Crowdfunding Features

[iynk.9053]

Please consider allowing some of the most-requested features to be crowdfunded through the Gem Store.

As an example, allowing players to dye weapon and backpack skins is something that ArenaNet isn't staffed to handle. OK, fine.

But what if ArenaNet simply put a price on the cost of said feature work and added a tab to the Gem Store for players to be able to fund it? Any projects that couldn't be completely funded could have the gems refunded back to the player accounts.

Seems like a win-win scenario.

[Zephire.8049]

The issue isn't money—they make enough to make content and fund an expansion—it's the engine and management.

Crowdfunding won't fix the engine (which is why weapons aren't dyable, not lack of staff) and it won't improve management. Anet even employs more people than would be expected for a studio that has one game in maintenance mode and one that is bringing in more money than it costs to make content for so it's not even due to the lack of staff. Maybe they have a third unannounced game in the works that requires so many people to work on it, but the money isn't the issue and has never been the issue. Even GW1 brought in more than enough money that they could start making GW2 and not update GW1 for years (outside some minor patches and short quests).

And honestly a lot of issues there are today could have been fixed if there were different people in charge. Instead of spending years and diverting the vast majority of money GW2 made into a project that ended up cancelled because NCsoft considered it a money pit that needed to stop, we could have gotten a new engine by now, better performance, more updates, larger updates, WvW updates, and/or PvP updates. That was years in terms of time, tens of millions of dollars in terms of money, and a hundred or more people that could have been working on the game that was already out with an established playerbase instead of something that we still know nothing about other than it existed and is the reason why so much of PoF and LW4 is lackluster and didn't get support after release.

I love GW2 but more money won't help when it's not money that's the problem and it's not up to players to fund a AAA game studio that's a subsidy of a different larger game developer that brought in 1.5 billion dollars in 2018.

[Danikat.8537]

It would be interesting to see how many people are actually willing to pay for things like dyable weapons, and how much they'd contribute. It would be especially interesting to see the reaction if Anet actually tried to crowd fund the full cost, rather than going the route many companies do of collecting token donations to gauge interest as a means of securing funding from more conventional sources. I suspect the cost and time scale would surprise a lot of people.

Bearing in mind for something like weapon dying which they've said would take too much time they'd likely have to hire at least 1 new person to work on it, so there's at least a few weeks wait between knowing they've got the money and even getting started because they have to advertise, recruit and train up the new person before they can do anything, then there's the time to actually do the work itself. This game has literally hundreds of weapon skins and Anet have previously said each one would need to be re-made to make it dyable so it's going to take months for someone to do them all.

I'm completely against Anet crowd funding things they've already said they're working on like Alliances because I think for a commercial company that's pointless. All it means is the money from the crown funding goes to that and the money which would otherwise have been allocated to it goes on something else instead, so effectively it's funding whatever other lower priority stuff Anet chooses to do instead. But if it's for things Anet have already said they cannot justify the time and expense to do I suppose it could be worth exploring the idea, see if enough players are actually willing to pay for it to happen.

[Steve The Cynic.3217]

@"iynk.9053" said:Please consider allowing some of the most-requested features to be crowdfunded through the Gem Store.

As an example, allowing players to dye weapon and backpack skins is something that ArenaNet isn't staffed to handle. OK, fine.

But what if ArenaNet simply put a price on the cost of said feature work and added a tab to the Gem Store for players to be able to fund it? Any projects that couldn't be completely funded could have the gems refunded back to the player accounts.

Seems like a win-win scenario.

The primary cost is not, as such, the money (as already discussed in this thread), but a direct cost to us:

• They have a finite set of resources for development (whether that's the game's code, the engine's code or "art" resources).
• They have a finite time to build stuff in(1).
• As a consequence, they have to prioritise what gets developed first, and what waits for later.
• If the crowdfunding thing shows that X is more interesting for us (the people who would be voting) than Y is, then X happens before Y (or Y doesn't happen at all), and in that sense, we (or at least the supporters of Y) do lose out.

It isn't exactly a zero-sum game between X and Y, but it's a lot closer than your description of it as a "win-win scenario" makes it sound.

[Veprovina.4876]

@Zephire.8049 said:The issue isn't money—they make enough to make content and fund an expansion—it's the engine and management.

