Dwarf Fortress: How Freeware Turned Into Millions
from the free-as-in-millions dept
If you’re not familiar with Dwarf Fortress, you’ve missed out on a legendary story about a labor of love. The game, a minimalist experience in which you are managing a colony of dwarves as they live their lives and conduct their dwarf-y business, was created by two brothers sixteen years ago. It’s an incredibly deep and detailed simulation and narrative builder… and it was released for free. This was during a time when lots of content producers were running around screaming about how “free” as a content concept could never work for anything.
But it does work, when done well. And Dwarf Fortress was done really well. Zach and Tarn Adams recently released an updated and prettied up version of the title on Steam and itch.io and the initial sales total in the millions of dollars.
“The fairytale ending is reality, but you didn’t kiss the toad,” Zach Adams wrote on Bay 12 Games’ forums. “You gave him money.” He went on to write the kind of grateful response to fans you don’t often see from game developers:
Tarn Adams noted that “a little less than half will go to taxes,” and that other people and expenses must be paid. But enough of it will reach the brothers themselves that “we’ve solved the main issues of health/retirement that are troubling for independent people.” It also means that Putnam, a longtime modder and scripter and community member, can continue their work on the Dwarf Fortress code base, having been hired in December.
Again, all stemming from a game that was released for free as a labor of love initially. So, how does something like this happen? Well, some of the answers to that are obvious. The Adams brothers made a great product that people wanted, for starters. They also continued working on and updating that product based on the feedback and input they were getting from its fans.
But the real power here is in these creators being awesome and human and treating the community as a community, rather than merely customers or content consumers. These guys have never been greedy, never treated the community poorly, and have generally built a great connection with their fans. The result is loyalty from the fanbase and a willingness to fork over money for an updated product that is mostly only aesthetically different from the free product.
As of today, Dwarf Fortress’ Steam page summarizes the game’s more than 17,000 reviews as “Overwhelmingly Positive.” “I am speechless to people around me between game sessions,” wrote jozef.sova. “Had my Chief Militia Commander tackle a Giant Cyclops over a waterfall ravine 10 stories killing it at the bottom,” wrote DEV. “Guy couldn’t get out and he drowned, may he never be forgotten.”
Make a great product. Release it for free. Build up the fanbase and the loyalty from them. Then ask for money for an upgraded version.
The result? Millions.
Filed Under: being awesome, cwf, cwf+rtb, dwarf fortress, free, tarn adams, zach adams
Comments on “Dwarf Fortress: How Freeware Turned Into Millions”
I that the original free version is still available is an understated reason for the level of success this release had.
Little earns “screw you!” ill will from the fanbase more than rug-pulling old versions and declaring “pay us for the latest or nothing,” especially using DMCA to enforce such greed.
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It probably helps that the paid version is all about the extra frills (e.g., improved graphics) and the free version is still the same game it was before the paid version dropped.
But just think of how much money they could have gotten if they had been asshats!
Saying that giving away content works as a business model is clearly only going to work in this one, very specific instance. It’s not like you can point to a bunch of other business models that included free content that were successful.
You need to stop living in this free for all fantasy land and start to understand that the only way content creators can make money is by giving up all their rights to someone that knows how to lock up the content, piss off the fans, and squeeze every last dollar out right at the beginning so there is no long term success.
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Sorry, dude, but I’m gonna need you to pay for the damage you’ve done to my Sarcasm Detector.
Re: Re:
What sarcasm? That is the standard business model of the copyrightable matter industry. Sure, it’s a cruel joke. But it’s real nevertheless.
Re: Re:
I could sell you a Poe detector instead. The new models are built with utterly ridiculous limits.
Mine didn’t even hit the red over Onion articles about “Werewolf” Walker.
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Red Hat and The Blender Foundation come to mind as very successful examples. Prusa research belongs there as well, as while selling Hardware they also make detail drawing available for free, along with Prusa Slicer software.
Re: Re:
Good calls, AC, but how about the granddaddy of them, ButtonWare?
And yes, it was technically shareware, but there were no threats of dire consequences should one not send any money to the author. And there were no limitations in any of the products, including the documentation. Fully functional, and essentially free. Look it up.
Oh, and Jim Knopf was a neighbor of mine for years.
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Offer something that real people find useful and worth something (Blender) and you can make plenty of money. Offer something objectively worthless (meshpage) and you don’t.
