Do donations work for arma modders?

[.kju 3244]

Intention

The intention of this thread is share experiences of modders asking for donations (via paypal or patreon for example) and raising awareness on this topic.

Obviously the pros and cons of donations or alternatives, or why people ask for donations in the first place can be discussed as well.

Why donations at all?

From the user perspective it can be one way of many to show your appreciation.

For the modder it can be considered as compensation to some degree for the effort put into it for example.

My personal experience

Pretext: You can read my reasons for asking donations in other thread.

Mid august I started a patreon campaign lasting for five months and now having stopped the experiment with the end of 2014.

Patroen is essentially donations - however people can commit to donate on a regular basis; yet also still do it just once or drop out at any point.

To get transparency into the outcome, here is a summary:

(all details in the two images at the end of the post)

Patreon:

• 40 people participated with 16 for all 5 months and 8 for 4 months
  
• Almost all signed up within the first few days (31)
  

• Top 5 overall donations: 2x 100$, 1x 80$, 2x 75$
  
• Average per person overall: 27,11$
  
• Average per person per month: 5,42$
  

• 12% of the people on average didn't fulfill their pledge (at first just 4% up to 25% in the fifth month)
  
• With resulted in 16% of money on average not committed (starting with just 4% and ending with 32%)
  

• Total of 1.169$ processed (234$ per month on average)
  
• Actual payout after all fees: 717€ (82% of pledged / lost 18% from fees) - with 143€ per month
  (Fees: incoming transaction, 5% patreon, outgoing transaction, exchange rate)
  

• Average work hours per month: 174h
  (1 year = 365,25 days = 52,18 weeks; 1 month = 52,18/12 weeks = 4,35 weeks; 4,35 * 40 = 174h)
  
• Average hourly wage based on the patreon income: 0,82€/hour
  
• This is without any social benefits (holidays, health insurance, etc) and taxes
  

Paypal:

• Largely for IFA3 work (based on feedback/comments)
  
• Highest donations (20€) from Russia (2x), Ukraine and Netherlands
  
• 6 donations prior to patreon campaign, 6 during the campaign
  
• 136€ in total donated (6,7% fees) and 127€ received
  

Conclusion

The individual amount of most people has been very generous and the overall average per month is fairly high as well.

The overall very low number of donators make this attempt unsuccessful.

At least in most high wage countries this is way off what is required to sustain a living from such income.

The high fees associated with patreon as non US citizen / dollar user don't help either.

Take away

• Most people don't seem to see a reason or need to donate as "it worked fine without so far"
  
• Most likely many people are still hesitant to sign up to paypal/credit cards to make financial transactions on the internet
  
• Small donations of 1-2$ seem like a very bad deal due to the high fees from paypal/banks (up to 40%)
  
• And as such are not done(?)
  
• While it is possible to reach the hardcore/long standing (forum) fans
  
• It seems very hard to reach the wider player community or people in communities/groups/clans
  
• Putting the text asking for donations into readmes, release posts, forum signatures, content websites, etc don't seem to reach many people or can convince them
  
• Regardless most donation queries seem to get overlooked easily; it would had to put in the game or the platforms/applications people get the content from.
  
• Even complex project or/and with lots of content most people take for granted being available for free
  
• Not much thought is put into thinking about how the user made content has been made in the first place
  
• The considerable effort behind most projects/user made content is non obvious to most people
  
• Finally modding is seen as a hobby regardless of effort and skill involved
  

Notes on patreon

• Platform looks decent
  
• Setup to present yourself and your work is well made
  
• Can be used to inform mostly your donators about releases
  
• Managing area of the page is rather weak and confusing
  
• Rather bad in informing users about updates and plans for their website and system
  
• FAQ is rather confusing, badly structure and changes are not highlighted
  
• Taking just 5% is quite good, but keep transaction fees in mind
  
• Payout is quick and reliable
  

They still have much to improve, find ways to reduce the fees overall, yet its a decent platform.