How about we crowdfund an engine upgrade? :smile:Let them hire some staff to only work on that.

[kharmin.7683]

The forums represent a very small minority of the player base. Crowdfunding might likewise involve a small sub-set of players. I'd wager that most players don't even look to the forums or would find out about any crowdfunding avenues. This could lead to Anet implementing things for a much smaller minority rather than for the larger majority which I believe their internal metrics have already factored in.

There is nothing stopping players from purchasing gems with real cash if they want to infuse Anet with capital. The method for this already exists. No crowdfunding necessary.

[IndigoSundown.5419]

Adding resources for such projects costs money. So what happens when not enough people support it? Refunds?

[Westenev.5289]

I believe players ultimately don't know what they want out of a game, so something like crowdfunding won't lead anywhere if the dev's aren't leading the charge. Personally, I think projects lead by money and not by the passion of the developers is a problem with todays society anyway, so I'd rather pay for a finished project than bankroll a multimillion dollar company to draft sales ideas they have a lukewarm interest in at best.

[Teratus.2859]

@Westenev.5289 said:Personally, I think projects lead by money and not by the passion of the developers is a problem with today's society anyway.

Agreed, having been a gamer for the better part of 30 years i've been around long enough to see the great advances in technology which has lead to more complex and technologically impressive games, but also what I would consider a decline of quality, passion and artistic creativity that made so many older games so iconic and loved.

Now i'm not saying new games are bad and old games are better and this definitely isn't coming from a place of nostalgia since I still own and play many of the old games I loved years ago and still love to this day.But I am saying there is a lot of weak, uninspired games produced these days sorely for the purpose of making a lot of money as quickly as possible by pandering to whatever is thee current thing that everyone is playing.. and that might be good for short term business gains but it isn't good for the integrity of the video game franchise's that are exploited for that purpose.This is one reason imo why we see some franchise's just gone.. and we've lost a good few over the last several years.. and others that have changed so much they are almost nothing like what they used to be.

[Dawdler.8521]

How exactly do you crowdfund something someone doesnt want to do? Use the money to force them to do it?

[Danikat.8537]

@"Dawdler.8521" said:How exactly do you crowdfund something someone doesnt want to do? Use the money to force them to do it?

Isn't that how jobs work in general? I mean I like my job but there's plenty of aspects of it I'd rather not do, but I do them because otherwise I don't get paid. (There's other factors too of course, like the fact that the enjoyable parts can't happen without the boring parts being done, but getting paid is pretty important because I also like having a place to live and food to eat.)

But if you mean Anet as a whole rather than the individual staff member doing the work that's fairly simple: if there's things they absolutely don't want in GW2 for whatever reason (or things which are impossible) they just don't set up a fundraiser for it.

But there's been plenty of things over the years which they've said they're not opposed to doing but which would take too much time (and therefore money) to justify. Making weapons dyable for example, at some point early on in the development of the game it was decided that, unlike GW1, weapons wouldn't be dyable. So weapon skins were all made using a system which is incompatible with the dye system (I can't remember the specfics but if anyone is curious I'm sure you could find the dev quote). Making them dyable now would mean re-creating every single weapon skin by a different method, which would take a lot of time. Anet would need to pay someone for that time and while they're doing that they can't work on anything else. So Anet have decided it's not worth doing. But hypothetically if the project was crowdfunded, allowing them to hire a new person (so it doesn't take time away from anyone currently working there) to do the work it could happen.

Realistically though I don't think crowdfunding things like this is practical. According to GW2 Efficency there are 6,549 weapon skins in the game right now. If we very optimistically say it would take 30 minutes to re-create each one to make it dyable that's 3,274.5 hours to do them all. If the person doing this was paid Washington State's minimum wage for 2021 ($13.69 an hour) it would cost $44,827.90 just to pay them (and take just over 20 months, assuming they worked 8 hours a day, 5 days a week with no time off). It wouldn't surprise me at all if the actual time to do it is more like 2-3 hours per weapon and more for ones with lots of effects, I sincerely hope the person paying it would be paid a lot more than minimum wage because this would require some previous training and experience (and the USA's minimum wage isn't actually enough to live on, especially if they need to be near Anet's office). Not to mention all the other costs like paying the person who is supervising and managing the work, staff time to recuit and train them, providing them a PC etc.

