Stardew Valley, which has been sold to millions of gamers, has been created using the free MonoGame engine. So ConcernedApe is giving back to the open source software which made his commercial success possible, like commercial parties should.
Stardew Valley, which has been sold to millions of gamers, has been created using the free MonoGame engine. So ConcernedApe is giving back to the open source software which made his commercial success possible, like commercial parties should.
Remind me, which Ferengi Rule of Acquisition is this?
There's not much argument to be had. You've created a logical justification for a myopic, misanthropic world view.
> My friend bought me lunch. I used that energy at my job. Do I owe them part of my paycheck?
Many find reciprocation important in a relationship.
You made my morning with this quip.
Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.
Someone built this and is letting you have it. For free. There is no legal obligation or law of the universe here, sure, but if you're in the top 1% of benefactors of this pro bono work, you have the opportunity to do some good and make sure that others, like you, get the chance to benefit from this free work in the future.
There is a pretty straightforward argument to be made that this falls under the "with great power comes great opportunity" umbrella of moral reasoning, since this work empowered CA to create the game that earned him a lot of money.
Giving a fake gift that comes with unspoken strings attached (and “keeping score” in your head) is the passive-aggressive, immoral act. If reciprocity is expected, it is definitionally not a gift.
Releasing software under a free software license is a choice to give a gift to the world. If the author wanted moral obligation strings attached, the license would say that.
The example isn't quite accurate. If a friend bought you lunch, the social norm of reciprocity would incline you towards buying them lunch in the future (i.e part of your paycheck)
Free open source software is a public good. While there is no obligation to give back, giving back helps that public good become more useful to other people (including your future self). I'm against making contribution an obligation, but I'm not against light social pressure upon philanthropists who have the means (which is what the parent comment was doing).
There should be zero social pressure, as gifts do not convey obligation. It was the software author’s explicit choice when licensing and publishing the software to make clear that payment is not expected.
You are correct that no legal obligation was passed, but generally people feel that if you got something from a community that helped you succeed greatly you do have an obligation to throw something back to the organization to help it help others.
If you don't, that'ss generally classified by people as being a jackass
https://framerusercontent.com/images/9GsFxfDtmRFpfgGlNH61QsX...
He also needs that tool to stay alive for the future, even if not considering the past.
It's a bit better position for everyone.
This also gives them direct access to the devs and can request new features or bug fixes that impact them to be prioritized. Everyone benefits. It's probably much cheaper to make a contribution than to do that in house and upstream the changes.
No but you owe him lunch next time. Wait till you find out that you have to share your birthday cake on your birthday.
Donate to the F/OSS projects that you used to make it big.
If I gave you a gift and you tried to give me money, I would be offended.
I’m not saying free software publishers wouldn’t accept donations - just that publishing free software is giving a gift to the world, and there is NO moral obligation placed on recipients. That’s the point of free software.
You are simultaneously arguing for 'moral' subjectivity while utilizing the strawman of 'moral obligation'. Who would enforce this 'obliging' if the subject of morality is still up for debate?
You are tying yourself in embarrassing knots over someone spreading their wealth, unsolicited, to people who helped them achieve it? Why? What's the end goal?
Go argue with someone about the morality of environmental impacts of tech... or something...
You're correct about that. The free software itself doesn't confer any responsibility. But the free software exists inside other contexts. Social/moral context. There're also future contexts for you or humanity. For example, if developing free software proves to be a sustainable model for people to do, you might get other projects LIKE the Blender Foundation to crop up in the future. You might benefit from them directly, or benefit from them by enjoying the things people produce with them. Also, if it's a tool that you like to use, maybe you just want that specific tool to continue to improve.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants
For example they gave $250k to the Godot game engine project in 2020.
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epi...
If Epic Games really cared about Godot, they would align more with their values in-house. Their M&A drives the organization like a propeller.
However, their stakeholders decided circa 2019/2020 that they want to influence the development of Godot and spent their money that way. Corporate donations aren't at a whim like us individuals who spend $3/mo on Wikipedia or a food pantry, it's considered by the executive team, calculated and green-lit by their accounting team.
ConcernedApe donated to give back to the foundation he came from, while Epic is out for global domination in the virtual entertainment sector.
I know you might be tempted to move on to do something else, but I really need my shop to keep working.
So, here is the deal: I am going to send you a 'donation' of 500 USD now, and then a monthly recurring 'gift.'
Contractually? You have no obligation to work, and I have no obligation to pay.