Donation details

Patreon:

Paypal:

[theevancat 277]

I personally don't ask for donations because I personally don't feel that it's right for me to do so. This is my hobby, I do it for fun. I don't expect to get paid, I don't want to get paid. I put in hard work because I enjoy it and because I enjoy seeing people use and enjoy themselves with my mods. That's my reward, really.

[Feint 137]

I agree with TheEvanCat in that I do this as a hobby and enjoy getting good feedback from people who use my addons and mods. However, I have found that people do enjoy being able to say thanks through a financial contribution. I regularly interact with people who raise millions of dollars for non-profits and they have informed me that giving people the opportunity to say thank you in this way is a great way of building a strong community and getting people invested in what you are doing. Through that reinforcement, the people doing the work are spurred on to keep going and try harder, in order to honor those contributions. In turn, the people making the donations feel a sense of generosity and are happy that they helped contribute to something that many of them enjoy greatly.

I do have a donations section on my website (feintgames.com) but I don't really promote it outside of my website's footer. I just use a simple PayPal interface where people can give as much or as little as they want. So far I've received 3 donations in my years of making it available totaling $30. That's more than I ever thought I would get and I'm very grateful for the financial and moral support.

One other time, I did give incentives to anyone who joined my facebook page. I gave out a pack of screenshots for addons and mods I was working on which I didn't make available anywhere else. No money changed hands, but people did give up their time to go to facebook and click Like on my page. I think these sorts of things are all a part of building a community. It may seem self-serving on the surface, but I'm glad there are different methods of direct communication between addon-makers and users of those addons.

[roshnak 41]

I guess my main question is, what is your end goal here? You mention things like social benefits, hourly wages, and how modding is still seen as a hobby. Is it your intention to try to make modding Arma into a career? A sole or primary source of income? Because if you are, then asking donations definitely seems like the wrong way to go about it.

I can understand if you love Arma and love modding it and want to be able to do it more, and I understand the time investment and skill involved in creating high quality content for games, but the simple fact of the matter is that, with very few exceptions (FSX, X-Plane), modding is a hobby. I kind of doubt that the problem with your donations is that people didn't know that you were asking for them. I suspect that the only way to make any substantial amount of money would be to just outright charge for your addons.

But if your goal is to just raise awareness for donation links so that modders can make a few more dollars, and not so that they can feed themselves or pay rent, then perhaps you could talk to addon hosting sites like Armaholic about adding large-ish donation banners to download pages. It would probably pick up a few more donators from the pool of people who get their addons from offsite and don't visit the forums.

[fabio_chavez 103]

I personally don't ask for donations because I personally don't feel that it's right for me to do so. This is my hobby, I do it for fun. I don't expect to get paid, I don't want to get paid. I put in hard work because I enjoy it and because I enjoy seeing people use and enjoy themselves with my mods. That's my reward, really.

whats the volume of your releases?

[Rydygier 1309]

However, I have found that people do enjoy being able to say thanks through a financial contribution.

Indeed. Once I've put paypal donate link to the few threads, because people requested availability of such way of appreciation. And as such appreciation form IMO it works pretty well. Who wants - can. Nothing more though. Of course evaluation depends on the country. What's nothing biggy for US citizen, may be quite noticeable amount of money in another country. So no one should hesitate with donation for the reason "it's too small, what I can effort". :)

From March 2014 till now I got in summary 134 $ (PayPal share not counted) in 11 donations (max 20$), where 8 was done in the first month, what points out the visibility problem. All those money, exactly 134 $ more, I ever expected for my hobby work, was noticeably useful, I have to say. Not need to add, I'm grateful for every penny.

Of course all depends, how many people are interested and want to appreciate this way work of given modder.

I'm inclined to the opinion, so main problem is visibility. Not even on the donation stage, but on simple discovery of existence. It was in the A2 times, the more now, with Workshop "junkyard", mostly for the missions, but not only - so cool and obviously hard worked content disappeared in oblivion never getting fair recognition counted by views/downloads/feedback, not mentioning about any other kind of appreciation. If there is like 5 mods and 20 custom missions for a game, it's not a problem. But for amount of content generated for Arma series so far logistical/PR aspect of making worthy projects visible to wide audience rises to the rank of a real challenge.

