only to developers, but to gamers like me (and yes, as mentioned before gamers like special editions and physical releases, look how itās done with homebrew releases for nes or THEC64, people keep buying stuff although it is already downloadable for free).
- Bring some special pokitto editions maybe with a metal shell with a gamedisk in a nice package and a manual and make a big twitter story about it.
- Sidenote: Importing goods and games is getting more and more complicated and very expensive in europe and especially in germany, postage and shipment even for small goods easily add 20-30 ā¬ to something you buy, so people donāt pull the trigger if they are not really into it
Sorry for the long explanation, i do love pokitto and the whole idea behind it, but this is something i just had to say.
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I do not mind the critique at all.
In fact I think it is pretty cool that we can have a conversation at this level and nobody gets super-offended. In todayās world it is pretty rare.
I want to clarify 2 things:
-
I have not made any system for donating to Pokitto. So in that sense it has not even been possible to āsupportā in such a way
-
When I say āpeople have gotten so used to getting things for freeā I am not talking about Pokitto community in particular. I am getting to be a grumpy old guy at times, I have 4 kids and I work in product dev. What I am talking about is a larger problem of āfreeā as in a) exports that were driven by political actions (how do you think free airmail shipping for 1ā¬ item from far east was possible?) b) games industry turning into a copy-paste in-game advertizing/purchases crapshoot (anyone remember things like LucasArts? Looking Glass? MicroProse?) c) ā¦ ah, lets stop here. I could have given examples from my own line of work but I think I am going too far.
So thank you @Zockeromi for your thoughts, I agree with most/all of them. I will try to do something about the issues.
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