Money

[Idsky]

Is there any option for a developer to receive money for working on BGA projects?

I'm putting work into Quantum for free which was in need of some polish because I love playing it. I would love to work on more games, but a developer's got to eat and time is money. Because this is fun I would happily work for a lot less than my usual commercial rate. If I wasn't a developer, I would have happily pledged a few bucks towards getting Quantum graphics improved, or 'tip' someone who made a game I enjoy better, but I don't know if any system like that would be workable or fit the culture of this site (just for volunteer hobby coders with day jobs?).

I guess publishers sometimes make private paid arrangements to get a new game coded? I guess they wouldn't care about an old game on here if it was out of production, but might contribute to getting a game upgraded if they're doing a reprint / update / expansion?

[joezg]

It is possible, but I don't know how common. There was a couple of paid projects advertised on this very forum, but for the new games.

I guess it will be more and more common with this world situation when BGA implementation could help with marketing.

If you build your reputation a bit by doing a couple of volunteer projects, you can probably contact a BGA team and ask them if they have (or have some knowledge of) a project on which a developer could be compensated.

The idea of community pledging for favourite games and / or tipping the developer is intriguing, but it seems that it is not so easy to put in place. A good question to ask the BGA team.

[Volker78]

I feel the same, it is fun, but a little compensation as respect for the work would be ok and could also motivate me to work on games, which I don't know/own

[sourisdudesert]

Hi,

I take advantage of this message to tell you a little bit more on this subject.

Some BGA games are developed by freelance developers we hire, almost exclusively from the BGA Studio developers community. We don't make public announcement about this because usually we already have 1-2 persons in mind for each project. Usually, we hire developers for Premium games with a tight planning and a huge potential. Obviously, we cannot finance every project like this, but to give you an idea during the last month 6 freelance developers from the community were working for BGA on various project, and it will probably vary between 5 and 8 for the rest of this year.

We cannot finance every game project because the vast majority of games projects on BGA are free games that does not bring any money. For these games, the only possibility is to make everything free (publisher is not paid / players are not paying / BGA is not paid / developer is not paid). Still, if you already developed a game on BGA you may have receive a little something from us

However, it does mean there is no room for improvements. With the increasing audience we got more money that we chose to invest by paying freelance developers (way more projects than in 2019), so that's something we've done already. If it happens we have the capacity to go further than that, by example by giving a compensation for the most popular free games, then we will find a way to do it. This is not obvious because as I said, free games do not bring money to BGA directly, but if we find a good way to do it we will do it.