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Death Egg

Should Doomworld, other Doom sites, source port creators, etc. use Patreon?

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I made this a separate thread from the one about Sgt. Mark IV because that focuses on a mod creator and the legality surrounding mods using propriety assets and others work.

I've seen at least a few sites around the Doom community that use PayPal donations to help keep them afloat, Realm667 springing to mind, along with ECWolf in the form of Super Noah's Ark 3D purchases. Patreon seems like it could be very beneficial for the Doom community to cover expenses, and I'm surprised that as of so far very few, if any besides Sgt. Mark IV, have taken advantage of it. There have been discussions on ZDoom's forums, for example, of if they'll be moving servers, and the subsequent costs of keeping it open. It's been estimated that ZDoom alone has roughly 9,000 fans or so iirc, and I'm sure some of them would love to support their port of choice. Similarly, Doomworld could likely benefit from a similar setup, and perhaps people developing entirely new games on the Doom engine could be using it as well.

The issue I've seen mentioned is that there could be legal troubles involved with this. The only thing that I could see really being an issue would be GZDoom and QZDoom having that non-GPL code in it, but I don't know how big a problem that would cause.

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I don't see problem with it personally, outside of the legal ones. If someone manages to stay afloat by doing what they love with help of the supporters, that's more power to them - it is actually pretty wonderful.
Of course, there are concerns about those content-creators paywalling their material just to gather more patreons - and that's pretty damn shitty.
I can't speak on the legal issues, since I am not a lawyer in any shape or form - but my guess regarding the non-GPL code is that the patreon is not really paying for the software using the code.

I do have a distaste for Patreon, though. Even if it was legal for me to get one ( to support my studies, art, programming stuff etc. ), I probably wouldn't do one for myself. I'd just feel wrong for taking money and potentially just screwing about.
Neither do I like Sgt., but really, he can have a patreon if he wants - although the problem of stolen assets remains ( unless it has been solved ).

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I accept donations for ReMooD/ChocoRenderLimits and I have received donations, which I highly appreciate. Currently times are a bit tough for me so these donations help pay the cost of the server and the domain name. I do not feel like a scumbag accepting these donations at all, in fact I am happy that the projects I work on make people happy.

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It's fine. If people are willing to pay people to make Doom stuff then all the more power to them.

I don't see why there would be any legal issues with this. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

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If it's optional, who really cares? Cards Against Humanity got hundreds of thousands of donations to dig a hole for literally no reason. Let authors ask for donations, but placing modifications behind a pay wall is both morally and legally wrong in most cases.

Not my best comparison, but if an author does bigger and greater things with some freely given money, is that such a bad deal? With Doom WADS, mods, and ports being so high tech, and the standards being so high, your average user isn't going to break new ground without money being involved.

I hope we never see paid mods, stolen content, or shitty practices, and surely these things are inevitable when money is involved. Being one of the oldest, and hopefully most mature, standing gaming communities, I trust this new culture to work out for the better of our community.


Sent from my phone, having serious PC issues, ignore formatting and spElling, pls.

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Ask for donations all you want, that money is not going to matter when you go to hell and have to fight cacodemons anyway. It will be just you and them.

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Memfis said:

Ask for donations all you want, that money is not going to matter when you go to hell and have to fight cacodemons anyway. It will be just you and them.


Ammo is expensive. Not sure what the space credits exchange rate is, but I'd rather be prepared.

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Since I already have a job, I don't need extra $$$ and I don't want to bring attention to my Doom hobby by asking for donations. What do you think I would do with the money? Buy servers to automate my workflow? Distribute AI Doom on HPC units? Sounds fancy, but it's too early to ask for funding.

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I fall somewhat into the "starving artist" category, as my work hours are primarily focused on content creation and marketing. I'm thinking of getting a Patreon to help out while I try to make a decent living off my art. Including game modding as part of what I do is questionable. I'm tempted because I feel that if I were receiving donations related to Doom modding, I would feel comfortable with say, working tirelessly to help someone or a team with textures, testing, mapping, etc., without feeling like I wasn't working. In my case, the money wouldn't be superfluous, it would be essential to paying bills and rent and whatnot.

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I'm OK with supporting to maintenance of forums and other sites, though source ports is a bit harier. Outside of maintaining masters servers for C/S ports (Oda and Zand and whatever else may be out there), how would a source port team split donations? Whilst I like the idea of contributions to a source port it seems like something that would cause a lot of arguments, or at least a lot of grumbling.

In addition, how would this fit in with an open-source model? If a user were to successfully make a pull request containing a large contribution to a port, but had no plans on joining the port's team, would they get any money? What would the legality even be of trying to give money to one-time contributors?

EDIT: I'm OK with modders having patreons and the like; not much more, if anything, to say there.

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printz said:

Since I already have a job, I don't need extra $$$ and I don't want to bring attention to my Doom hobby by asking for donations. What do you think I would do with the money? Buy servers to automate my workflow? Distribute AI Doom on HPC units? Sounds fancy, but it's too early to ask for funding.



How about working less and investing that free time in Doom programming...? ;)

Altazimuth said:

In addition, how would this fit in with an open-source model? If a user were to successfully make a pull request containing a large contribution to a port, but had no plans on joining the port's team, would they get any money? What would the legality even be of trying to give money to one-time contributors?


Moral issues aside, where's the problem? The GPL expressly allows making money off the code and if I give someone money for having done some work it is their responsibility to properly declare it as income.

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Graf Zahl said:

Moral issues aside, where's the problem? The GPL expressly allows making money off the code and if I give someone money for having done some work it is their responsibility to properly declare it as income.


Well with legality clarified, the question still remains of what would happen with one-time contributors. How would you value a one-time contribution? Would it just be easier to not bother with paying contributors until they're made a member of the source port's team? Divvying up money just seems a rather tedious task, since there are so many parameters to consider when trying to value one person's contributions to a port in a given month against another's; and this becomes more complex when considering non-code contributions that are still important (such as adding or improving documentation on the port's wiki), if considering them at all.

I'm not skeptical of the benefits, but find myself unable to see a clear solution to splitting money. I want to make it exceptionally clear that I would be more than happy if somebody worked out a fair system for this (which there must be given there are professional teams with diverse roles that all get paid different amounts) I'd be more than supportive, but of course "fair" is subjective.

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