Support OpenGameArt.org on Patreon!
Greetings, folks!
If you've been following OGA for a while, you're probably already aware that I've been considering serious funding options so that I can work part time on OGA, and eventually even transition to working on it full-time if funding allows. I've been putting it off for several months now due to time constraints, but the last few days of disastrous performance issues have made it clear to me that I no longer have enough free time to even tackle the routine maintenence this site requires in order to stay in working order, particularly given the increasing amount of traffic we've been getting lately.
The performanc issues are now fixed, but I had to take two days off of work to do it, and given that I do hourly contract work, that isn't something I can afford to do very often. The upshot of my job is that the hours are very flexible, so that even while my contract is in effect, I can work up to half time on maintaining and improving OGA, but in order to do this, I need continued funding so I can keep paying the bills.
While I had originally been considering Kickstarter, Patreon is a better business model for what I'm trying to do, since the monthly pledge model allows me to devote time to OGA continuously, rather than raising larger sums of money with periodic Kickstarter campaigns.
If you've found that OGA has been helpful to you in the past, please consider supporting this site with a monthly pledge. Click the link below to help out:
Thanks in advance for your continued support!
Bart
P.S. I would be happy to address any questions or suggestions that people have either here or on Patreon.
Comments
Hopefully in the next few months I can scramble some money to throw your way. I've just put a deposit down on a house so it won't be for a while :(
Having bought a house about a year ago, I know exactly how that goes. :)
I've been using the hell out of this site. I want to contribute but I've got so many indigogo kickstarter paypal donation whatever accounts it's getting really hard to keep track of them without a spreadsheet. Do you have a paypal I can send some money to?
Understandable. :)
We've got a paypal donate page here that has my paypal address on it:
http://opengameart.org/donate
Thanks for your support! :)
For those who already have a recurring payment with Paypal, etc., would you rather we transfered it to this Patreon thing?
Humans being the pathetic, mindless, sheep-creatures that they are do seem to prefer supporting things when they are aware that others are also supporting them.
For those who already have a recurring payment with Paypal, etc., would you rather we transfered it to this Patreon thing?
Only if you don't find it troublesome to do. I'm wouldn't call people a bunch of mindless sheep, but certainly more donations result in more publicity, so there's definitely a feedback effect. :)
I suppose that OGA isn't making that much on ad space. Don't get me wrong, donatons are better than ads, but when I consider the dollar amounts, I think that the funding goal of $2000/month is a little extreme. At that rate, it would be a second job for you, and that would be great I suppose, but as it is this site is more or less community-run. I did notice several site crashes in the last few days, and I thank you for fixing the problem. I know how hard and time consuming it can be to fix bugs in software. No offense, but even if I could afford it I would probably not fund OGA on a monthly basis. If the cost is so great, I would recommend finding a way to reduce it. Recruiting some quality volunteer site admins might be a solution. Of course, the hosting itself might cost something on its own, and that burden shouldn't fall on you. You should be getting at least $50/month to pay for that, and I don't know where that money would come from under normal circumstances. As it is, it looks like donations alone have far exceeded that number, which really amazes me considering most everyones on this site are FOSS people. Congratulations, and good luck.
The $2000 funding goal was for bart to work on OGA as a second job thats exactly what he was saying ^.^
Also the site upkeep is only part of the work, you also want to develop new features etc.
The cost of the hosting is only a small portion of the overall cost of keeping something like OGA running. (however the server spec's that OGA requires to run with decent performance would probably suprise you and runs more per month then $50 by a large margin)
If you really think that OGA can be hosted for $50 I challenge you to find someone who will host it for that and point them out to bart.
Also recruting quality site admins, who dont get paid, is much harder then you might think.
I think that the funding goal of $2000/month is a little extreme. At that rate, it would be a second job for you, and that would be great I suppose, but as it is this site is more or less community-run.
You should check the feedback forum and read the backlog of bug reports and feature requests to see what all is needed, code-wise. To some extent, this site is able to run on its own, but frankly it's slow and buggy and there are a lot of things that people would like that I just don't have time to implement in my spare time.
If the cost is so great, I would recommend finding a way to reduce it.
