r/gaming • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 PC • 10h ago

Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis'

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/dwarf-fortress-creator-says-the-industrys-in-shambles-over-ai-and-layoff-happy-ceos-everyone-i-know-their-bosses-are-slowly-getting-psychosis/
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u/AnOnlineHandle 9h ago

How did they get by in those twenty years? Wasn't the game bringing in some kind of income then as well?

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u/Urist_Macnme 9h ago

It was a free game (and the basic ascii version is still free).
They survived purely from donations from players.

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u/LakyousSama 9h ago

And they only started a donation page some years later after Zach got sick and they needed money for treatment. They were doing it for nothing before that.

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u/geeiamback 8h ago

According to this interview from 2010 they've been taking donations since release in 2006:

PC Gamer: You rely on donations from the community to fund ongoing development. When did you reach the tipping point where you knew you could do that? How did that feel?

Tarn Adams: It was the summer after the first year of my math postdoc in 2006 when I decided I needed to focus on DF full-time, but we didn't really have hope for donations at that time. DF hadn't even been released yet. I was just thinking I'd burn off my savings for a year and then get a job. When the game was released in August, we were making around a thousand dollars a month, and that was enough to build some hope, and the average kept going up. There wasn't really a tipping point... or if there is, I still don't feel like I've reached it. This year has been good so far, but there was the unusual 19-month delayed release in April which led to a large bump. Now we're stabilizing back down around treading water again. It's good though, since I'm able to work on the game full-time as it stands, and that's satisfying.

https://www.pcgamer.com/community-heroes-tarn-adams-for-dwarf-fortress/

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u/beenoc 7h ago

They've always taken the donations. Zach's cancer scare is what made them start to look into a paid version.

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u/kalmah 9h ago

They were apparently living very frugally and moved back in with their parents at one point and by 2015 they had a Patreon that was pulling in more than 4K/month.

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u/colonelsmoothie 2h ago

Zach had a normal job. One time he got really sick and realized was lucky that he had health insurance. Tarn not having the same type of safety net was one of the main reasons for making the Steam release.