As for my personal user-side experience - even with this amount of good stuff, I'm awared of, I will never have enough time to even decently try half of it. Almost 2300 Arma 3 play hours and most of the projects, that excited me at release still awaits its turn. Well, true, most of that time was spent not for actual playing though.

Edited January 13, 2015 by Rydygier

[Defunkt 431]

As dedicated and knowledgeable as you are on this series and as much as that means that you will generally execute to a much higher level than the vast majority of people releasing mods, the vast majority of people who consume those mods aren't really that particular. In essence you're vying for recognition and support against people who do this for free (an expectation enshrined by BI's license) and the 'value added' isn't the sum of all of your efforts but rather the difference between the execution of your release and the next one that appears to be offering something similar. Even given a more discerning audience that's a slim platform on which to seek voluntary donations amounting to a living wage especially given ArmA is something of a niche title. People don't tend to place that much importance on the configs and scripting behind a release, the thing that can really loosen wallets is new models ('ooooh, shiny'), the rest they assume (rightly or wrongly) will just sort itself out one way or another.

[naizarak 4]

bohemia needs to subsidize and sponsor the leading content creators of our community instead of pocketing revenue earned off their work. the recent a3life fiasco demonstrated the extent of their concern about modders

[seba1976 98]

bohemia needs to subsidize and sponsor the leading content creators of our community instead of pocketing revenue earned off their work. the recent a3life fiasco demonstrated the extent of their concern about modders

Maybe BIS knows, that people will want to do it for themselves, and then want to share it with the rest. Wanting to make a living out of modding is awkward. That's what jobs are for. People who does mod, does it because they like it so much that enjoy devoting their free time to it, regardless of any other considerations. If someone can't do it in those terms, he should certainly stop.

[nodunit 397]

bohemia needs to subsidize and sponsor the leading content creators of our community instead of pocketing revenue earned off their work. the recent a3life fiasco demonstrated the extent of their concern about modders

Nice as that sounds I'm pretty sure the life mods would takeover the top of the market.

[Chairborne 2594]

I want to make a rather personal note here and share my experience about donations.

I was asked multiple times for my source content by CUP members, like many other modders, or if i wanted to join CUP directly.

Aside from the fact that i'm jealous of my work like any other person :) and even when i can i just prefer to work on my own (but that is just how i do things, i envision something and i want it to be the way i want, and when you work with other people you have to make compromises of course) i kept away from CUP for a very specific reason.

And that is, you (and by you i mean very specifically YOU, Kju) wanted to make a living out of a community effort that would have just had your face on it and where everybody else was just riding in the back without seeing a single penny.

I took a look at your patreon page just out of curiosity and there was a ridiculous amount of money (3% ?) offered every month to a different modder for their contribution to CUP, or whatever project that was back at the time.

It never really felt like a COMMUNITY project, but rather a "give your stuff to me so i can make a living out of it and maybe, eventually, i'll give you the breadcrumbs of a month's earning" and you weren't even that shy about asking for money, your signature was very clear about it.

However small my contribution could've been (i certainly don't have the skills nor the experience you have) i would have NEVER allowed someone else to gain money off my back and off something i made for fun in my spare time.

Now you can argue that CUP is just a small part of what you did over the years, but it would've also been one of the biggest projects to impact the whole Arma 3 community, like how AiATP did, and that means, if your project of making a living out of modding became a success, it would've been one of the major sources of your income for the time being.

However i don't want to be an ingrateful SOB, i still play with AiATP and i respect the time and dedication you put in your other projects, and i really think it's a shame that CUP is (from what i've heard) shutting down.

Moving to a less "personal" note, the others who replied here made valid points too. In this community, and the vast majority of modding communities, everything is made for free out of modders' spare time and you always have to confront yourself with other modders that deliver comparable stuff.

