Funding development through freelance sites like upwork?

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ElderTroll
Posts: 499
Joined: 25 Jan 2012, 07:01

Funding development through freelance sites like upwork?

Post by ElderTroll »

So, there are websites online where you can hire freelance programmers. What do people think about using services like that to get features long anticipated features implemented? These are the results I got from searching for c++ game developers on the website. Personally, I'm fine with people earning a living off open source software. I just love software that is free for people to use and also open, so that anyone can always refine or expand on it.
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Thunderforge
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Re: Funding development through freelance sites like upwork?

Post by Thunderforge »

First question is: who pays for these freelancers? Are you volunteering?
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Funding development through freelance sites like upwork?

Post by AnyOldName3 »

The money has to come from somewhere. If money was coming from somewhere, I'd gladly take it myself in order to justify spending more time working on OpenMW. I'm sure a lot of other regular contributors would be in a similar position.

If OpenMW did manage to collect enough money to pay people to do things, then we add the massive potential issue of judging how to be responsible with it - someone might offer to do something in exchange for some of it, but that doesn't guarantee that everyone would feel that was the best use for it. There are also other questions like how to hold the money between collecting it and giving it to someone who's just finished a new feature as it would be fairly easy for whoever had it in the interim to just disappear forever with free money.

The simplest similar situations now would be for individual developers to set up their own Patreon accounts and let people donate to them, which doesn't actually give the people donating the money any guarantee that anything will get done, or for an individual or company to employ someone themselves to add a feature and do a good enough job that it can be merged when it's done (which would only really be feasible if a company or individual wanted to use OpenMW as an engine for a game they wanted to sell but the lack of a feature made that harder).

By the way, if you are an individual or company who is making a thing and wants to use OpenMW (without violating its licence) to make the thing, but in order to make the thing, need OpenMW to do a thing it currently doesn't do, then I am open to offers.
MikeMXellers
Posts: 24
Joined: 30 Aug 2014, 13:19

Re: Funding development through freelance sites like upwork?

Post by MikeMXellers »

At one point Scrawl had a patreon and I gave money to that and I'd surely give money again to help push development forwards, although then there are other things that need to be considered, why should 1 developer get paid to work on the game while others put in their time and effort for free and once money is involved developers could leave due to not feeling they are being treated fairly. In the case that we put money together to hire developers using freelance websites who could be trusted to handle the collected money. There also exists the issue of determining what features to implement, although I guess a democratic voting system could solve this. There are definitely issues to consider but I want to see more features for this engine, and I'd be willing to pay for them, I started working on content for OpenMW in 2014, and it's now 2018 and the engine still doesn't support the features I need to do what I want do do with it.
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ElderTroll
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Re: Funding development through freelance sites like upwork?

Post by ElderTroll »

I used to contribute like 50 bucks a month to Scrawl's patreon and it was totally worth it. Scrawl did so much to get OpenMW to where it is. Overall think I've donated something like 500 dollars to the project and would have been happy to donate more. However, I'm going to be out of work soon and won't be able to support any developers while unemployed. This is a suggestion to help make the community more lively.

I agree with the issues you guys raised.

Even Scrawl's patreon never got over like 500 dollars a month and I think it might be difficult to get people to contribute to the point where someone was making 3,000 a month. That's why maybe hiring folks in countries with lower costs of living might make sense. Supporting yourself in a developed country could be done, but they'd have to be full time (making noticeable progress) and releasing videos on youtube of progress and maybe writing posts on moddb or some other venue to build hype. The guys developing the overgrowth helped popularize development vlogs, but they seemed a little burnt out by the end. That's why I thought about either Google summer of code or Upwork to help gain some more momentum for the project. I follow the tracker and see all the work people like you guys (thunderforge, anyoldname, and a half dozen other folks) are doing. So I'm aware and grateful for you keeping the project alive. I'd love to there to be a full-time paid dev working on the project and coordinating a GSOC student student. The devs of dwarf fortress have managed to make a living releasing free software. The difficulty would be to convince people of financially supporting a game that is already released, playable, and a decade and a half old. The Bay 12 devs (dwarf fortress guys) make blog posts pretty frequently. To attract paying subscribers you'd probably need to effectively convey progress. Personally, I think you could make the argument since openmw is multiplatform, more future proof and could eventually allow for more ambitious mods or tc's, and overcomes a lot of limitations of the original engine. In order to make that a convincing case you'd have to show people how it overcomes the original limitations (mods, features, stability, etc).

Maybe the funding could be some of the less interesting such as editor development, de-hardcoding, the last few AI pathfinding stuff, etc.
JohnMaster
Posts: 38
Joined: 09 Aug 2017, 05:32

Re: Funding development through freelance sites like upwork?

Post by JohnMaster »

I would suggest Bountysource for Bugtracker items but it still needs Redmine support. Add support if you can below.

https://www.bountysource.com/issues/138 ... or-redmine

OpenMW Example Suite
DestinedToDie's Patreon

TES3MP
Koncord's Patreon
David Cernat's Patreon
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psi29a
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Re: Funding development through freelance sites like upwork?

Post by psi29a »

This has already been talked about, multiple times... please do a search next time.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3649
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