Apparently Toady has had several 6 figure opportunities just to license the name that he's turned down.

The game is made for the love of making it and what little money they made was always just about allowing them to keep doing what they love. The resulting good will their 20 years of labor refusing to sell out paid off in the end when they needed it. Honestly, I'd have bet that if they released the "premium" version for free on bay12 but $30 on Steam they'd still make the majority of what they have.

Yeah, they've been "comfortable" for years now, the main reason to "sell out" if you will was to ensure that health insurance would be available.

How can you be comfortable if you don’t even have health insurance. Seems like an oxymoron to me.

In America, healthcare (insurance and out-of-pocket) can be a major contributor to cost of living for anyone with anything more than the occasional cold. It's especially bad for self-employed people like the Adams.

You seem to be in agreement.

When you are young it seems like you don't need it. Usually there comes a time though where you realize you should have it.

That seems to be an uniquely American approach to the situation ...

It reminds me of Justin Hall's story about holding out and refusing to sell "bud.com" to Budweiser.

Instead he just hung onto it, and eventually used it for his own bud delivery company, once recreational cannabis was finally legalized.

He was much happier that great three-letter domain name be used for something he loves, strong kind bud, instead of something he hates, weak piss beer.

https://bud.com

https://bud.com/history-of-bud-com/

>In 1999 I was contacted by a lawyer Steven M. Weinberg, representing Anheuser-Busch, makers of Bud beer.

>We chatted by phone: “So, you’re a college student!”

>Actually I graduated the year before.

>He continued: “Well, how does $50,000 sound for bud.com?”

>I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated. I remember reading that the marketing budget for Budweiser beer that quarter was $16.1 million. BUD was the company’s stock symbol.

>I wasn’t going to sell lightly, and they weren’t going to bid against themselves, so we didn’t get anywhere.

The story about his fight to register the four-letter domain name fuck.com is also hilarious:

https://www.links.net/webpub/fuck.com.html

I'm torn on this story. On one hand I'm really glad he got to keep using it personally out of the gate and eventually was able to later use it again for the intent it sounds like he gave when registering, couldn't ask for anything more for a short domain.

On the other his reasoning for not selling it was really unrelated to that. At the time his response was standard squatter logic - I registered it first and you have a lot of money + will actually use it so I should get more money from you for it. It wasn't like he responded "I think I will get more than 50k of use out of it" or "It's more than 50k of inconvenience for me to change my email" it was straight up "I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated.". Hard to feel inspired by that.

On the third hand Budweiser is indeed really shit beer...

That's not squatters logic any more than you're a squatter in your own home if you refuse to sell even if a generous offer comes along because you value your home a lot more than even an above market offer, but you'd still likely sell at 100 times valuation. Again, that doesn't make you a squatter, just someone holding on to something and saying "If you really want this, you're going to have to offer me something grand, and I know you can afford it, otherwise I'll hold on to it".

I mean there are a lot of differences here, primarily that you by definition don't own domains you lease them to use, but yes that'd also be its own flavor of extremely uninspiring story. Holding out to get the value something is actually worth to you before you give it up is great and interesting but that's not the reason they gave.

Rich people buying homes and not living in them or renting them out is an issue for housing supply.

I'm not torn. They were actively using the site. They weren't sitting on it simply to sell it. But of course, everything has a price... it was just significantly higher than $50k.

I have a story similar to this. My friends and I had a joke about some famous person in high school (in the 90s). We registered a domain with his name and used the domain extensively.

10 years later the guy tried to sue us for control of the domain. We were actively using it though and it was just an inside joke. Random internet people with no clue about the situation would have thought we were just squatters.

"famous person tried to sue me for a joke domain I was using but wouldn't sell because we liked using it" is a very different story than "guy says the reason he didn't sell is he knew they had a bigger marketing budget". Your story actually sounds awesome. His could have been if it were "I loved what I was doing with it more than 50k" instead of what he says it was. In the end it worked out to a similar outcome, kinda? That's where the torn piece comes in, it worked out but not for the inspiring reason it sounds like at first.

I'm not sure why you care about annheiser-busch so much.

He knew that bud.com was worth more than $50k to Budweiser.

Bud.com would still be on every can and case of beer they produced.

Says they didn't like the beer, anyhow. If Budweiser came with a 15 million buyout offer I might see your point, but $50k is barely enough to buy a reliable car after taxes, registration, and insurance.