But if you stop working on WooCommerce, I will obviously have to stop the donations.
Sounds cool?
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The output of that is rather positive here though, but it would be naive to not see the self-interest.
EA does something similar, and their EASTL is an opinionated and gaming-focused container and algorithms library that they maintain and made open source.
But I think people cynically underestimate the value of the contributions corporations do make and fail to understand just how much of the software we enjoy is only possible due to corporate funding.
Igalia may be a good example as most of have are not even familiar with them. But the Linux distro that I use comes from their, the Servo browser is being driven by them, and many other projects benefit from their contributions.
Epic has a grant program that has given out thousands of grants, including over a million dollars to the Blender project
AAA studios don't really use MonoGame.
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[0]: https://www.supergiantgames.com/blog/bastions-open-source-br...
Despite all the talk from libertarians about how private donations are the solution to the world's ills, open source software very rarely gets substantial donations.
We're already being taxed like crazy while that money subsidizes things almost everyone disagrees with. The libertarians believe that if people weren't taxed as much they could voluntarily spend money on things that are valuable to them. Some people would donate more and others wouldn't donate at all, and that's okay. I believe we would see a lot more voluntary donations without the burden of high taxes.
Claiming "libertarians haven't solved this yet" while continuing to take everyone's money is not a fair argument.
To stay on topic, this thread is about a private individual donating to a project he supports. That's something everyone should be happy about. And he did not do it as a political statement.
Its hard to see SDV as some niche 'indie' project and more and more pedantic definitions of 'indie' aren't helpful. This is a game with an estimated half BILLION in sales. He's extremely wealthy and could have given 50x more easily. Its a bit arbitrary on who or who hasnt done enough. Why no metrics like 10% of your income if you use the tool? "Volunteerism" doesn't work and stuff like this seems like mostly PR and a tip, moreso that "let me help you run this project." I mean does this make monogame better? It seems like a tool that's not really used by any commercial devs. This just seems like a "thank you for helping me get super rich," kind of thing. A tip, which is different than funding a project, fundamentally. You can tip a dying business that is destined to fold shortly, for example. That's not the same as funding it.
This sort of "we are and aren't a business" gray-zone these foss projects live in needs reform, imho. Expecting the kindness of strangers doesn't work. Look at how many foss projects get little to no donations. I don't have the fix here but these developers should probably roll up a LLC and market some kind of service these companies can just easily write invoices for instead of just expecting a random middle-manager to fight the execs to write a $100k check to some guy named Phil in Minnesota that maintains something-something-lib, which is one tiny part of a larger ecosystem that maintains their backend.
For the hundredth time. He's an extremely rare person focused on quality, value, and competency. And he clearly just loves his own game
Edit: Sorry? Pay for what, and risk what why? AAA studios simply cannot deliver good value in comparison. The donation is unrelated—or perhaps, arguably, open source makes this productivity possible.
Edit: if the engine is not maintained, there can be compatibility issues, it can go abandoned and lack new features, etc. It's the technical pillar of the product, like Unity.
ConcernedApe's next game is also built on MonoGame, so he has self-interested reasons to want MonoGame to continue to be maintained. But just because ConcernedApe has self-interested reasons to donate doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't also come from a charitable place.
MonoGame is basically getting a sponsor. The ecosystem benefits. I'm personally happy to leave it there rather than asking for moral purity.
But now, what if you "donate" to a public park across the street from your house: Is it charity? Yes, you are giving money to the city/trust that you don't have to give. Do you benefit? Yes directly, your property value goes up and you have a nice place to walk. Does that make it "not a donation"? No. It just makes it a smart donation or even sponsoring a project.
In all cases he is securing his own supply chain, and for a very cheap price. It is a very rational business expense.
The fact people with this opinion exist also discourages donations from others because "nothing is ever enough" for you.
Also pro-tip, if you do more than a handful donations you'll realize that you as the giver is always the one that most benefits from being charitable. The feeling you get is why you do it.
(this sounds like an attack btw, as you can't know what I do)
"Sponsoring", "Supporting", "Paying", "Hiring", "Contracting", etc, this is all ok.
but calling it charitable donation is a bit too much; calling "donation" money that you give that directly benefits your own interest is something I don't feel is right. It's only about the wording, not the action.
"I made a video game and now I chose to give 500 USD to help women who need shelter because they are beaten by their husbands", or even 50 USD, or 5 USD.
then yes, this is charity, and beautiful.
But this is very different to "I sent 100K USD to the project I absolutely and critically depend on".
