Something I have recently considered if the possibility of setting up an Unreal Engine 4 game development Patreon - if you’re unfamiliar with the concept of Patreon, it’s essentially a platform where people can subscribe (on a monthly basis) to a content creator in exchange for varying levels of access to that creator or their products. There are few small indie developers already using this platform, but I figured it might be an interesting place to set up something a little more significant.
The idea is that a small group of experienced developers of varying disciplines would come together to develop a vertical slice for a small, interesting game. During the course of developing the game, each developer would produce a number of articles (or examples / tutorials) detailing their work process on the particular part of the game that they had been working on. The idea is to create a wealth of knowledge covering more or less every aspect of developing a small game, from small worked examples, to project management considerations and beyond.
Subscribers would be able to pay for varying levels of access; for example the lowest tier would receive game alpha builds and the final product, middle tiers would receive access to the articles, and higher tiers would gain access to specific insider insights, some ability to affect the project, and / or potentially a little one-on-one time with individual developers. Monthly summaries would be sent out to all subscribers, and articles intended for middle tiers would become free to all after a year.
Developers would receive a share of the monthly income based on the articles they produce (they would not necessarily be required to do the final writing themselves, but they would be be expected to produce enough coherent material for an article to be written), and articles would revolve around recent demonstrable game progress*. The vertical slice upon completion could theoretically later be used to either chase a publisher, or go into early-access, to produce a more complete final product.
The real questions are - would people be interested in such a thing? Would people be interested in subscribing, and if so, what would they like to see and how much would they be willing to pay for various things? Are there any developers who might be interested in contributing? Do you have any other thoughts about such a project and how you might approach it?
Thanks for reading!
*Notably, Patreon isn’t likely to be a ‘day-job quitting’ exercise; consider that if the project absorbs 20% of the revenue and the remaining 80% is split between six developers who contributed that month, then a $3000 per month Patreon is only going to give you $400 per month. This is more a labour of love than it is a money-making scheme. It will also take a considerable amount of time and effort to build a subscriber base large enough to generate that kind of income - expect a lot less.
That doesn’t really sound any different than other crowdfunding other than that it’s a subscription–an like anything else, the level of interest depends on the project and the level of confidence that people have in the developers to be able to do what they say they plan to.
I don’t know how well it would work. But personally will support this if you give it a go. Maybe tires need to be a bit different as it sounds that without any type of subscription people won’t even see what they can get out of it. Something less exclusive could bring more people on board. Perhaps releasing some of the materials for free after few month or half a year. Just a thought, not a critique.
Other forms of crowdfunding usually aim to produce a specific game within a specific budget, and people get their rewards towards the end. In this case, it’s more aimed towards producing material aimed at developers, the practical project is the means through which said material is created (it provides real problems and challenges within a given context). Most indiegogo or kickstarter projects are either aimed at producing either a game, or a narrow series of tutorials for a given discipline.
It’s definitely different, and I know I could personally see value in something like 8 high quality articles per month covering practical approaches to things like project management, game design, as well as working examples and explained methodology for art pipelines or feature implementations. This is the kind of material you don’t always see outside of things like GDC talks.
Yeah, I have certainly considered the value of releasing a certain amount of the generated content each month for free; a summary of a month’s articles, with one cherry-picked example given for free could probably go a long way to showing the value proposition to prospective subscribers.
This is kind of the objective. They wouldn’t necessarily be well-known devs from the community, but they would know their stuff and be able to demonstrate it.
Software used would be industry standard, firstly because this is what the majority of experienced developers are familiar with, and secondly this is what less experienced developers are usually learning. It’s all about using the best tools for the job and achieving the best results, just like a development studio would - if this means using costly applications like Maya, or specialist tools like World Machine, then that’s what will be used. Some workflow techniques are of course generic and can translate into various alternative packages.
This wouldn’t be happening. The project needs to be built around the capabilities of the development team and the individuals within it, and it needs to operate like a normal project. You can’t produce material regarding project management or game design methodology if you’re letting the community run the show. It also sounds like the potential for a complete mess, and it’s far too much work to directly manage such a community.
These are not going to be video presentations. Writing lengthy articles in itself takes a lot of time - consider that it would take about 3 hours to produce a short 2000 word article, possibly four if it needs substantial additional material (screenshots, animated gifs, videos, whatever). Eight articles per month is a 24-32 hour commitment - which is a lot on top of a full time job and finding time to actually develop the game itself. Doing video presentations would take considerably longer - they need to be prepared, shot, edited etc, not to mention require the purchase and maintenance of dedicated equipment and space to film in.
This isn’t about teaching people how to use things like 3D modelling applications from scratch - there are other places to learn that and it isn’t the best use of time. The kind of material we’d be looking at would be more about techniques, approaches and methodology; the kind that isn’t easily available online. I used the word articles rather than tutorials, and made a comparison to GDC talks for a reason.
