Money to donee

We all know that Thrive has to be an open source game where the developers are all volunteers must not gain anything (apart from the credits), but there is one thing that made ​​me think:

This is not the first time he hears people on youtube asking me if there is a way to donate money to the project and they are willing to do so.

I am convinced that if dovessiamo set a button "donate money" something we can obtain it and that is obviously not something we have to take us, but to use it for any costs or expenses for the game. we should make an account where all major project members can control it and before using them all must be aware of and agree.

What do you think?
I consider it a great idea.

I am generally wary of donation buttons, especially for projects that early in development. Thrive is not much more than a collection of ideas and some art right now. While everyone (including me) likes to think that this will evolve (hehe) into a proper, playable game someday, the reality is that development can quickly stall and grind to a halt. People lose interest, key personell leaves for personal reasons, etc. If that would happen to Thrive, and there's still money left from donations, the donors might get upset.

Don't get me wrong, some funds to set up infrastructure would be nice, and donations are certainly a valid way to obtain those funds. But maybe we should wait until there is tangible progress, say, at least a playable and fun beta version of the microbe stage.

I dont really like the idea of donations. We also discussed it alredy, too.

Usually donations are done to encourage the creators to work more on the project, and to ultimaledlly give them enough income so they can quit their jobs and focus on the project full-time. That works fine for small, closed teams. But as we are an open comunity, where anybody can come and contribute on stuff, there is no way of deciding who gets what. You alredy said that, but this is to clear things up for anyone who hasen't read the others discusions.

We could only use it on general expenses, but for that we need expenses. Nowadays, anything we might need is free for us to use. If we find something we need money for, that we really need, i would be ok to open donations to pay that sais thing, and once the payment has been fulfilled, close donations so we dont get any money leftover.

So unless we have something to spend donations on, we dont need donations.

Its been discussed before. Answer is no.

Daniferrito wrote:

I dont really like the idea of donations. We also discussed it alredy, too.

Usually donations are done to encourage the creators to work more on the project, and to ultimaledlly give them enough income so they can quit their jobs and focus on the project full-time. That works fine for small, closed teams. But as we are an open comunity, where anybody can come and contribute on stuff, there is no way of deciding who gets what. You alredy said that, but this is to clear things up for anyone who hasen't read the others discusions.

We could only use it on general expenses, but for that we need expenses. Nowadays, anything we might need is free for us to use. If we find something we need money for, that we really need, i would be ok to open donations to pay that sais thing, and once the payment has been fulfilled, close donations so we dont get any money leftover.

So unless we have something to spend donations on, we dont need donations.

Precisely this.

I understand that you guys don't have expenses and are making this game for the reason of having a better spore type game except better which is great. I just wish you guys would not look a gift horse in the mouth. You could use the money to hire trained programmers, coders, etc... Even if not already I don't know what type of setup you guys got, but you could use it to buy a small to large place to setup a base of operations. Even though you guys say your equipment is good enough it wouldn't hurt to make some upgrades anyways. An to rap up this post I want to say that I am very excited for this project and hope is sees completion soon before 2020. A kickstarter or using Steam wouldn't hurt even though you guys are against money funding.

You can't rely on donations to pay "trained programmers" (which some of us already are) full-time and any other kind of payment scheme would only introduce a lot of complexity and risk.
Also when the members live all over the world it doesn't make sense to have a base of operations, especially when people don't work on any kind of scheduele.
The kinds of things you are suggesting require the kind of money you get from investors, which put a lot of bad constraints on your project which is what lead to a lot of the bad tastes of spore in the first place. Kickstarters require more than what we have now to show off, and would require a very different mindset of what people have now.