DRM News

It turns out that simply allowing your player base to donate can actually lead to dollars rolling in.

Dwarf Fortress, a game built around simulating your colony of dwarves down to such minute details as their finger nail growth (I’m not kidding) as you explore the world and build your…well…fortress, proves that. The game is freeware, with no requirement to pay in. And yet according to PC Gamer, the player base is doing just that. And being rather generous to boot.

Bay 12 Games revealed how much they’ve been receiving for the past few months, leading up to a major update of the game in April. The numbers are astonishing.

December Donations: $4762.98
January Donations: $2291.50
February Donations: $1452.57
March Donations: $4387.99
April Donations: $16104.49

Now, this is a very hard core simulation with an equally hard core group of active players, so I don’t think you’d see the same sorts of numbers if you were running a free version of “Barbie Plays Dress Up”…unless of course that game featured some sort of digitized pornography. In that case, it would be a race between dollars from pervert fans and cease and desist orders from Mattel’s lawyers.

Erm…where was I? Oh yes, donations! Several indie game titles have gone the paid beta route in recent years (Frozen Synapse being a current example), stating that as the game gets closer to release, the price will rise. This is an entirely different animal, though. This is a game that will likely never see a commercial release, and yet the fans are willing to chip in. Perhaps it might be worth their while for bigger companies to devote more time to actually caring WHAT they’re releasing to the public? Could it be that game quality might matter more in the long run than dubious piracy statistics when it comes to the bottom line of sales and profits?