Do donations work for arma modders?

[icebreakr 3157]

Interesting. Well, personally I can't wait for the competiton to be over so the real community can come back together and make some awesome projects - not for money or fame but for fun and good karma ;)

[seba1976 98]

Interesting. Well, personally I can't wait for the competiton to be over so the real community can come back together and make some awesome projects - not for money or fame but for fun and good karma ;)

I'm really glad to hear you say that. Thank you buddy :).

[nuxil 2]

Interesting. Well, personally I can't wait for the competiton to be over so the real community can come back together and make some awesome projects - not for money or fame but for fun and good karma ;)

Its over. We just have to wait for the winners to be announced. So im not sure whats stopping the "real" community to start modding again.

Donation can be a good & bad thing. i myself have no mods i have released to the public but i have received some donation for my tool i made.

I appreciate the donations i been given, but sometimes i feel its a burden especially when the donation text say something like:

Here is 20 buck.. can you please include this & that in next version.

It feels like they want to buy a feature with donation and i in someway feel obligated to look at the requested feature since there is money invloved.

People should donate because they want to. i think its wrong when people donate because they want you to include this & that in the mod/tool/whatever.

[luki 53]

Intresting thread....

I'm modding in arma/ofp since more than 10 years, and i do it because i like it, its a hobby, its passion. I never asked for donations and always rejected them.

On the other side im missing something like paid user content/dlc, i would pay without question for quality addons and support the original creator.

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.

Something in that direction is missing and in exchange we have thieves and people profit from others work far outside the arma boundaries.

If BI don't provide some clever different way for mod distribution, i see no change in that.

Interesting. Well, personally I can't wait for the competiton to be over so the real community can come back together and make some awesome projects - not for money or fame but for fun and good karma ;)

I think the competition made one thing clear, its a lot of work to mod for arma3 :)

Edited January 14, 2015 by Atsche

[inlesco 233]

Come on, people, deeply somewhere, everybody wants to receive [at the very least] a small donation / fortune. And then there's Life mods for A2/A3, at a different level of capitalism and greed.

On MANW, I find it was a great time to see who's producing words only and who's producing actual content, no matter the circumstances.

[granQ 293]

"money ruins everything" - socialistQ

[eggbeast 3673]

well i'm sorry to see kju retiring.

we gave him our three months solid work converting all of the A2 aircraft, and CUP will benefit from that, along with our real weapons configs for vehicles and aircraft.

this is the kind of thing we as community can put together, never mind money. However, if a person wants to have a donate button that's up to them. i don't mind at all. It's not the same as A3L making $100,000 from selling stolen models from other games and charging people to access a mod containing content by a multitude of oblivious unpaid authors... and then showing up in these very forums going on about how cool their mod is...

good leadership is a rarity in any community and kju will be missed.

[Rydygier 1309]

Its over. We just have to wait for the winners to be announced. So im not sure whats stopping the "real" community to start modding again.

Did it actually stopped during MANW? Or is stopped now? I didn't noticed that at all, but I easily could miss something. IMO MANW not only not reduced anything, but delivered so many new mods for the community. Are MANW entries in some way worse, than usual community output out of MANW?

good karma

Not all believe in karma. :P Fun is most important. But it was discussed in another thread - modding takes time. Probably in A3 more time is needed, than earlier. At least I heard such thing from modellers. Currently you can mod for fun and work for money. The more latter, the less the first. Personally I wouldn't have nothing against just to mod for fun AND money. Money for hard work, and quality modding is hard work, aren't bad, spoiling thing. Especially for those, that for any reason haven't regular job, so have lots time for modding. As long the money not reduce fun aspect of course, which can easily happen, as with money expectations, rush and stress often come.

Edited January 14, 2015 by Rydygier

[seba1976 98]

Paying for content is not what .kju wanted, and it would probably not stopping him from leaving. When you don't do it because you like it, it's hard to keep doing this kind of thing. I personally think paid content would be a disaster for the community, even attract the wrong people.

[old_painless 182]

I have also donated a small amount to .kju it will be sad to see him stop. What I would suggest for someone as clearly talented as him who wants to work with arma and make a living of it is to apply for one of the many openings that BI has. Most likely it will not be a problem to work off-site if that is an issue. That would be a win-win for everybody

[seba1976 98]

I have also donated a small amount to .kju it will be sad to see him stop. What I would suggest for someone as clearly talented as him who wants to work with arma and make a living of it is to apply for one of the many openings that BI has. Most likely it will not be a problem to work off-site if that is an issue. That would be a win-win for everybody

He cited BI "shifting priorities" as one of his (many) reasons to leave, so I don't see him working for them. But hey, when you want money right?

[fabio_chavez 103]

Kju made the most valuable contributions to arma 3, which across the board, adressed many of the core problems of a very flawed game, he invested so much time into user support that i sometimes suspected that he has cloned himself to be able to deliver 24/7 technical service. He is a profound encyclopaedia shareing his knowledge for free with inexhaustible patience to anyone who seeked his advice. Many talented and dedicated modders gravitated towards him for he was an amplifyer, multiplicator and accelerator that gave individuals the opportunity to contribute their work to something bigger than each one would have been able to acheive on his own. He tried to find a way to make his passion sustainable, an endevour on which at any point, he was 100% open and honest about and voluntariness was the premise (even if he would have succeeded, he would continously be accountable to his donors, which obviously makes the hostile accusations thrown at him here by some (weaselly backstabbers) a farce).