Re: Re: Re:
Bite your tongue, Toom1275. You should know better than to invoke the Whiner In The Nordic Darkness.
Re: Re: Re:
I feel like you might be pushing a poor example.
Over seven mill, give steam a third (round down to six for convenience). Split between two people (3M each,) amortized for twenty years?
$150,000/yr is really good, but with it all back loaded like this, it doesn’t seem like a particularly easy or compelling example of “just give it away for free :)”. Most people can’t put twenty years into something and hope it will pay off.
Re: Re: Re:2
They don’t have a choice. The universities that they attended have no better plan for these people. They’ll need to take whatever they can get from the market. And the market is filled with criminals who slurp all the money for scams, copyright infringement and robberies and ponzi schemes and investment opportunities. So since they don’t have proper business plan, they spend 20 years developing technologies without compensation. This all means profit for the rich and beautiful.
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And it still doesn’t work. If they’d never put out a paid version, they wouldn’t make any money.
You don’t make money if you don’t charge for the item. When they started charging for the game, they made money.
That doesn’t “prove” that free items make loads of money; it proves that putting out a game players pay money for makes money.
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You’re repeating the myth that when people talk about “free” they mean “no business model at all.” But that’s wrong.
https://www.techdirt.com/2009/05/08/free-does-not-mean-no-business-model/
When we talk about free, we’re talking about how to use free as part of a business model.
Here, the game would not have made nearly as much money if they didn’t have the free version.
No, you make money when you figure out which part to charge for, and which part should be free. These guys have. They leveraged the free part to make the paid part much more valuable, which is what we’ve been advocating for decades.
https://www.techdirt.com/2007/05/03/grand-unified-theory-economics-free/
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People act like Dwarf fortress earned zero revenue before the paid version. They still got donations. They’ve been living off donations since 2007: https://www.bay12games.com/support.html
The paid version was a way to fund their retirement plan. They made money for their work long before the paid version came around.
Is it guarenteed? no. Neither was success with the paid version
Re: Elephant and Hyenas!
They were getting income via donations too. They just put out a good product. HYENA, I am a long time Dwarf Fortress player. And yes, I plunked down for the paid version.
And for what its worth, the paid version is WORTH IT in my opinion. But then, they put polish on a great version already. Mind, there are some complaints, but overall its done well!
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Oh, so why have people in the community donated money to the brothers over the years when there was no paid version?
Perhaps you don’t understand the simple fact that people sometimes are happy to donate money for something that they like just to support a creator. It’s almost like you have never heard of Patreon for example.
The money they are making on the paid variant of the game is entirely due to the free version that have been available for a very long time.
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I am u sure if this is sarcasm or not but…
Tarn and Zach Adams have a damn Patreon. The figures are in the forums for your perusal.
They definitely did not make enough to be co sidered “successful” by Wall Street standards, but if it puts food on the fucki g table, it works.
A lot of fans have ben waiting eagerly to BUY the game. Me too, as soon as I scratch up enough cash to do so. AT FULL PRICE.
Sure, for every Bay12 Games there’s a Spiderweb Software, but still, that doesn’t take away the fact that 2 men cashed in 20-odd years of goodwill and trust into a massive payoff for EVERYONE.
Re: By the way
The game is not even fully finished. I think about halfway with what is planned.
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@AC (aka asshelmet)
Perhaps you’ve skipped over my response to a different (and more cogent) AC, just above. Rather than refer you to that post specifically (’cause I know you’ll not bother), I’ll just quote from it here:
And that was in 1984!
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Tell me you don’t understand the Free-To-Play business model without telling me you don’t understand the Free-To-Play business model.
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https://www.bay12games.com/support.html
They lived solely off the donations of fans for 15 years (since 2007). They made money without charging for the game. If you want to claim they didn’t make money, maybe make sure they weren’t making money before you say that.
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Heh, the usual moron brigade are still using the same playbook from 20 years ago, they just seem to have forgotten what comes where.
“It’s impossible to make money from a free product” is the lie that should be pushed when the examples being given are new or innovative. When it’s a proven success, they should be switching to “but, this is an exception, nobody else can do it” lie.
They’re so dumb and lazy, not only are they repeating claims that were debunked years ago, they’re not even using their own talking points correctly.