Industry standard software will be used throughout unless there is a case for using certain unique or specialist software as mandated by the project or specific workflow requirements. There’s no question of that; the whole objective of the project is to cast a light on professional development practices and you can’t do that if you’re deliberately avoiding professional development software.
This doesn’t mean that free or unusual software won’t get used, but it has to be determined by the needs of the project.
At the start of the project there wouldn’t really be any community to speak of, so there isn’t going to be an audience to poll. At the same time, the process behind establishing a project is in itself a topic of discussion that’s almost never publicly discussed. How do concepts form? How do you know if they are achievable? How do you establish if they make sense from a business perspective? There’s a lot of ground to cover during the early phases of project conception.
As for backdoor funding - I think we’ve already established that such a Patreon would be really quite unlikely to remotely cover the costs and expenses of a serious project. There are much better places to obtain project funding, and they don’t require the production of large quantities of learning materials.
You can never please everybody. It’s more important to establish a realistically achievable project that takes into account the specific skills and experience of the team. I expect people will subscribe primarily for the material output, not for the game genre. Art workflow translates between projects, programming concepts may or may not be genre specific, design principles can be applied in a number of contexts.
I would say go for it anyways as becoming a Patreon Creator has no startup cost. I started one for fun in less than 1m + 54secs. Its easy just sign up with a name and valid email address. Either Gamer Devs will support it or not. I do like the idea of a small group of experienced developers of varying disciplines would come together, I personally see this Team as a Consultancy, and they’re plenty of Devs in the Got Skills? Looking for Talent? Forums, I feel ould pay a monthly sub for pro answers to tough questions.
I would anticipate stiff competition not from the plethora of FREE Tuts already out there, but, from Epic’s own FREE Live Training as its the Best-in-Class Tutorials by default, and the #1 trusted source for information direct from the UE4 Gods themselves.
I would be curious as to what the interesting game would be, considering the numerous genres/subgenres. For example, I personally favor FPS and RPGs, so if your team is developing a RTS, that may not appeal to me. Do you plan to hold a contest to vote on the game to be developed?
My only suggestion, I wouldn’t subscribe unless there was some free content that I found really helpful. And for some types of content, videos might be more helpful than an article and take less work. Most tutorials aren’t heavily edited or super planned out, and they don’t need to be. Seeing someones workflow and how they work normally helps viewers understand the process more.
There’d definitely be some video content where necessary, though I suspect it may often be embedded in an article covering a wider context. Video content is pretty good for demonstrating how to do things, but it’s often a bit naff for explaining why.
Getting a project of this scale up and running takes a considerable amount of time and effort - that in itself is a cost. Simply creating an account is unlikely to yield results, so I’d much rather hit the ground running with an established game plan and demonstrable content ready from day one. I don’t really want to be charging a subscription fee before there’s content ready to be accessed! This means it may take a couple of months of work before the Patreon side of the project even emerges. I also wouldn’t want to create the project without the support of the core developers needed to generate enough content on a month-to-month basis.
If people could please stop obsessing over tutorials it would be great - I’ve already said that the objective of the exercise is not to produce tutorials, but more to produce practical articles regarding project-specific development problems and workflows. Tutorials are usually generic and don’t have the framework of a real product to contend with, articles often go into considerably more depth. There’s plenty of material out there on the web that walks you through how to do XYZ, holding your hand at every step, but that material never goes into the same breadth of detail nor any great explanation and reasoning behind the process.
This is an example of an article; it’s a highly focused piece detailing how a specific problem was solved, specifically how rolling stock was simulated for the railways lines in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate.
This is another example; a more generic problem but an equally focused and detailed explanation of how and why, in this case, it’s how Nvidia set up a skin shader in one of their demos. http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch14.html
Both of those are more technically orientated, but there is a clear difference from being simply a ‘tutorial’ in that much more attention is paid to the explanation of the approach - which makes it somewhat more valuable than just a set of instructions to recreate something. Not all articles would have such a narrow focus as that first one, and some material may well fall more into the domain of tutorials (others more into the domain of opinion pieces, or statistical analysis, whatever gives the best format for the topic).
Entirely to be determined. It will depend greatly on the experience of the development team - and the project will be chosen in the same manner that a conventional development team may approach a project. There will be no such vote, because it doesn’t make sense in the given context - you can’t for example talk about why you chose to make a given game (for example talking about business plans and/or market analysis), if the answer is ‘because 40% of 10 people voted for genre A over genres B and C’.
I was actually thinking along the lines of a FPS/RPG/RTS Hybrid:cool:
I honestly didn’t expect you to throw a random page up. My point was, just Take action on it regardless. Rapid implementation, adjusting the concept as feedback comes in. When its all said and done, the concept may have morphed into something else once its up and running.