I can't imagine it would go over well if Anet announced "We're starting a crowdfunding campaign! If we can raise almost $50,000 then in two years you can have dyable weapons!" (This is what I meant when I said the reaction would be 'interesting' if they ever actually tried it.)

[Smoosh.2718]

@Dawdler.8521 said:How exactly do you crowdfund something someone doesnt want to do? Use the money to force them to do it?

Also to add to your point, if someone doesnt want to make something or has no enthusiasm to do it. It will be crap as a result.

Prime example of this, Balance patches, [Please insert image of El Risitas here].

Also, Crowd funding products to a company... Which is meant to be making items you want to buy in the first place will never go down well. Lets face it, if they arent making the most asked for items now, they will fail in times to come if that keeps up, Crowd funding will not change this, as you'll only get mis-spent money on projects that get canned which arent even related to what you asked for. Like who the hell asked for a mobile application related to Gw2?

[LucianDK.8615]

Look at Star Citizen, a most severely cautionary example of crowd funding.

[Dawdler.8521]

@Danikat.8537 said:

@"Dawdler.8521" said:How exactly do you crowdfund something someone doesnt want to do? Use the money to force them to do it?

Isn't that how jobs work in general?Not really, no.

Imagine if you could just hand $1000 to a bank cashier and tell him "Look man we are over 50 people that has worked to get this going, we crowdfunded you robbing the bank. Here's the cash, now do it." And if he fails to do it everyone can just sue him in court.

[Ashen.2907]

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:How exactly do you crowdfund something someone doesnt want to do? Use the money to force them to do it?

Isn't that how jobs work in general?Not really, no.

Imagine if you could just hand $1000 to a bank cashier and tell him

"Look man we are over 50 people that has worked to get this going, we crowdfunded you robbing the bank. Here's the cash, now do it."

And if he fails to do it everyone can just sue him in court.

Except that the suggestion here is for ANet to decide what to put up for crowd funding. So the employee, in this case, would be asked to work on projects decided by their employer...just like pretty much every job in the world.

[Westenev.5289]

@Ashen.2907 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:How exactly do you crowdfund something someone doesnt want to do? Use the money to force them to do it?

Isn't that how jobs work in general?Not really, no.

Imagine if you could just hand $1000 to a bank cashier and tell him

"Look man we are over 50 people that has worked to get this going, we crowdfunded you robbing the bank. Here's the cash, now do it."

And if he fails to do it everyone can just sue him in court.

Except that the suggestion here is for ANet to decide what to put up for crowd funding. So the employee, in this case, would be asked to work on projects decided by their employer...just like pretty much every job in the world.

I really hope gw2 is more than just a job to the dev's. A job is something where you get paid to work the least for your time... no passion or interest.

Throwing money at problems is a poor start, and ultimately useless without drive, vision and planning and reward. In all likelyhood, the extra stimulus would likely be indirectly funding Anet's other asperations and behind the scenes projects.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Ashen.2907 said:Except that the suggestion here is for ANet to decide what to put up for crowd funding. So the employee, in this case, would be asked to work on projects decided by their employer...just like pretty much every job in the world.And what would happen if the end result didn't satisfy you? I mean, look at the build templates. Now you can at least see how badly they're done and decide they're not worth the cost, but if you paid upfront, you would be denied that option.

[Coelho Nat.4697]

As people stated, some features are locked behind the engine, but the idea of crowdfunding is not bad.I would support more face options in the game. For instance, the players who contributed to the crowdfunding could access the new faces for free. The players who haven´t contributed would access it through gems.

[kharmin.7683]

@Coelho Nat.4697 said:As people stated, some features are locked behind the engine, but the idea of crowdfunding is not bad.I would support more face options in the game. For instance, the players who contributed to the crowdfunding could access the new faces for free. The players who haven´t contributed would access it through gems.

Might as well make it an optional subscription model then. Let's divide the player base between those who pay to play and those who don't.

[Ashen.2907]

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:Except that the suggestion here is for ANet to decide what to put up for crowd funding. So the employee, in this case, would be asked to work on projects decided by their employer...just like pretty much every job in the world.And what would happen if the end result didn't satisfy you? I mean, look at the build templates. Now you can at least see how badly they're done and decide they're not worth the cost, but if you paid upfront, you would be denied that option.