The cost of letting the site "run itself" (into the ground) on its own is just the cost of the server. It needs a hefty box, and there's no reducing that. As for the rest of the cost, that funding is meant to take the place of the money I would receive from spending those hours on my regular contract work. I have a house, I have a wife and baby daughter, and I have bills to pay, and my asking price for those hours is already significantly less than what a lead Drupal developer/administrator for a medium to large site would be paid out in the work force. My wife is incredibly supportive of this project; she has a regular job and makes significantly more money than I do, and she's aware that I have the job skills necessary to make as much as she does, yet she has never complained that I'm going to be working for less money than I could be. On the other hand, if I suddenly cut my hours in half without some kind of way to fund that, we'd have trouble making our mortgage.
I get the feeling that you're under the impression that I'll be making more money than I am right now if the funding for OGA goes through, but I need to be clear about this: this isn't supplementary income, it's replacement income. I don't come out of this any richer; all I get from it is time to work on OGA without losing money every hour I spend not doing my hourly contract work.
Recruiting some quality volunteer site admins might be a solution.
I've already got a lot of people helping out, but here's the problem: Volunteers are volunteers. I can't afford to pay them, and often times volunteers discover that the work involved in maintaining the site is actually a lot more extensive than they thought it was. There are a number of administrators who can devote some time to helping out when they see spam, or art that needs to be edited in some way, or licensing issues, etc. On the other hand, really doing major work (running contests, curating art, etc) is a huge time commitment, and thus far no volunteer has been able to keep it up, and since I'm not paying them, it's not my place to force the issue. Given my experience running this site for the past 5 years, I can tell you that "just find some volunteers" is highly unrealistic, and it would be incredibly unfair of me to place those kinds of demands on my admins, who are willing to spend their time helping to run the site for free.
In conclusion, I'm sorry if I'm coming off as a little irritated. While it's true that OpenGameArt would be nothing without all of the incredible contributions from the community, I would like to believe that by running OGA I'm providing more than zero value to the FOSS and Indie gaming communities.
Coding takes a lot of time, and this platform is important. So, donate if you can and are willing. $1 is fine if you can't afford more :)
REally I thinks is very important help to the creator with this amazing site. I have put an announce in https://www.scirra.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=157&t=95767
I hope this helps.
Nice work bart!
Pd: and yeah, coding takes a lot of time and the time is money, isnt´t it?
To those requesting PayPal, Patreon accepts donations through PayPal. Just select it at checkout.
I'm pledging $10 per month.
Bart, I hope you reach your goal. Good luck!
Also, will you update my existing account to supporter, or do I get a new one?
I can't afford much atm, but I'll gladely give you $2/month.
This website is part of public interest to me.
Good luck!
Just woke up. :)
Bertram, Guarav, Quilmos, and GunCheloc, I really appreciate your help. :)
@Guarav: No need to sign up for a new account. You've got the OGA Supporter medal now. :)
Thanks!
Struggling a bit here myself, but I can do $2/month.... I do want my double high-fives!
I'm not sure I would worry about removing the ads. They've never been in the way, and a couple have been useful.
Part of the trouble with ads is performance and disk space. In order to give useful information to advertisers, I have to keep metrics, which means that I have to record every view of the ad along with every click on it. That way I can tell advertisers how many unique viewers have seen their ad, and what the click rate was.
Without running the ad, the homepage for people who aren't logged in is completely cached (it updates once every couple minutes), so it's very easy on the system. There's also the issue of database table sizes. When you're inserting hundreds of thousands of records a day, pretty soon the table gets huge and inserts start to slow down, which is one of the reasons advertisements are turned off right now. I could tune things better than the out-of-the-box Drupal module I'm using, but it's a lot easier on the site (and on our disk space) if we don't have them at all.
The other alternative is to go with an advrtising company and run their iframe, but then I don't get to screen the ads in advance for annoyances such as sounds or animation, or things like malware. Also, right now, OGA has no outside tracking cookies, which is really rare nowadays. When you visit here, Google Analytics doesn't know about it, Facebook doesn't know about it, Doubleclick doesn't know about it, etc. That's kind of a point of pride for me, so the whole idea of running outside ads is really unappealing.
Finally, and this is perhaps the most important reason I'd rather not run ads: The only people that I want to be beholden to are my users. If one company decided to buy up all my ad space, that would be huge, but then I'd likely start depending on that income, so that would put them in a position to pressure me to run OGA the way they want me to run it, rather than the way the users would like it run. I'm not comfortable with that.