It's not about the amount or doing "more", or that people are never satisfied, is that if you give to people who work in your interest, it's strategic sponsorship (or contractors...).
It's two very very different things, under the same word: "donation".
Oh and these studios often lose money instead of having profit margins in the multi-million, see Ubisoft.
ConcernedApe has done something special with game development to achieve that. I always look to him as an example as I take to game dev as a hobby. This is yet another way I want to take after him for sure. Looking forward to Haunted Chocolatier!
Also I’d never heard of MonoGame somehow, def going to take a peek now!
He really had perfect timing with its release. The original developers and the rights holders for harvest moon had so badly fumbled for so long with bad releases or only in Japan releases etc. Someone was bound to show up in that space since there was a clear demand for that type of game. It also helps that he aped (heh) harvest moon from the super nintendo / game boy generation so it basically runs on a potato and no one needs to buy dedicated hardware.
However, I believe Stardew Valley’s appeal wasn’t simply of fulfilling a void in the market. It is great because there is genuine passion for the subject in the execution, and the content in the game is truly compelling for a wide audience. An amazing story.
Just like it’s somewhat amazing to realize it took until 2009 for “digital Lego” to catch on with Minecraft.
"MonoGame is a "bring your own tools" kind of framework, which means that it provides the building blocks to build your own engine and tools, but it isn't quite an engine itself.
If you are expecting a scene editor (like Unity or Unreal), MonoGame is not that.
If you love coding and understanding how things work under the hood, MonoGame might be what you are looking for. And fear not, getting a game running with MonoGame only takes a few minutes."
With MonoGame/XNA/FNA, LOVE2D, libGDX, HaxeFlixel you are getting a bunch of tools instead, which is probably not bad if you like coding and your game doesn't fit into one of existing popular genres.
But it's good that code-first engines still exist. There are always going to be projects that are more experimental, or don't have a clear pattern of entities, or are dynamic enough that that kind of thing doesn't make sense.
Thinking here especially of the Doom / Quake / HL1 era where they were basically building the level design tools in parallel with the game.
Whereas nowadays you can have movement, mobs, dialog flow, etc all with very little code, and it's placeholders like "oh we need a custom shader for this effect" or "that boss needs some custom logic".
Honestly though it only reads as inspirational with the success coming at the end. 9 times out of 10 that story is actually how someone "wasted" 5 years of his life, ruined his relationship with his girlfriend that was basically supporting him the whole time, and had difficulty getting a normal job after.
Poppycock. What, you wanna cry at how beautiful *checks notes* Hatred is? What about Unity Asset Swap Shovelware #375438? And for those who fall on the 'violence' side in the 'violence' vs 'sex' debate, how about we take a gander at the corruption genre?
Sure, there are some amazing indie games (think of Unrest, for example), but there's also a ton of low effort garbage, and far too many projects which suffer from a lack of time, lack of resources, lack of ambition, or, sadly, lack of care. And, of course, the occasional 'I can't believe anyone at any point during the project thought this was a good idea'.
Maybe it's more of a lesson in how hard it is to finish a game, than how hard it is to make a somewhat successful one.
Really glad to see mega successful devs giving back to the tools that they use.
He donates, the engine remains a high quality tool, he doesn't have to write the whole stack himself.
Theirs a Flat Red Ball fork that can even build C# to Web. Hopefully these solutions can be shared with Godot so theit C# web export works.
I remember one year, someone bought me an old book on game development. It was a book using DirectX 3.0. To this day, that was probably the most intimidating programming books I’ve ever read. I remember hearing about XNA at the time and it just made so much more sense to me.
I’ve tried a few times to get back into game development, but I don’t like most big engines. The opinionation of them doesn’t square with how my non-game dev mind wants to model things, and I’m too retarded for the math/physics involved in rolling your own engine.
I did briefly toy with monogame though during a period where I was unemployed. It certainly had me the most comfortable as someone who’s career prior had been enterprise .Net crap.
At this point though, game dev seems extremely tedious. I have much more interest in game design. I’ve considered picking up genetic coding just to try it out for that purpose.
Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
This, however, is one area where eventually Epic Games shines — they take a much lower cut and if they increase in popularity with gamers then steam might be forced to lower their share.
It's probably the big name studios who already have entire departments to do that kind of stuff that feel they're being ripped off.
It pays to be the middle man!
Truly? I believe he lives in Washington State. It's really HALF of his income?