Sorry. I used the term tutorials generically meaning providing instruction, however, I prefer wikipedia’s ‘tutorial’ definition. I can see value in Articles regarding project-specific development problems and workflows, IF I’m using that project’s source and workflow as a template. Will The Interesting Game Project’s source be made available to your Subscribers? If YES, the concept’s appeal instantly increases 500% for me.
To answer your questions:
I believe Gamer Devs in this community are interested in Consultation and Tutorials solving problems specific to their Project’s Game Development and are willing to Sub for such Consultancy services. There are plenty a PAID offers for Tutors that suggest this, especially for Blueprints. I pay monthly subs for Legal and CPA Services, Pro UE4 Technical Consultancy could operate in the same manner. Additionally, I can easily visualize Articles being generated from such Consultation/Tutorials, which ultimately results in more content for your Patreon.
Personal tutoring would fall well outside of the remit of the project, it’s time consuming and does nothing to further the actual development of the game or associated material. Game development is a pretty full-on activity and writing the articles is going to take a considerable amount of time on top of that as it is.
As an aside consultancy needs to be run like a business, not on a Patreon basis, then at least you can pick clients who can actually be helped and aren’t going to waste your time - like a significant number of people who have been ‘looking for a tutor’ in these forums.
You mentioned tiers early on in the access and I think it’s vital to understand the tiers in the communities knowledge. We have the No knowledge, can get by, the experienced and the omg people will pay for 5minutes of your time. The 5minutes of your time won’t subscribe because there’s no value but the other 3 could find value.
However, the why is importing for can get by/experienced the no knowledge which is the largest section will need more.
Why not pick a project every quarter. Then have your team divided into members and leads. As your members build the content they create the tutorials of real world applied design/coding. This is what your no knowledge would pay for. Your team leader discuss the why and write the articles, this would not only discuss the why of lighting effects etc but also project management and team leader skills, this would be useful to the can get by/experienced. (Obviously tier 2 should have access to tier 1 content as well). Then you need the premium service which gives early access to the development and access to a forum for speedy response to queries and the bonus free content.
The 3month timeframes makes projects more achievable yet long enough for some quality small environments etc. It means you would be varying the game/art style often enough that someone like me (interested in fps) would continue my subscription through your rpg phase since the cost would be minimal and I can still try to look for value I can apply over.
Just my two cents, I’d be very interested in the above but I wouldn’t pay money purely for articles that I can find anywhere online but insight an entire development pipeline from top to bottom would be gold
I think the idea is good, but in practice the money side of things is going to be difficult. It can take a long time to build up a Patreon following, even just enough to feed a single developer. With a team you’re going to need a lot of people to be prepared to work for nothing for an indeterminate amount of time with no promise of a return. That’s the major difficulty imo, there is probably demand for the idea to work but that is one serious hump to get over.
Also successful Patreons tend to be established content creators making more content similar to their existing content. Hard to start one without an already existing following.
Time. 3 months would be fine if we were working full time, but we wouldn’t be so time would be more limited. Whilst it’s possible to do a number of small games, you do lose a lot from what makes the larger projects more valuable; demonstrating how they evolve over time, how they’re managed, and there’s no real time to develop game-specific techniques / technology.
The only comparable thing I can think of are the individual game blogs - alternatively 12 month’s access to the GDC vault would set you back $495 - and a fair amount of that material is just the slides from talks without any additional supporting material.
I expect it would take a considerable amount of time to gather a following, possibly a year just to get a distance into the four-digits per month range. I did kind of mention this in the initial post though. There is also however the pay-off at the end; a working vertical slice leads to a product that can be sold.
At the same time, there probably aren’t many existing teams already pushing out content looking at starting a Patreon either.
If the project is very large though it increases the chance of failure (as do all our solo projects) if my solo project fails only I am impacted, if your subscription project fails you open yourself up to being sued. Could you many complete the game develop the articles then once complete release as a subscription system slowly whilst you work on a 2nd project to avoid that risk?
Definitely an interesting idea, I might be interested in taking part. I’d have to wait and see if I could juggle that with all the work I have going on at the moment though! (nice problem to have :p)
If the game project is never completed, it’s never completed. Projects fail, and understanding why they fail is just as important as observing why projects succeed. In the event that the project fails, it has still produced the monthly material and playable builds up until that point and subscribers got what they paid for - there’s not really much ground for a lawsuit in there.
Asking people to develop a game and contribute to regular articles for a minimal monthly return is a big ask. It’s an even bigger ask if they’re not going to see a penny until the project is complete, and then only see a minimal monthly return for continuing to contribute. I really don’t think it would be reasonable to ask developers to commit to that, and it also assumes that there’s intent to ever develop more than one project.