The only way to get proper recognition to a point where you can make a living out of it would be to deliver an incredibly huge quantity of assets and mods and keep them at an exceptionally high quality standard.

That is simply not feasible by a single person.

I do modding just for fun and because i like to see my projects in game, community recognition and donations are just a plus considering i dedicate this very little time.

[evromalarkey 150]

@Chairborne now that's really not fair. CUP really isn't about money and kju never gain money from it. I don't know where you get that CUP is shutting down, that's nonsense.

[Chairborne 2594]

kju never gain money from it

Just because it didn't go the way he planned doesn't mean he didn't want to.

His signature and patreon page were very clear about it.

Even when i was asked to join CUP the thing many told me was to "speak to Kju", so he clearly was the main reference point for the project (or the rest of the team tried really hard to make it look that way :D ).

Most if not all documentation or activities i found when i looked into it had Kju's name all over them.

I don't doubt the rest of you didn't do it for the money and if you think i meant that, i really didn't.

I don't even know who else is part of the team aside from two italian guys.

I don't know where you get that CUP is shutting down, that's nonsense.

As i said, it's rumors. I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong.

[andersson 285]

If I'm not wrong kju never asked for donations for CUP, but he did for AiA. Work on AiA will benefit CUP, but they are not the same.

I just had a look through the different threads to be sure and I couldn't find anything regarding CUP and money donations. C stands for Community and it looks that way.

[Chairborne 2594]

If I'm not wrong kju never asked for donations for CUP, but he did for AiA. Work on AiA will benefit CUP, but they are not the same.

I just had a look through the different threads to be sure and I couldn't find anything regarding CUP and money donations. C stands for Community and it looks that way.

How can you determine that donations came specifically from one project and not the other?

He was the main developer (see above), he clearly stated in his signature to "help him make a living out of Arma modding", what tells you he didn't want to get money from CUP as well?

What difference does it make to ask for donations in the thread or in the signature? It's still there in the end.

[alduric 10]

How can you determine that donations came specifically from one project and not the other?

He was the main developer (see above), he clearly stated in his signature to "help him make a living out of Arma modding", what tells you he didn't want to get money from CUP as well?

What difference does it make to ask for donations in the thread or in the signature? It's still there in the end.

Well, Chairborne make a solid point.

[andersson 285]

I see your point, he asks for donations to work as a modder full time. But the way I interpret his intentions was that the test was to work with AiA and that's why this can be found at the first AiA post: "Note: I will ask for donations to fund this project. More on this very soon."

He started CUP and is very much involved in it, but nowhere is it stated that he will take money for it. That is a true community project. So even if he would get donations to make his life go around it would be for AiA, then I guess he can work on CUP on his free time as any modder.

There is a difference in supporting him in AiA and him as a general modder. If he would take donations and stop working on AiA it would be wrong as people were donating to get AiA. Yes, difficult to follow up how much time he spends on what project though.. edit: And as you point out, maybe a bit strange if people donate, as to any modder, for other involvements. Where is the line between "donations" and "income"?

I can't answer for kju, but that is the way I understand it. Anyway it looks like it didn't work out and as he had promised transparency he gave us the numbers. Fair enough imho.

Edited January 13, 2015 by andersson

[SavageCDN 231]

I don't have a problem with mod-makers asking for money. I don't really like being spammed by it (Bornholm anyone?) but having link on their page, etc is fine by me.

As a donator I think Patreon is a great idea.. $5 - $10 month (for me) is easy and I can't forget about it as it comes out automagically. I like donating actually.. it allows me to thank those I feel have put a lot of work into whatever project it is I'm supporting. Not being smart enough to produce my own content this is one of the ways I can 'pay back' the community.

[tupolov 520]

ALiVE has had a number of generous donations (and we thank everybody that has donated!), that has paid for the cost of our ALiVE Web based DB for a few months. However, the first 8 months or so has been covered by the devs, so actually its cost us a little bit to develop ALiVE!

