Marketing Dwarf Fortress, a project no gaming company would ever sign on for (10+ years of development at least?) to begin with - is a contradiction it itself. I don't know if society is "wrong" or "right" as to whether we should rebel against it or not, but Toady is directly doing the opposite most companies would do right off the bat. And to market something like dwarf fortress? An /alpha/ game? I know minecraft did that - but the creator of that game is a dirty scumbag from my estimation. It's wrong to charge money for an unfinished product, in my book.
At any rate, dwarf fortress /could/ be marketed when it's finished, if Toady needs some retirement cash. But right now it's not. It's in development and will be for a long time. End of story. There's no product to sell. For it to be even successful as a finished product, it needs to have its entry barriers removed or stifled, which will take a lot of work. I know Toady wants to keep the graphics at a bare minimum, but hopefully by the time DF is at 1.0, stonesense or some similar mod will be so advanced, you'll be able to seamlessly translate between the two, or three or four graphical representations of your fortress. Which suits me just fine, and will probably suit others fine too.
There's nothing quite like Dwarf Fortress simply because of the beastly nature it is to create. Tons of programming. Tons of work. It's not going to be replicated. So there's no point analyzing it like a normal game you go to market with. It is a piece of art, at least in its craftsmanship and the audience it appeals to.
So, allow me to nitpick a little here.
1. The Dwarf Fortress codebase is not where the stroke of genius lies. Tarn himself has claimed not to be a particularly awesome coder, and while he has a math Ph.D., he also claims to be a second-rate mathematician. Companies like CCP (Eve Online), maintain a cadre of economists and other academics on their staff to analyze, develop, and manage their game. They're far from the biggest player in the market. There are literally no barriers whatsoever to a mature game developer, equipped with a fraction of the development funding sunk into most AAA titles or MMORPGs, developing a Dwarf Fortess clone. And with the resources they'd have available - software architects, data modelers, project managers, QA/testers, art directors and artists, all the latest development tools and tremendous hardware, middleware components and libraries - they could hammer out what Tarn considers a 20 year project in 3-5 years, easy.
2. The issue is not that they can't, it's that they won't. They need a return on their investment, and that means finding (or creating) a market large enough to sustain the sales requirements for the game they've produced. The bigger hurdle may be to find a publisher willing to fund them when the game is likely to deliver so much replayability that it may well impact their other sales. Simply, by the nature of the market, there are faster ways to get rich, in types of products that are less risky to produce. For an analogy, think of a 3-4 really good movies - I mean movies of
outstanding quality - and then go and look up the ratio of cost to produce vs how much they grossed in theatres. Now consider 3-4 really shitty movies that nonetheless were very popular, and look up what their ratios were. You'll very quickly find the reason why most movies produced are nothing but steaming crap with a cherry on top. A high gross/cost ratio is a safe bet for a publisher, and very few publishers want to make a bet on something that's likely to be in the 1.0 - 1.2 range, even if it's likely to be pure quality and gain a cult following. The same effect can be seen with reality TV, book publishing, etc etc.
3. On charging for an alpha, Minecraft, etc. I know very little about the dude who developed Minecraft, but based on what I see I wish him all the luck in the world and don't see a need to condemn anything he's done. He lets people play a demo version of the game right in the browser, for free. In this free Classic version, people get a feel for what makes the game cool, but doesn't get all the gameplay elements that tie it all together into a more coherent game experience. It's a marketing vehicle, like any demo. If people want the full in-development experience, they can pay a small sum to support the development, get access to the full, in-development version early, get free updates and - eventually - the full game. Nobody is being coerced into paying for it, and frankly, the alternative would be:
- Disallow the public from experiencing the game as it's being developed, keeping it behind lock & key
- Force the developer to develop the game in a resource-vacuum, or sell it to a publisher to be able to complete it
He happened to get rich, and is sinking a big part of that into further development. I'm pretty certain that was entirely by accident, and not a pre-meditated "get rich quick" scheme. The fact that he's continuing development after the huge cash infusion proves that - with $33 million USD in the bank at age 32, he could've easily retired and said "kk, the current InDev is the final release, have fun guys!"
Really, if you want to call foul, go after the big publishers who grant access to buggy Alpha or Beta versions only after having paid a hefty full price for a pre-order, and use their most loyal customers as unpaid guinea pig testers. Go after GameStop who aggressively markets pre-orders 6-12 months before release - before there's even a gameplay video on YouTube - and offers a useless DLC coupon as the only reward.
4. Tarn could
try to pull a Minecraft, but I'm sure he knows as well as I that he couldn't replicate their success with Dwarf Fortress. Minecraft is a very accessible, simplistic game whose differentiating factor lies in that the multiplayer component combined with player block building keeps the simplistic gameplay fresh. In a sense, it's like a distilled version of Second Life - little inherent gameplay, but the satisfaction of being able to build something and show it off to others, and exploring content created by other users. DF shares none of these qualities - the interface and graphics is demanding of new players (to say the least), there's no multiplayer interaction, and while you do get satisfaction from having built something, it's hard to show it off and your creations are easily ravaged by the game's mechanics (which is the "fun"!). All of that combined means that releasing DF at a charge during development would likely alienate parts of the existing community, wouldn't provide a whole lot of additional revenue, and would be risky. It'd mean that Tarn would have to worry about the sales-side of his project, or hire someone to do so. Most importantly, it'd mean that Dwarf Fortress would now be a
game product for the market, and thus shaped by the market's demands, to the detriment of his fantasy world simulator end-goal. So while I wouldn't call it immoral or wrong for him to try to commercialize it, I do think it's the wrong direction for him.
Finally, at risk of contradicting some of the points I've made above:
if people are freely purchasing your product or service then you're doing something right, and nothing to be ashamed of.
The concept of "freely" is tenuous at best, and is entirely related to the amount of marketing thrown at a product. Given a sufficient degree of marketing, none of us can be considered "free". PR agencies are
exceptionally good at persuasion and manufacturing consent. I like to think of the ratio of money and effort spent on marketing something compared to the amount of resources spent to develop it to be a good indicator of "morality" in media publishing. If you have to spend an inordinate amount of resources to manufacture my consent in order for me to part with my money to recover your total cost, then I essentially paid you to convince me to buy it in the first place. That, I consider immoral. Thankfully, Toady can be considered to be impossibly free of immorality in this regard, though I'm hoping that the free media exposure will convince more people to try it (I know at least one friend of mine gave the game a shot after I shared the NYTimes article with him - he's currently fighting a losing battle with a lake he happened to let flood his farmlands, and having a ton of "fun"!)