Not a good idea for me. It could stop potential users to enter while the main scope should be bring more people try make a game.
IMO I’m not against ask money for a game made for Pokitto. If the original question was just to clarify if that is possible, I see no legal way to stop someone ask money for something he made. That’s said is highly improbable that a Pokitto game dev team will make a lot of money. There are already very good games free and open source here and I hope to see more and more.
I think any potential Pokitto creators would make games regardless of whether or not they got paid. We’re all here for fun after all.
I know for a fact that asking for a voluntary donation will not make anyone rich, it’s more of a show of gratitude than a money making venture.
I feel that as long as I haven’t actually made any promises or accepted any incentives then I am beholden to no one and can drop my projects as soon as something more interesting comes along. (For the same reason, I tend to keep most of my projects secret, in case I decide to stop working on them.)
Ironically this is actually one of the things that makes me reluctant to even accept donations. If I accepted donations, I think I’d feel bad if someone had given me money because they liked something I was working on and then I decided to stop working on it for whatever reason.
The main problems would be:
Unless we acquired more forum members, it would probably be the same people winning every time
It might put less experienced programmers off entering because
They’ll think the judging is going to be more strict if there’s a monetary prize
They’ll think a monetary prize will attract a lot more competant programmers, meaning the competition will be tougher
It could get complicated if there are teams of people working on jam entries
That could potentially be mitigated by having a less serious, less competative jam run alongside the one giving out money/prizes.
(Personally speaking, prizes actually make me slightly less likely to enter a jam, but I expect I’m the exception rather than the rule.)
Programming indoors in 30°C heat isn’t much fun either to be honest. :P
If the game has really good production values (for a hobby game) and I play it a lot I might be thinking it is fair to donate few euros, but I think that is not the usual case (for me at least). My own games are made as a hobby and I am having fun in making them I would like to keep the dev time short so I do not get bored. I do not expect anyone to pay for them. I rather would like to get feedback and comments.
For me personally I enjoy making games as a hobby, but PtaD is so far the first project in all my years that I can actually finish and have a well polished game. However, I wouldn’t put the Pokitto version beyond a paywall, at most for a larger game like that I’d do a pay what you want model with 0 being a perfectly acceptable amount. For making money on my game development (as being an indie dev is one of my big career goals with game dev) I’m liking dev on the Pokitto due to it’s forced limitations and then releasing the Pokitto version as free and open source while making an “enhanced” version (mostly just upscaling or gimick effects like making it look like you’re playing it on an old style TV) for other releasing on other platforms commercially.
I view such a donation system as more of, “Hey I really like this game you made and would love to see more great games for you so let me buy you a coffee.” After all programmers are just machines that convert caffeine into code right
At the very least it would be really cool to show on a user’s profile how many games they’ve released and the total like count of their games. But I think this might be beyond Discourse’s built-in capabilities.
It should be relatively straightforward to count a user’s submissions to the games category, and tally the likes from that. Theoretically it could probably be done by just scraping the pages with a crawler.
Though it’s not the most sophisticated way of doing things, so the information obtained from doing so might not be particularly useful.
I would like to keep the dev time short so I do not get bored. I do not expect anyone to pay for them. I rather would like to get feedback and comments.