We all do it for fun, for free, with no expectation of commercial reward. However, we also specified a license preventing others from gaining commercial benefit from our hard work.

Now if someone wanted to sponsor our server hosting costs (for the Web/DB) then great!

I also personally contributed to CUP (and continue to). Its not shutting down and it is certainly a true community project. No one on the project is in it for money, including Kju.

[Gunter Severloh 4054]

Want to share my own experience with donations.

For me all the donations I have received were through my website for Iron front:

http://www.missionrepository.com/

I'd have to say that in the past 1-2 years I've had about $150+ in donations, and most of them were coming from 2 donators.

Quick story, i built the site to host all of iron front's missions, and mods for the community, assuming most of the community know me for my compilingaholicism (if thats even a word) :o

I seen a need in the community in 2012, considering that all the missions and links were a complete clusterf*ck as there was alot of missions and it was seriously

a pain in the ass to locate a working link for a given mission, i spent 3 weeks researching and locating them all, and building a website to put them all in one place,

at same time I was doing this with I44 too.

Point is I built the site because I felt the urge to help the community, i felt a need there for Iron front community as it was going downhill because of all the politics behind it,

and it not being supported anymore, the devs left, ect,.

I only have a donate button on the site that goes to paypal, and all donations I get go towards helping me pay for the website's subscription, so to those whom donated

I would assume felt that I was doing them probably a big favor for locating all the missions, hosting all the files, mods, ect,. and providing them in such a way that they

are neatly categorized, and the download was simple and direct without all the shenanigans you get with some hosting sites.

For that at least I did it for the community, and not so much for myself, but its....solving an emotional issue when i see files or things like missions

information, files ect,. spread all over creation confuses the hell out of me, and from there I wont do anything until its all in front of me and organized, I HATE CLUTTER!

As for my mod series I did all those for myself, I have no thought in the back of my mind of expecting someone to donate, if someone does, then great, it helps me pay the

bill for the site, but thats it, other then that I dont care.

I build the mod for myself, and then feel the need to share the excitement of what i created, I think quite a number of modders can say something similar,

I enjoy the feedback from the mods, but I also enjoy making something that really helps another player in the community enjoy their game that much more,

for me its community, the money is just an unexpected benefit.

[theevancat 277]

whats the volume of your releases?

I don't think I quite understand what you mean.

[chrisb 196]

I have, on one occasion, donated quite a large amount, but only because the mod made the difference to the game that I really wanted to see. Plus I wanted to help ensure it continued forward.

Other than that, I have done small donations here and there and also helped in a fund raise for someone needing something to help them continue modding.

My view is that the makers of any type of content for the game, could charge for their work. But I understand that this will probably never happen, so donation remains the only option. But its an option few use really, I would think, its quite easy to overlook a donation button and not bother. I know we shouldn't, but its just the way it is.

If BI could maybe introduce something that built a framework for modders, to enable them to receive payment for their work (scale related), then I would support that. But its not really a business type thing to do, once a business gets involved doing that type of thing, then it only leads to upset, disappointment and arguments.

Not sure how it could move forward, other than donations.

However, completely game changing mods, should get recognition from BI. Some re-new the game in such a way, that players continue playing and new players come in. This does need to be recognised by BI in some way, look at DayZ (:rolleyes:). There has been much better content made for the game (imo), that has never been given the support or appreciation, that it maybe should have been given.

[St. Jimmy 272]

Nice post. Too bad that there weren't many Patreons :( I feel bit bad about my $2,50/month when the avg was over $5 :D

[Dwarden 1125]

thanks for sharing this interesting statistics and details with us

[djotacon 190]

thanks for sharing this interesting statistics and details with us

Instead readind statistics may be more useful to open a web store to sell our creations to the public. Right now STEAM is earn money "by the face" with all of our works and forcing us to accept abusive agreement if we want publish with them.

A proper web store can get to all the modders an mission developers get money legally and do not beg for some money for work more than deserved.