The only thing for developers they still do better than Google and Apple really is a few promotions throughout the year that target specific genres for released games developers can register for (whereas Google and Apple select the games they promote), and the "Next Fest" 3x a year for unreleased games.
They used to do stuff like "visibility rounds" that would reach 100,000s of people who didn't know about your game - the same feature today targets people who already wishlisted your game, so these days most developers have to put significant effort and money into promoting their Steam page on other channels like tiktok/youtube/reddit.
There's a reason why everyone launches on Steam.
If you are an indie team that makes a 50GB game and has 50k players, distributing and update management would be a gargantuan task without Steam or something like it. 2.5 petabytes of bandwidth isn't cheap.
Yes what they do is profitable, I'm not saying that it isn't. But paying for what they do is (clearly) still more attractive to developers than rolling their own infrastructure to do the same.
There's also the cost of selling through Steam / Google Play / Whatever - typically 30%.
I assume the developer has some professional expenses - an accountant at a minimum, probably a lawyer, certainly insurance. Maybe they also have a PR team, advertising, and the like. I don't know whether they pay for testers, translators, and things like that.
Then we get on to things like buying a new development machine, going to tech conferences, taking an educational course, backups, and all the other things that a business needs to spend on in order to be effective.
Maybe a profit margin of 10% is unrealistically low - but developing software has legitimate costs. The margin is never going to be 100%.
The video games industry is filled to the brim with gatekeepers who take their cuts. Valve takes 30%, just for their store. Publishers start at 10%. Your engine might take a cut.
Estimating that Stardew Valley, the big success video game with the lowest overhead bar none, has made 10% profit might be too low. 20%? Might be high.
For whom? The manufacture? It's closer to 10-30% for the manufacture (lower for white label goods, higher for "premium" brands). And it's higher for products that enjoy monopoly status.
For retailers, it's 2-3%, but retailers also get products on loan and negotiate various agreements that help cover the costs of displays, shipping, marketing, and wastage. So even that small percentage margin is skewed a bit.
There's a reason that retailers and food manufactures ("canned goods") were some of the largest American companies prior to technology taking off. It's a highly profitable industry.
Go for it, but most will not achieve a similar outcome.
(To be clear, Stardew Valley is a great game. But "making a breakout indie game" really does feel akin to winning the lottery to me, even if the game is fundamentally great.)
If you want to create indie games—and you can make it work without quitting your day job—go for it! But I don't think it would be smart for EA or Ubisoft to, like, stop making big-budget games and make indie games instead. If you can make a breakout hit, you can make a huge profit—but you have to make a breakout hit, and that comes down to a lot of luck.
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Now, I do think it would make sense for EA/Ubisoft to try more mid-budget releases, which explore something new instead of continuing a 10+ year franchise. A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the publishers were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped? Although caveat, I also haven't been following gaming as closely as I once did.
I think the problem comes from marketing budgets. For any given game a marketing budget can push some amount of sales, but applying a marketing budget to each game makes it much harder for the winners to make up losses on the rest.
Small releases also need to be 'lean' releases; management overhead is another cost that's hard to make up in scale.
Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
Hearthstone (Blizzard) is another rare exception of an indie-scale, in-house game that was a breakout hit that could not have come from the outside (because of the IP involved), but even that existed because it started as a "closet-scale" project with senior developers who insulated themselves from management pressures.
> Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
The advantage would be funding. I love indie games but I do get tired of 2D pixel art. With just a bit more money—still an order of magnitude less than Call of Duty, mind you—the possibilities really expand.
I started playing Psychonauts 2 this week, and I think it's such an incredible game—and a great example of what can happen when an "indie" developer manages to secure a real budget. (I don't know if Double Fine is indie, but their games contain the sort of outside-the-box thinking I associate with indies.)
Perhaps some sort of YCombinator-esque model could actually work here.
Absolutely. People tend to assume that 95% of video games turn a profit, when it's the reverse. There are highly polished, incredibly high quality video games who simply just don't sell.
Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O.
More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.
There are thousands of new games each year. The handful lucky outstanding low-budget games won't put anyone to shame.
> There's an uptick in indie devs that have broken through the barriers with good gameplay despite the graphics not being AAA quality.
Don't confuse indie with AAA. Indie is about control, AAA about budget. There is usually a correlation between control and budget, but there are also many long-running indie-devs with good budget now. Supergiant, who made Hades 2 for example, are such an AA(A)-Indie.
> Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O. > More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.
Those are long-running, genre-defining games, which also received a good budget over the years. Many of them are in the realm of AA, probably AAA now. Those are naturally grown services-games which could grow from success to become even more successful. Big studies tried to emulate this in the last years, but ultimately failed big in most cases.