I'd much rather support OGA with art than money so for a limited time anyone who donates $50 or more a month will get a custom avatar like this:
I just need a picture of what you'd like it to look like.
Sharm, you're awesome :)
Do you mind if I put that up as a reward on the official page? Just let me know the limit of how many you can reasonably do, along with the the latest date you can do them.
Go for it! Let's see, let's say 20 and it should take at most a month from when I get the reference image? I mean, it should only take 2 days for each one but I'm worried about all 20 going at once. It's not completely selfless, I intend to use the pieces I make to enhance the character generator I'm making in this style. :)
Ah, that's a really awesome idea. :)
Also, this gives me a couple of ideas for art rewards that I can offer myself.
Nice idea but the funding goals are really high compared to the content that is uploaded to this site, for $5000 you could hire a professional artist who will create more high quality art than uploaded here by all users together.
Investing in a better reward system for contributors would be a good thing in my opinion, since this site lives from people donating their art for free. The donations for keeping the site alive should come from the consumers and if you have more and better contributors, you will have more consumers and so more donators.
Even advertising would be ok for me, if it is not annoying. You could offer cheap advertising for indie developers or just offer little free advertisings as a reward.
Well I love this site, I don't have a lot of money, but I'll pledge 2 dollars!
It should be noted that as long as I'm still doing my contract work (which could be many more months), anything over $2500 will go toward paying for art (probably a even a large portion of donations over $2000, honestly, but I don't want to guarantee that). The goal that I'm really shooting for at the moment is actually just $2000, which will allow me to work 20 hours a week on OGA. $5000 would be great, and I put that goal there because I don't want people to assume the campaign is over just because we got to $2000. The additional money can be put to use, as you said, by paying for art, while I'm not able to work the remaining hours.
As for the value of what I do compared to the value of a full-time artist, that's actually more difficult to quantify than what you're making it out to be. The site can hum along as it is with no improvements with just a couple days a month of total effort on my part. That being said, OGA isn't supposed to just be about people showing up at the site to download art. There are a lot of collaboration and community engagement features that we're missing out on right now just because there hasn't been time to code them. As for how much that will eventually be worth? I don't know. In the long run, it can make a huge difference.
@Warspawn: You're awesome, thanks! :)
Duion, you don't have to feel like artists are getting used or shorted because the money isn't going to us specifically. You see, this site is a fantastic place for artists and good paying clients to find each other. The clients I've found through this site are much higher caliber than what I've found elsewhere, there's a respect for the artwork and a willingness to be fair that you don't find in any of the other communities I've posted my work in. I see the artwork I put up here as a type of investment in advertising, and one that has such great returns that I'd gladly have paid for the privilege to post here if I knew what it would do for my career.
Bart is a huge advocate for treating artists fairly and with respect and that attitude permiates the whole of his site. In all my dealings with him he's been kind, friendly, generous and has always had my back when things stop being fun. If he says he can make this site an even better community I believe him and back him 100%.
@Sharm: Wow, that's really nice to hear. If OGA is a good home for artists, then I'm doing something right. :)
@Duion
I've found and paid artists through OGA that I never knew existed and never knew had such great talent until I came here. I have contributed directly to the artists because of what they put on OGA, namely Sharm and Redshrike. I can also tell you it wasn't a small sum of money. The exact amount is between me and the people involved but safe to say it was a reasonable paycheck. If you're interested in making art or you want to have art made this is an excellent place to do it.
@Sharm
I'm with you! I love this site and the talent it makes available to developers. I make software, not art. You make art, not software. This is a fantastic meeting ground for the two types of people to meet because they can hash out whatever they want. It's a friendly and professional feeling environment free from bias and disrespect. Without OGA I would never have met you and never would have become so interested in game development.
@bart
I adore this site, I would do anything I can to help out. You already have my info and you know my intentions. I'll keep an eye out for an email with further details.
You already have my info and you know my intentions.
Haha, that sounds more ominous than it actually is. :)
Keeping up with answering questions is going to keep me pretty busy today, so it may turn out to be a day or three before I can get back to you. Thanks again for your help!
Awesome, and you've got 38 patrons already!
In my mind there's a bit of a conflict between your first milestone ("Permanent removal of advertisements") and your highest pledge level where you'll prominently link the sponsor on the home page. To me there isn't much (or necessarily any) difference between a sponsorship link and an ad.
I don't want any donors (or potential donors) to be disappointed/disillusioned by this.
