And while he wanted to wait for things to shake out before coming down too harshly on the company for one misstep, it's clear the move called into question much of the good will that had been built up. They sent out a nice plaque once Dwarf Fortress hit 1,000 backers and offered a tour of the offices, where Tarn said he picked up a "sort of legit vibe" from the people there. Tarn said the company had been pleasant to work with up to this point. But that's what I'm thinking of them as now: a financial institution, rather than a company that is creator-centered." An elf wanders the red sands of the Dune of DashingĪs his words imply, it wasn't always that way.
I don't want to put too sharp a point on it because I may build ill will with my financial institution. "As we're discovering, there are certain tenuous aspects to this existence where two-thirds of your income may vanish overnight depending on how certain businesses operate and whether they continue to exist," Adams said.Īdams clarified that Dwarf Fortress had only lost about $100 in pledges since the proposed fee change was announced days prior, "but it speaks to a larger issue, which is, do they understand their own model? If so, the messaging has been trash. Patreon backtracked on the change late last week, but we spoke with Tarn in the midst of the incident, when numerous creators were reporting a wave of cancelled low-dollar pledges. That change drew plenty of backlash from creators and supporters alike, particularly for the way it discouraged people from backing a wide array of creators at very low amounts, a key behavior in the Patreon ecosystem.
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Instead of passing variable processing fees onto creators receiving pledges, Patreon said it would begin tacking on a per-pledge charge of $0.35 plus 2.9% and making the pledgers cover it. Speaking with at the Montreal International Games Summit last week, Tarn discussed the game's business model (for lack of a better term), and how recent proposed changes to Patreon fees provided a grim reminder of just how fleeting stability can be. "There are certain tenuous aspects to this existence where two-thirds of your income may vanish overnight depending on how certain businesses operate"īut there are few certainties in gaming, even with that longevity and recognition. Since then, it's been added to the MoMA collection, cited as an inspiration for Minecraft, and become the stuff of game development legend thanks to its absurdly complex simulation of a fantasy world rendered entirely in ASCII characters.
The first version of the game released to the public in 2006, and the brothers have treated it as a full-time job since 2007. Despite that, Dwarf Fortress has provided the pair with a sort of stability many developers would be thrilled to call their own.
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Dwarf Fortress is a remarkable game for a number of reasons, but one of the underappreciated ones is that the sibling dev team of Tarn and Zach Adams have released it as a free game and funded development largely through fan contributions on PayPal and Patreon.Ĭonventional wisdom would suggest this is a precarious way to pursue a career, even for an industry notorious for precarity between its penchant for seasonal layoffs, fluctuating business models, and publisher implosions.
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