Will a 'donate to game' system work? [POLL]

tochicool

Instead of forcing players to give money, why not make it voluntary? If the game is as popular and the players love their beloved game so much, to keep it alive they should be about to give money to the conmany to support it. It may sound brilliant in theory but will it work?

 

tochicool

Would you donate to a game to keep it alive?

tochicool

How much would you donate to a game at once?

tochicool

If you could, how often would you donate?

tochicool

Maybe, if the game is popular enough

Maybe, if it's amazing

$10 - $30

Monthly

Mystralz

I'm sorry I can't afford to play investor to donate to a particular company for 10 years in hopes that the rest of the small community will choose to do the same. Which in most cases is extremely overpriced as high as like 5 times.

Example: League of Legends characters are 10 dollars a piece. League of legends has atleast 50 characters. A full 5 year project game costs 50 dollars. I can get other full games for less then 20 dollars that are worthwhile to play such as monday night combat. I would feel alot more comfortably just shelling out a reasonable fee for something that is obviously not comparative to the 50-60 common release price. If it is not triple A i will also never pay a subscription fee, there's just way too many good games to choose from to occupy my time.

My best advice for people making games that they feel need to go the charity cash shop route, is go back to the drawing board. Make a product that people will consider triple A, if you want to make a killing in today's market. Now you may say your inexperienced but, I've seen some examples here and there of new companies making games good enough to sell at standard retail prices and even sometimes adding subscriptions.

This makes me feel that supporting the sea of indie games with potential is a great waste of time and money. In fact if you ever do make a decent amount of strictly charity when you don't really deserve that amount that even further reduces the worth of my investment as money does not directly make your game making skills better. One may even think that it makes your skills worse as your analysts would tell you that what your doing is working so why change for the better.

tochicool

Originally posted by SaltonMilton

I'm sorry I can't afford to play investor to donate to a particular company for 10 years in hopes that the rest of the small community will choose to do the same. Which in most cases is extremely overpriced as high as like 5 times. Example: League of Legends characters are 10 dollars a piece. League of legends has atleast 50 characters. A full 5 year project game costs 50 dollars. I can get other full games for less then 20 dollars that are worthwhile to play such as monday night combat. I would feel alot more comfortably just shelling out a reasonable fee for something that is obviously not comparative to the 50-60 common release price. If it is not triple A i will also never pay a subscription fee, there's just way too many good games to choose from to occupy my time. My best advice for people making games that they feel need to go the charity cash shop route, is go back to the drawing board. Make a product that people will consider triple A, if you want to make a killing in today's market. Now you may say your inexperienced but, I've seen some examples here and there of new companies making games good enough to sell at standard retail prices and even sometimes adding subscriptions. This makes me feel that supporting the sea of indie games with potential is a great waste of time and money. In fact if you ever do make a decent amount of strictly charity when you don't really deserve that amount that even further reduces the worth of my investment as money does not directly make your game making skills better. One may even think that it makes your skills worse as your analysts would tell you that what your doing is working so why change for the better.

Perhaps an option whilst donating would be to fill out a survey om the pros and cons of the game. Why you donated and where you want your money to go to...

Metentso

I would  donate around 10$ monthly for a good MMO, in theory. If i see i'm the only idiot donation i might stop. And this is what would make the system fail, maybe.

Toferio

There is a donation system already in place for many mmos, it is called vanity items cash shop. Want to "donate"? Sure, donate 10 bucks and get a cool pet as a reward. However I doubt a game would be able to survive on that alone, only as a starting budget on kickstarter or the like.

mmoguy43

For an MMO I think this is a terrible plan. But for a small SP/MP game like Minecraft, maybe and only if it gets popular. I can't imagine you'd have enough good developers that are capable of making an MMO (better than MO) that have their job on the line every month hoping for a donation. Their job security is bad enough as it is.

VowOfSilence

This poll is kinda flawed. Everything depends on what kind of game we're talking here. Dwarf Fortress is indeed based on donations only. For indie or open source games, this could easily work. For AAA-tiles that cost up to 100 millions, it would never work imo.

Dewm

I dont' think it would work.

And at least in my case, I wouldn't mind donating to a good game that I liked. and it would prob be $10-30 but my biggest deal is I'd forget. 

 

And I think alot of people would be like "meh some one else will donate" and then just keep playing for free.

Gravarg

For some item mall games it's sorta like donating.  I've given out my share of money just so I have a certain look.  I'd kinda consider that donating, like to goodwill.  I get a recipt from goodwill that i can write off on my taxes   In games I just get too look how I want to.

Reklaw

If donating to a game is it's only option many games in this genre will not survive cause we have to live with "the want it all and want it now for free" type of player that have come to this genre.

So NO will not work with today's generation of new comers to games.

WhiteLantern

So, you are basically describing the F2P model: play the game and buy stuff if you want to. Right?

Teiraa

Donations are certainly sufficient to keep servers running (no cash shop needed). Some people are running gameservers this way.

But it takes a lot more money to develop games. You cant feed a dev team for years to create a future MMO game just by donations.

Thekandy

This model would be relying far too much on the goodwill of people, most of whom would see nothing wrong with just playing the game for what it is worth and then never look back.

It's a nice thought, but the reality is that only few people would be so generous, the rest would just welcome the free ride.