[mistyronin 1181]

My two cents:

IMHO donations should be something unexpected not some kind of business plan, if not they lose all their meaning.

I personally don't feel comfortable asking for donations, and try to avoid it unless it's for a certain and clear goal. For instance asking for help to pay infrastructure stuff needed for the creation process, as some times the mod creator is simply unable to afford/keep with it ( but then again, the donated money would be directed only to that specific end ).

Tho I also recognize that when I really enjoy a mod, I feel like I'm in debt with the creator and I want to reward him with a donation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the idea of transforming amateur mod-making into a "pro-business", but IMO selling third-party content would be the correct way to do it, not donations. But obviously when I pay for something I become entitled to strong criticism and have some quality expectations.

[Chairborne 2594]

Kju made the most valuable contributions to arma 3, which across the board, adressed many of the core problems of a very flawed game, he invested so much time into user support that i sometimes suspected that he has cloned himself to be able to deliver 24/7 technical service. He is a profound encyclopaedia shareing his knowledge for free with inexhaustible patience to anyone who seeked his advice.

It was part of his effort as detailed in his patreon page, too.

You seem to have all the answers so answer this: where does the love for the community end and where does the monetary interest start?

As soon as he decided to pull back from "making a living out of modding" (as he himself described it) he also decided to pull back from all his other projects. Was all his recent work made with money in mind?

And even after all of this you still miss the point of what i said.

As long as it's his time, his knowledge, his creation he is free to do whatever he wants and gain all the money he wants from it, like everybody else does and i am in no way criticizing this. It's a very different thing when you want to get donations money out of other people's work (in this case content donated to one of his projects by the community) and explicitly make a living out of it like Kju did.

[fabio_chavez 103]

Was all his recent work made with money in mind?

I did not miss the point of what you said, everybody is entitled to have an opinion though im not interested in beeing confronted with your paranoid and hostile accusations.

Oh and to get to your question... he made all this to finance fulltime work on a huge mod project that he has been planing to realize since well before the release of the alpha and if you would have payed attention to what he has written and not merely cherry picking and twisting the facts to fit your resentments and aversions, you could know that. Its sad for arma 3 that this mod will never see the day of light btw...

Edited January 14, 2015 by Fabio_Chavez

[Ezcoo 47]

To be honest, I really wish that BI would recruit kju as full-time dev. He's so valuable person to the content creation genre (and the series in general), that his contribution would pay his salary back multiplied.

[fabio_chavez 103]

oh and this:

It's a very different thing when you want to get donations money out of other people's work (in this case content donated to one of his projects by the community) and explicitly make a living out of it like Kju did.

why dont you leave that judgement to the people that contributed and donated content to him (like i did)? CUP is free to build upon for anybody, not just kju and in contrast to your work it tries to deliver a coherent and comprehensive product. Something that is really bringing Arma 3 forward!

[chortles 263]

To be honest, I really wish that BI would recruit kju as full-time dev. He's so valuable person to the content creation genre (and the series in general), that his contribution would pay his salary back multiplied.

First, who knows how much they would have offered him pay-wise. Second, considering what seba1976 said on the previous page and what kju said in his threads, I'm not sure that BI's priorities would have changed, especially when even existing devs aren't heeded (see kju's posts about ending support for AiA)... if you thought he was a "lonely voice for backwards compatibility on the outside", imagine him being a "lonely voice for backwards compatibility on the inside". :/ Edited January 14, 2015 by Chortles

[Chairborne 2594]

oh and this:

why dont you leave that judgement to the people that contributed and donated content to him (like i did)? CUP is free to build upon for anybody, not just kju and in contrast to your work it tries to deliver a coherent and comprehensive product. Something that is really bringing Arma 3 forward!

I donated some of my stuff too, so i guess i'm entitled to make that judgement.

If i don't get money from work that i did for whatever reason, why should anybody else?

he made all this to finance fulltime work on a huge mod project that he has been planing to realize

So you agree with me he also had evident money interests in what he did within the community. :)

[seba1976 98]

.kju haven't played the game in 3 years, who knows what motivated him to continue in the community! Just, let's forget about it. He was gone the minute he stopped playing and enjoying what he was doing.

[fabio_chavez 103]

If i don't get money from work that i did for whatever reason, why should anybody else?

well, you can only answer that to yourself! so how about stop bothering other people with your crusade here maybe?

So you agree with me he also had evident money interests in what he did within the community. :)

you want to make it appear as if this was a revelation :rolleyes:

Edited January 14, 2015 by Fabio_Chavez

[ProfTournesol 956]

To be honest, I really wish that BI would recruit kju as full-time dev. He's so valuable person to the content creation genre (and the series in general), that his contribution would pay his salary back multiplied.

My thought exactly. A community manager would be a good job for him.

[vegeta897 13]

I donated some of my stuff too, so i guess i'm entitled to make that judgement.

You're entitled to make your own judgement, and others are entitled to make theirs.

If i don't get money from work that i did for whatever reason, why should anybody else?

The reciprocal of that question could be asked too. People do things they want to do, and if others want to support it, they will.

[inlesco 233]

Really, .kju was one of the few who had enough patience to teach even the most clueless from the beginning to the top. It's amazing.

A full-time dev position from BIS to .kju could be the best donation ever made.

[Darkhorse 1-6 16]

Expecting the people in here to pay him thousands upon thousands of dollars to mod for ArmA, then leaving, or quitting, or whatever you want to call it, when they don't... I suspect Kju is/was in the wrong community.