Maybe you can think of a footnote to add to the first milestone or something.
Keep up the good work! I hope this becomes a significant income stream.
Hi,
@bart: It's going up! :)
@Sharm: Wow, this avatar looks really good! I wish I could handle $50/month!!
Maybe one day I could hire your talent to get one?
@William.Thompsonj: Now your project is making me wish I was a true artist.
Best regards to all!
@bart
Now that I finally found my card your patreon count is up to 48! If I had to guess I'd say there are a lot of people that love OGA enough to help keep it going. Good job Bart, you made a solid and happy community here. Keep it going. (don't forget my badge ;)
By the way, I posted the link on my facebook. Maybe I'll recruit someone by accident to help maintain my favorite site.
@Bertram
You have an awesome game already, you are a true artist. I wish I could get my head out of my butt and make something besides demos and art! I'll get there eventually, just takes time and resource. If you have a request I'm all ears.
Too bad I have no money of mine to give! I owe a lot to this site. For what it may help, I advertised the campaign on my blog.
@JasonWoof: I removed the $500 reward (since I doubt it'll be used anyway), and added a footnote to the advertisement goal.
@Buch: You're doing a lot for OGA already (as evidenced by the six pages of art on your user profile)! Thanks for all of your hard work. :)
@Sharm: There are a couple questions about your avatar reward. Can you hop on IRC today and send me a message so we can chat for a few minutes? If not, I can email you.
@Bertram: Yeah, probably, but not now. I made it high because I'm scared of having to a lot of them at once and not having time for my job. I hate disappointing people.
@Bart: Oops, I knew there would be, I should have done that yesterday. On now.
Correct me if I am wrong but I think the point of the 5000$ milestone is ment for "everything" that might be necessary to make OGA shine, not just to cover Barts living expenses/work but also things like art commisions, hiring a specialized coder to get some heavy lifting done or even sponsoring projects affilated with OGA.
@MrBeast: That does include some extra money for hiring people to work on the site, commission more art, etc (even once my contract ends and I'm hopefully working on OGA full-time), although for particularly large endeavors (such as an outside site redesign, which would be in the tens of thousands) I might have to do a kickstarter.
You hit 50 patreons and you're almost up to $500! It's working!
Congratulations, too bad for the ads though, I have found two amazing projects/products from them. But I can understand why they need to go.
Just tossed a Grant, 50 bits, some cash... wait bits... maybe that is all it is these days. on... off... Anyhow you have some "virtual" cash headed your way.
Keep up the good work. Everyone.
@Sharm: I gotta say, that avatar offer is a good motivator! I could only do $10 right now, but If there are still some tokens left when I get on top of my finances, I'm going for it!
I don't like the monthly payment idea of Patreon, but I gladly will donate you some money over Paypal!
Really like this site and would like to see it keep going! :)
Hi all :)
Sorry for the late answer.
@William.Thompsonj: Well, I wish I could be hired to make games as a dev more than an artist. It's simply more my cup of tea if I have to choose between the two. Thanks for you kind words, btw. :)
@Sharm: I understand completely. So no problem at all! ;)
@Bart: Best of luck with this new aventure!
@kddekadenz
I understand your dislike of monthly payments. I have a mortgage and plenty of other monthly bills that take cash out of my account (not to mention a wife who loves shiny new things).
I think of it like this: I could donate all US $120 or whatever currency you use at one time and be done with my yearly donation but I tend to forget a lot. If I set a monthly payment I know I'll have OGA around because I support it directly and without the need to remember or think about it. It's easier for me to set a low and reasonable payment every month than to pay it all up front too; I keep cash on hand because of my mortgage but I usually can't spend it... because of my mortgage. My wife is willing to let US $10 a month go because that's about the same as one time at a restaurant. If she sees US $120 leave the account all at once she'd kill me. It's easier and more convenient to have a monthly payment than a lump sum because you set it and you're done. It's not a large amount so it doesn't hurt. You also have the piece of mind that it's going to keep your favorite site running smooth (and keep it existing!).
@William.Thompsonj
I see your point, but my life situation is different. I expect my income to decrease in half a year with my expenses going up, so a monthly donation is no option for me.
It's nice to see that you are so passionate for this website! :) And no, it isn't my favorite one, but definitively one of my favorites ^^
@Bertram
I donated you 10 bucks (one-time-payment). It's not much, but I hope it helps ;)
I just subscribed for $3/month by Paypal, since I don't want to register to a website like Patreon.
