Board Game Arena

Dear BGA developers,

you may know now that the organisation of BGA has changed.

(http://ludovox.fr/savoir-board-game-arena/)
"Depuis le début de cette année 2016, Grégory Isabelli est devenu indépendant, et est donc devenu le seul salarié de BGA. Il a pris cette décision car il était de plus en plus dur de concilier vie professionnelle et vie autour de BGA, donc il a opté pour cette solution afin de se consacrer à temps plein à BGA et développer encore plus de projets pour le site comme le portage sur smartphones et tablettes, la future Sandbox et encore bien d’autres projets à venir."

"Since 2016, Grégory Isabelli is the BGA only employee. (...)"

First of all, congratulation Grégory.

But i wonder if the BGA organsation should change. That's ethicaly weird for me, with the current BGA organsation, to be an unpaid worked for BGA (with passion, love of gaming and programing etc... not problem about that) and to have my hours and hours of work contributed to the salary of an employee.
I'm not against the fact that BGA has now a full time employee, but I wanna know the status of BGA.
BGA now makes someone live, and unpaid developpers are contributing to it.
Could we know about the BGA financial activity, and BGA future projects for the site ?

Can we have more information about it ?
I need full transparency about BGA organsation.

I'm sure BGA will improve with this turning point if his organisation.

best regards,

Hubert Borderiou

This is an interesting question!
Isn't developing a game on BGA like modding a game or creating custom maps? Or more broadly like contributing to Wikipedia or Facebook? I do think it's fair to pay a team to do the dirty technical / maintenance part.

BGA provides hosting servers and creation tools for free; we can use them to provide content (adapt games) that are free as well. As long as I keep ownership of my code and I have some fun in the process, I don't mind if someone gets paid for making the tools I use. And oh boy will it be fun to use the sandbox ^^

Also, the board games industry doesn't generate as much money as the video game industry so BGA just can't be like Steam or GoG. Some day maybe?

pikiou wrote:Isn't developing a game on BGA like modding a game or creating custom maps?

Pretty sure the answer is no. When you mod a game, you bought it and people who play your mod bought the base game as well. Bethesda doesn't get money directly when someone uses a mod, whereas on BGA if there are no games or there aren't new games developed all the time, it won't be as attractive to pay for the club. Or not as much ads will be displayed.

It's more like iTunes, Play Store or even websites like Kongregate. They get games made by developers all around the globe, and yet those developers can still get ad revenue or even a percentage of the amount paid in the case of iTunes and Play Store.

I know people who bought Warcraft 3 just to play DOTA; same for Half-life just to play Counter-strike. Nowadays it would be like buying Super Mario Maker or Trackmania: most of the content is created for free and on a regular basis by the community using amazing tools.

I don't think BGA gets paid for the ads. It's more of a bonus for the editors who let BGA use their games.

Just a comment : there is no "new organisation". There is an additional "premium" type of game on BGA in addition to the "free games". The free games doesn't generate much money and this money cover the cost of this service. The new premium games may cover in the future the cost of BGA "employees", and of course this point hasn't been reached yet.

So this does not change anything for games developed by the community, that are all free. We are not making money by selling an access to these free games, so there is nothing new here.

Of course, at some point in the future, a new premium game will be developed by one of you, and obviously in such a case you will get some revenues from it. We are going to make an announcement to developers about this soon so stay tuned.

I know this "2 models on 1 website" aggregation may be difficult to understand, but we really need this model to attract both "small games" that needs visibility and need to be free, and "premium games" that we are not authorized to propose on BGA for free.

sourisdudesert wrote:Of course, at some point in the future, a new premium game will be developed by one of you, and obviously in such a case you will get some revenues from it. We are going to make an announcement to developers about this soon so stay tuned.

I know this "2 models on 1 website" aggregation may be difficult to understand, but we really need this model to attract both "small games" that needs visibility and need to be free, and "premium games" that we are not authorized to propose on BGA for free.

And this is awesome news for all of us. Devs, admins, founders and players.

Good luck with the development of the site!