I worked more than 2000 hours on this as well. Over the course of 3 years, on a single mod. If you dont count that accelerated spin-off. But I dont do total conversions, like Homestuck or TES. Because there are not enough people to play those to justify the work put into it. (from my point of view) Otherwise I would have written a Stacraft TC and a Shadowrun TC. Both things I know and enjoy quite a bit.
No one flung shit in your direction, at least as far as I know. I hope.
I cant work fulltime on DF sustained by MDF donations. I have several other sources of passive income. Over the last three months, in which I got the highest donations so far, I got ~500$ in May, ~500$ in June, (both exception because of the fundraiser and me posting donation links on the board, reddit and facebook), and ~200$ in July. Some months its 20-50$. The first 2 years it was nothing. Overall, after 3 years, I earned as much as I would get in one month in any random IT job here in Germany. The two fundraisers are more for my conscience, to justify to myself that I can work that much on DF. I dont lose money, that way. Kinda. But no one in Europe (or the US in your case) could make a living from this. My plan is actually to wait a bit, and after the MDF-to-DF2014-update set up a Patreon, for a lower, but steadier income stream. If its 100 people giving 1$ thats perfectly fine by me, as long as its something I can plan for. I really dont want to monetize the mod, but I dont see any moral shortcomings in giving people the option to donate.
Now my lifestyle is a bit different from most others, I wouldnt work as an employee anyway... and I mostly stay and write DF mods because of three reasons:
1. Its purely mental/creative work, which is different from my usual hard physical labor (mountaineering, cycling, cross-country hikes)
2. It creates something, somthing that other people do enjoy (a couple of thousand at least, which is nice.)
3. I am good at it and get positive feedback.
Now you are also good at it. And got positive feedback, but less. But thats not about the modder, its not because of you, its because of the project. Take Boltguns Succubi. A perfectly fine mod on its own. It has <500 downloads, across all versions. The thread has 328 replies and 20k views. Its 1,5 years old. Now compare that to the MDF Succubus thread. Its from end of May this year, so just over 2 months old. About the same number of replies, 311, and 10k views. It gets much more exposure. Why? Because its a good mod, with a fun race, embedded in MDF which has the GUI, 20 tilesets, utilities, blablabla. Its the LNP of mods.
Lets compare mods to tilesets. If you post a tileset in the tileset section and tell people to download and install it, you get very few people that do that, and even less feedback. On the other hand, if you directly write PeridexisErrant and have it added into the LNP, it gets so much more exposure and more people to play it.
That is what I am doing with the humans at the moment as well. Bay12. Reddit. Facebook. Flowcharts, Tutorial fort, succession fort... producing content content content for people to see. The more people see it, the more will try, the more will produce content on their own, snowball effect. (Splint will know what I mean, we just talked about it, because he asked about Orcs or Humans, and I said Humans, of course.)
Now lets assume you want to make modding your profession. You can either fight your competitor (MDF) for users, or you can join and work on the same project. Which would at the current state not generate income for you either way. A new project is to small to ask for donations, and working on MDF currently only gives me donations, as well as hopefully Splinterz. I added his donate link to the new manual. Without his therapist we would all be lost. I actually dont know if he gets any donations on regular basis, or how much.
The problem you face is that you made many smaller mods, instead of one large one. People dislike change (in general, sorry guys, its true) and wont jump from Mod X to Mod Y to Mod Z. I act the same, I played exclusively Genesis before I started modding.
The only way that I can think of for your to earn something with DF-based modding is something like a kickstarter. Even I with the largest customer base of all modders here, get 0-200$ a month if I dont do something special. Toady just got 15.000$, and >3000$ on average, so we the modding community, dont really affect that.
If you set out and make a plan, make a thread about it here, on reddit, anywhere else where people might be interested. And say: Hi, I am Putnam, maker of X mods, one of the best modders DF has (I for example think that you are better than me when it comes to the coding part, and you know dfhack!) will make Mod X with this and that deadline, a project outline of what the mod should offer (I dont know what project would interest you, but I can think of two things that people would pay for: 1. A MDF-like mod that has a GUI, but reverts completely back to vanilla if everything is set to off. Essentially a LNP for mods, but more modular than MDF. Sorry Milo Christiansen, I know rubble exists, but its too hard to get into. And 2. A MDF race, which I know works, because I have done it twice now.), and a set amount of money you need to make it happen (You are a student right? Take 1-2 months at summer break, or whatever you in the US have, or take a semester off for a larger project.) than I think it would work. After speaking to Toady One. From my experience he say "Yeah, good luck, but dont tie anything remotely finance-based back to me, I am afraid of lawsuits and responsibility for semi-endorsed third-party content, so dont do it on bay12."
Of course that would be for 1-2 months. Not fulltime, all the time. But I dont do that either. I could try, and I think I could do it for a year, but I wouldnt be able to get enough money from DF alone. Than again, a potato salad kickstarter got tens of thousands of dollars, and a webcomic I read gets sixthousand dollars a month... ^^
But in the end, no one here is in it for the money, not even Toady. Its for the user. I certainly would have never expected to get money from this when I started.
Poll