I will certainly upgrade it in 2015.
Keep it up!
Mind sharing what db OGA is using?
MariaDB (OGA runs on Drupal).
Seems like MariaDB is the same as MySQL, i got some experience with MySQL and PHP, i can give you a hand if you need.
Id be fine with being an admin to contribute to the page since i dont have spare money to give.
Hey Bart, just donated on Patreon, I think you'll be reaching your goal soon and couldn't be happier for ya :D
Anyway, I may be able to help those who are upset the ad space is gone.
I have an app called TouchIt that was released a little over a week ago and has become quite popular.
I can run ad campaigns for those who contribute over $30 a month for no cost as long as they are still donating each month.
For any one interested in the ad space you can download the ap here
If downloaded on wifi, videos/ads will download/redner on the Main Menu Screen with hyperlinks that bounce around towards the bottom.
This is a really good idea, much better than turning to intrusive ads and the sort. I hope this place remains community driven. Unfortunately I haven't been able to monetize any of my games yet, so Im a bit short on money and can't help you much. However I promise myself to make up for it when (and if) I get successul in my games. :)
I promise, as soon as I win in the national lottery, I'll become yor biggest funder! But for now ... only a small amount has to suffice. =/
Worst of all: I can't help with art. But I try to contribute some art/gaming related software in the future. In the forums of course. :)
I too think that OGA should remain free, but stay alive. I've seen great projects suffer because of the money/time problem. Projects that were community driven were turned into a "money making maschine". I do what I can to prevent that from happening and I hope more will join too!
Best of luck to Bart and OGA
Bart,
I have only been here for short while, but the first thing I noticed when I came to the website is the request for money.
From the looks of it, you are running a custom made soluion or using a framework to build your website. Why not take your donation money and purchase professional software like XenForo to run the website? That software uses the xenframework, which is extremly fast and efficent. Also, that framework has been worked on, debugged, and tested by thousands of people.
Why reinvent the wheel when better, more secure, and more stable solutions exist? Being a programmer, I don't want to spend a lot of time reinventing things that don't need it. Every single feature you have on here exists as a plugin or included feature of that software. Also you could set up userupgrades for people. These could be cosmetic upgrades for username colors, ad removal, art promotions, etc. Honestly I could litterally have a compeiting website up in minutes.
If you do decide to switch over, I would be happy to donate my time to write you a database port script. No I dont need access to your database, just send me a "fake" account so I can see the structure.
Personally, I would be much more interested in donating for some cosmetic acount upgrades then just doing it, to do it.
Please know this post is made with respect and thank you for providing a resouce that helps out developers and artist around the world.
Lets make a free website of oga with no hosting cost on weebly. Five Stars out of Five.
Weebly is only free under 500 MB of content. OGA could burn through that with 3 of the large art submissions. On the other hand, I'm sure there are some more cost effective options than what is currently in use. It might be worth looking into.
@unenergizer: can you showcase the comparable website? If it is as easy and similar as you say, it would be worth a try. :)
I've used weekly, and wix and I can tell you that after uploading 100 + images it lagged very badly, kept timing out and crashing, not to mention having to wait like 10 minutes for it just to load the website builder, which is why I don't use any of them anymore, do they even give you a download option?
@unergizer the site is built on Drupal, which is a very scalable open source solution used by millions of people including some of the biggest organisations on earth. It is used by NBC, Fox, Tesla, Twitter, Pintrest, Ebay and the US government, so it isn't a scalability or reliability issue, the difference is that those organisations have enough money to throw at servers and devs. I am sure there are ways OGA could be optomised, but you're never going to get past the fact that scaling up costs money.
The OGA server load comes from allowing a large number of users to perform complex database queries across a large quantity of files which each have heaps of dynamic metadata, and letting everyone upload and download as much as they want whenever they want. No matter which platform you build your site in, if you allow that much freedom to users you're going to run into either performance issues or high server costs.
Most other file sharing sites have per user download limits, or tiered paid accounts, or they sell user data, or just have lots of adds. What other site lets you upload and download such a huge variety of file types so freely? This site is like a cross between a social network, megaupload, deviantart and soundcloud. What do you think their hosting and support costs are like? How do they pay for it?
I'm not doing much right now but will try and do more as I can