The general problem is, the bigger your budget, the bigger the anxiety, leading to more control, conservative micromanaging and throwing every shit into the game to cater as much people as possible, which in high numbers cannibalizes the market eventually. Low-budgets can take on more risks, focus on their gaming-mechanisms and don't have to sell big. Making small money to cover your costs is already good enough, and they all can always explode by luck if they get their marketing right.
Games like Schedule 1 or R.E.P.O. don't have to offer 100h+ of fancy fun and high level entertainment. People are happy if they can get their 10+ hours of fun out of it, because they didn't waste big money on it anyway. So you will always see cheap games occasionally explode for a short while, while everyone is waiting for the big games going on sale, especially when the cheap games are coming with a social aspect.
I’m really not sure what it is. Usually, when a company begins to abandon/shaft their user base like that, it’s because they found a more lucrative market to chase instead.
Yes. It's incredibly rare. And suggesting otherwise is silly. Go ahead. Compare all the indie games released and see how often they succeed.
Sure, you can find successful ones, but you are ignoring those that do not succeed. There is a name for that, you know—survivorship bias.
At 10k new indie games a year, maybe a dozen gross over a million. A larger studio can't afford those kind of odds. That said, they should be able to make more games with a better focus on gameplay and a bit less on leading tech graphics.
Most indie games don’t sell for more than $10 USD, but let’s be generous and say you manage to convince your audience to pay $20.
Total: 200,000 USD
After Steam Cut: 140,000 USD
Could you work on the game part-time while holding down a full-time job? Sure, but you've got to have some iron stamina to want to sit in front of a computer for another 4 hours after a full day of work. Furthermore, not being able to focus on the game means dev might take significantly longer.
>These platforms are provided as private code repositories that add integrations with the console vendor's APIs and platform-specific documentation.
https://docs.monogame.net/articles/console_access.html
How can something be open source and closed at the same time? Is this basically MIT license? (Project page says Microsoft Public license)
> The MonoGame Foundation cannot directly give anyone access to the private console repositories without prior approval from the vendor due to NDA requirements set out by each vendor.
Blame here goes to Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft (though I'm not so sure about Microsoft)
This also applies to Godot, another open source game engine, which doesn't have any code for console support on its upstream repository.
GDK is open-source (https://github.com/microsoft/gdk), but to be fair there is a possibility that there are some parts under NDA.
But no one is paying MonoGame in this case? Maybe I'm just thick but X developer pays for MS/Sony/Nintendo to become authorized > and then they ask permission to use MonoGame per the page.
1. Apply to the vendor developer program (required for publishing).
2. Through the program, request access to the MonoGame console repositories
MonoGame gets nothing in the end.
Why not LÖVE (Lua) for example? https://love2d.org/
There is also libGDX (Java) but not sure Oracle is any better than Microsoft. https://libgdx.com/
In contrast to java it has added a lot of helpful constructs for high performance code like game dev; things like `Span` and `Memory` plus ref structs make it easier to produce code that avoids allocation on the heap (and thus lower GC pauses, which are a concern for most types of game dev).
At least for now I'd rather trust Microsoft than Oracle, esp since both CoreCLR and Mono are under more permissive licenses than Java and have been for some time.
Unity, Godot, and the XNA successors (Monogame, FNA etc) all use it.
It's higher level and more productive for the average programmer than C++, but still has static typing and much more mature libraries than Lua and other dedicated game scripting languages (of which there used to be many).
A lot of game development is Windows centric, and many C++ game devs prefer Visual Studio (the full fat one, not VS Code). I'm guessing MS is seen more favourably in gaming circles than it is in web dev.
Windows and the Xbox are both tier 1 platform targets for game devs as well.
Only proprietary bit is the debugger (vsdbg) but there are open alternatives.
Because Stardew Valley is written in it. Probably half of modern games are written in C#, too (Unity). It's not exactly an odd choice.
> Isn't the big tech (Microsoft) in this case is a very big downside?
No, a language being backed by big tech is a plus as long as the stack is fully open-source (which .net now is).
> Why not LÖVE (Lua) for example?
Because Stardew Valley uses MonoGame, not LOVE.
> There is also libGDX (Java) but not sure Oracle is any better than Microsoft.
Other than Minecraft, can you name one successful game written in Java?
Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame
https://monogame.net/blog/2025-12-30-385-new-sponsor-announcement/