Well, that is a function of how crowdfunding, preordering, etc works. If you participate in something, knowing how it works, then you do not have much room for complaining that it did, in fact, work as intended.

Personally I am not fond of the idea. I was just correcting an erroneous analogy.

[Ashen.2907]

@Westenev.5289 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:How exactly do you crowdfund something someone doesnt want to do? Use the money to force them to do it?

Isn't that how jobs work in general?Not really, no.

Imagine if you could just hand $1000 to a bank cashier and tell him

"Look man we are over 50 people that has worked to get this going, we crowdfunded you robbing the bank. Here's the cash, now do it."

And if he fails to do it everyone can just sue him in court.

Except that the suggestion here is for ANet to decide what to put up for crowd funding. So the employee, in this case, would be asked to work on projects decided by their employer...just like pretty much every job in the world.

I really hope gw2 is more than just a job to the dev's. A job is something where you get paid to work the least for your time... no passion or interest.

Throwing money at problems is a poor start, and ultimately useless without drive, vision and planning and reward. In all likelyhood, the extra stimulus would likely be indirectly funding Anet's other asperations and behind the scenes projects.

Sure I hope that it is more than a paycheck for ANet employees, more for their sake than mine, but ultimately when the boss says, "this is what we are working on," that is what the employees work on. If you just let each and every employee do whatever they felt like, whatever they were "inspired" to do at any given moment...nothing would ever get done.

[Danikat.8537]

@Ashen.2907 said:

@Westenev.5289 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:

@Dawdler.8521 said:How exactly do you crowdfund something someone doesnt want to do? Use the money to force them to do it?

Isn't that how jobs work in general?Not really, no.

Imagine if you could just hand $1000 to a bank cashier and tell him

"Look man we are over 50 people that has worked to get this going, we crowdfunded you robbing the bank. Here's the cash, now do it."

And if he fails to do it everyone can just sue him in court.

Except that the suggestion here is for ANet to decide what to put up for crowd funding. So the employee, in this case, would be asked to work on projects decided by their employer...just like pretty much every job in the world.

I really hope gw2 is more than just a job to the dev's. A job is something where you get paid to work the least for your time... no passion or interest.

Throwing money at problems is a poor start, and ultimately useless without drive, vision and planning and reward. In all likelyhood, the extra stimulus would likely be indirectly funding Anet's other asperations and behind the scenes projects.

Sure I hope that it is more than a paycheck for ANet employees, more for their sake than mine, but ultimately when the boss says, "this is what we are working on," that is what the employees work on. If you just let each and every employee do whatever they felt like, whatever they were "inspired" to do at any given moment...nothing would ever get done.

I agree.

I suspect it's similar to how my job operates, even though I don't make video games. I like my job and the work is important to me, I have a lot of ideas and opinions on what we're doing, what we should be doing and how to go about doing it and I'm happy to share them whenever the oppertunity comes up (which is part of my job, this isn't just me nagging people). Whenever I can I make sure I'm involved in strategy meetings and the early stages of project planning so I can get my ideas out there, and even in the day to day work I'm fortunate to have a fair bit of freedom to decide my own priorities.

But that still doesn't mean I just get to do whatever I want whenever I feel like it. There's still plenty of times when I'm doing boring administrative work because it has to be done, or when something has gone wrong and I have to sort it out even though I'd much rather work on the new project I'd been expecting to do when I started the day. I can't refuse to do that just because it's not the thing which interests me most because it's part of my job and it needs to be done.

Often it's part of the same thing. I want to get a new project going because it's exciting and I think it's going to do great things. But to make that happen I have to do all the tedious paperwork like writing the proposal and project plan, and setting up a Teams page or a Dropbox or a shared spreadsheet or whatever tool we're using to collaborate this week.

It's basically the same with every job I've had, and I think it's the same for all jobs. A friend of mine sells her artwork for a living - literally creating whatever she imagines and then selling it online and at craft fairs and even she complains about the boring work she has to do sometimes. She once made a felt giraffe, amazingly detailed and I think one of the pieces she's proudest of having done, but while she was working on it she got so sick of creating the pattern she swore she'd never do anything involving giraffe's ever again. She'd chosen to do it, no one was forcing her to finish it and she still had to do some things she didn't enjoy because it's part of the job.