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Well…in their defense they aren’t getting their asses continually handed to them and their rhetoric polished by having to counter angry pirates any longer. Said pirates long having realized that talking to the copyright maximalists is a waste of time and no matter what laws the copyright cult manages to push the end result remains “Pirates, as usual, are not affected“.
The few copyright trolls left are just left pissing up a rope all on their lonesome.
Re: Re: Re:2
Happily we can summon our EU representative and tell them about the problem and they will push some vote buttons so that the free-for-all techniques can be forbidden.
Good thing they had that second job, though...
approximately $7m from sales
Half goes to taxes. Some unknown portion goes to “other expenses and people”. Call it $3m for the brothers, or $1.5m per brother.
$1.5m / 16 years is approximately $93,000 per year.
Which, if no further taxes are taken from it, is fairly good annual wages. Given that they had their second (at the time paying) jobs, it’s all bonus, and a really quite excellent 401k equivalent.
Here’s hoping they use it wisely.
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They claim to have lived solely off the donations of fans for 15 years (since 2007). https://www.bay12games.com/support.html
This was their day job. You are right, the paid version was the retirement “plan”. It was their 401K. but when you say they had paid jobs…they have been getting paid to make dwarf fortress.
That sound you hear is Tero angrily grinding his teeth over why nobody pays him for his laggy, buggy freeware.
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What teeth? I already lost my teeth long time ago.
You declared the software laggy and buggy even though you haven’t got a cube to the screen with the software. It’s also significantly more performant than the competition doing the same operations, i.e. when unity’s user interface takes 5 seconds to respond to key presses making editing of the properties impossible, our software does it in less than 2ms.
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That’s not news. You’ve been toothless, threatless, and meaningless since a long time ago when you started shitting on this site.
Your own testimonies and posts through this terop account have showed your own data and memory leaks and issues with compiling your own data and files.
Maybe you’d actually get work done if you didn’t spend months in between trying to troll people who don’t think you should murder people for copyright money.
Wasn’t that your genius business plan to start with, which is why you insisted that we were all wrong and your one marketing video on one London bus could not be criticized? Now you’re suddenly insisting that it has problems?
Cryptocurrency by itself is a very questionable sort of investment that heavily leans towards “greater fool” scams, so this comparison with an actual game that people actually play is irrelevant to the point of bizarre.
I think it’s funny as fuck you had to add a pre-emptive follow-up note explaining how your copyright scam is different from a crypto scam, except that it’s not even relevant here because that’s not what the Dwarf Fortress developers did. They gave people a game that people could pay for in the form of donations.
Could the developers choose to sell off the copyright to their game as a form of monetization? Sure, but why would they want to when it’s clear they want to continue developing it for users? Would you sell off the copyright to Meshpage now? Would you even find a buyer?
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when using 100% of the time for development didn’t make it popular, I’m trying the 70% time for development and 30% time for marketing. Your trollish web site just happens to be in front of my troll fury.
Yes, that’s why I got the technology ready and working properly. When you cannot figure out how to get money from your work, you shouldn’t let that problem kill your technology. If you put your head to the sand and let a small money problem break your software development process, you should pack your backpack and move to marketing. It’s well known fact that software development is very expensive and that companies do not want to pay that expense. If that breaks your development process, you’re not very good software developer.
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..and there he is, right on cue. Half a dozen posts instantly flagged as deranged copyright maximalist garbage.
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He was here earlier, but well…
Even I grow tired of dealing with the Shame of Finland.
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Problem with this pattern is that the money only comes at the end, when realistic pattern would get smaller amount of money every week. When the reward is at the end of the time slot, there is significant risk that a failure in the end will lose the reward completely.
The youtube crypto scammers promised billions at the end of the time slot. They even built a timer and prevented you from withdrawing your money until the timer is elapsed. And when you wait for your money back (with significant 1%/day interest rate) the scammers who now control your money have already left the building when you notice that not only you’re not getting the promised interest rate, but also your original investment is gone…
So I don’t think your million promises actually hold water.
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How copyright solves this problem (and how dwarf fortress people got it solved) is that when one investment promise fail to deliver, the authors still have their copyright ownership intact and can sell it to next sucker with money stack available. If the people whose money story failed tries to use the product without compensation, its possible to sue the bastards.
This is how copyright is different from random crypto investment scam.
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