I have read scurrilous rumours that the developer of Minecraft has over half a million dollars in his bank account. Of course I'm sure that this is just rubbish, but if it's true then there is no justice.
I wouldn't doubt it. If you enjoy building things, but haven't played it, you're doing yourself a disservice. It's simplistic, but the game is surprisingly enjoyable.
The major difference? Minecraft is feature poor, but mostly bug free - people are willing to bet that additional features are coming, because past development has demonstrated that they
are coming,
and that they'll work well when they arrive.
Dwarf Fortress has
lots of features, but there are bugs EVERYWHERE. We don't have to bet that there are more features coming because Toady's dev blog tells us what he's working on, but whether they'll ever truly be fixed and stable and working as intended is pretty much anyone's guess. Toady finds bugfixing boring and frustrating (so do I), but people won't buy a product that doesn't work well, and DF works... somewhat.
Folks, I loves me some DF, and this is one of those games I'd like to be able to recommend to people, but the number of issues present in the codebase (soap, cleaning, FPS to name three that come up without hitting the bug tracker to find more) are not hard to find even for a new player. The interface is clunky and uncomfortable to navigate without memorizing the keyboard-shortcuts menu system. Systems are implemented haphazardly, and additions to little-used areas of the game, like Adventure Mode, don't encourage me to donate money to Toady in the slightest. If I wanted Adventure Mode curses games, I'd play Angband. If I wanted bugs, I'd buy from EA.
What I want is the richness and complexity I can see buried in DF, but without the game-eating bugs and head-scratching frustrations of all the systems that simply Do. Not. Work. or that work only when you apply micromanagement workarounds to force things down a path that should be automatic (like plaster casts requiring you to micromanage bucket-filling to work).
I would support the idea that 3.16 would become the last version that is free with donations and future versions require a ten dollar / pound purchase fee. Nobody can convince me that this game is no worth ten quid of your money.
See, here's the rub. I don't have to convince you that the game isn't worth ten quid of your money. You're going to have to convince me that it IS. It may be, down the road, but right now, it's hard to see the game getting itself into a truly 'good' state in a reasonable timeframe, and that's a pretty good reason for me not to spend money on it. People donate for minecraft because the game is accessible, fun, and the development is (mostly) bug free - and fast.
I can't claim this about DF. The game is
not accessible, and while I find the built-in complexity fun, it's not for the faint of heart. It's certainly not mostly bug free, and development is progressing down a path (adventure mode) that I find so undesirable I'd rather copulate with elves in a magma shower. It's not a good way to solicit my money for future development. If Toady wants to add more features and spice up adventure mode instead of fixing bugs, that's certainly his choice to make, but where I spend my cash is my choice, and it's not going to be on DF in its current state.
(Maybe someday...)
I enjoy playing DF, but in its present state, if Toady were to make payment a requirement, I'd turn my back on it and walk away. It needs a lot of love before it would be worth my money, and the new features always seem to have as many bugs as they do new fun things to play with.
Notch, minecraft's creator, earned that money and deserves it.
This. Folks, Minecraft is playable (if somewhat simplistic) in its current form, so people are paying for it to get in on the ground floor, and because they've been told that it's a limited time offer with an increased price for late adopters. If Toady wants to pull a similar move, I'd be all for it, but there'd have to be a huge round of bugfixing to get the game into a state where the current feature set works enough to make it worth paying for, IMO, and until that's done it'd be a fools' move to try to make the jump to a pay-for-play system.
Am I demanding that Toady drop everything and fix bugs, because everyone knows that Toady is just a bitch to be abused by his playerbase? Nope. DF is his baby, and he can encrust it with gems, or dump it in magma all he likes. I am, however, suggesting that for this game in its current state (or even as it probably will be after the next 3-6 months) it's not worth much, if anything, to a large proportion of gamers. Folks willing to put in the kind of work DF players do for their fun are few and far between nowadays, and trying to trade on the donations and purchases of that group with the game in its current state is going to make for slim pickings.
Author
Topic: Outstanding bugs in 0.31.16 (Read 10905 times)