It's not about whether I care about Budweiser, who was trying to buy is irrelevant and like I said I don't even like their beer either. I'm just against the idea that registering a domain is something that entitles you to try to use it to make 15 million on transferring it because you were first and hoped someone with big pockets could buy it from you. It's one thing when your reason for not selling is your legitimate intent/action to actually use the domain but it's another when you blatantly say your reasoning is they have more money they could give you for it. It's not some crazy idea, modern policy at ICANN (who actually owns the domain anyways) agrees this is not how they want domains to be used either and most people in that position nowadays at least feign an attempt to say their reason for not selling was existing personal use even if internally they know it's about trying to get more money for the transfer as they know they'd be at risk of having their registration revoked otherwise.

Public resources like domains are tricky. We want them to be used not treated as a get-rich-quick opportunity where people who registered a bunch of generic things try to get millions for sitting on domains. I'm glad in the end this one actually got used but when the story from the source itself gives a completely different reason it's hard to be excited about it regardless how much you care about Budweiser in particular.

In comparison for example (though not specifically domains) "Dwarf Fortress" didn't sell rights to the name because they were actually using it, intended to continue using it, and didn't want to dilute the value they had actually put into the name that made others want to buy it. In the end they made millions of dollars with success of the game's newer launch off that brand identity they had built. That's an inspiring story of not selling a name.

Things have a price when the buyer and seller agree on a price. If only the seller thinks it's worth more than 50k, it's not really worth more than 50k.

Why does he have to give it away to the first corporation who throws money at him?

bud is probably worth 100,000s if not a million.

Corps will drop millions for celebrity endorsements. Why settle for less?

Who said anything about he should have had to give it away? All I said was the story was an uninspiring one about domain squatting for money not an inspiring one about someone who refused to sell because of their love/use for the domain. What they had to do at the time this was occuring was very unrestricted but these days it'd be governed by the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy where you really don't want to give something like that as your reason for not wanting to sell to a good offer. After all domains are not owned by you just because you are currently registered them, they are owned by ICANN.

It doesn't seem like a very similar story at all. One is a story of hard work for many years on something one loves; the other is cybersquatting eventually (kind of) turning into a business?

I'm surprised WIPO didn't perform some dispute resolution by taking bud.com away from him and giving it to Budweiser.

$15M * 70% = $10.5M and some percentage goes to the publisher they're working with (let's say another 30%) = $7.4M / 2 = ~$3.7M each

Steam revenue share over $10,000,000 is decreased to 25%.

Also it very unlikely publisher get 30% for title like DF. More likely there is some recuperation if publisher invested into new version and then then 10-15%.

PS: I work in game development.

30% goes to the publisher? What service are they providing?

being on steam is pretty valuable. people are more likely to buy a game on steam than off of a random website. steam will show your game to people who like similar games. there are cloud saving features, mod integration, updates etc.

There is also pretty good Linux support. So if you wanted to tick the Linux box you only have to make sure your game works under proton which generally just means avoiding proprietary anti cheat and Microsoft specific codecs/fonts.

I know a franchise whose games ran with 99% compatibility in proton except the cutscenes which used a proprietary codec. Proton then got a patch and just shows a static image during cut scenes while the rest of the game works perfectly. The developer can fix it by reencoding the cutscenes. No need for explicit Linux support.

20% is going to the publisher. They paid for the Steam version, including hiring the graphics and sound people. They're also handling customer support for the paid version.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/b0mzog/offic...

Of course for legendary game like Dwarf Fortress it doesn't make sense and it much lower, but for normal indie game 30% is not a limit so most of developers get less than 50% of sales after Steam and publisher cut.

Usually % that goes to a publisher depend on stage of development, risk publisher taking, whatever you give up your IP and your agreement on recuperation. E.g. if you keep your IP, but publisher cover most of development costs after prototype then they will likely take up to 50% after Steam cut.

Access to a market that can reach $15M in revenue very quickly.

Lol a question that could be equally applied to the entire tech industry!

$3.7mm/15 years is shy of $250k/yr TC. There's something to be said for being able to work on your life's passion, but not all of us can think up funny amazing dawrf simulators, and even if we did, there's already a really really good one. https://xkcd.com/2347/ applies. Unless people start being a whole lot richer and a lot more generous, newer load bearing pieces as appropriate for our newer world aren't coming about. Instead they're Facebook and Google supported.

Can’t they carry forward the losses from the past 15 years/

Food and rent aren't losses.

What? A company pays it's workers a salary and that's a loss for the business no matter if the people it's paid to are using it for food and rent.

If they didn't have any revenue coming in at all, then they should have a quite high deficit in the company that they can subtract against the income now to reduce taxes.

To be able to maintain carry forward losses, you have to have capital. The boys didn’t have capital. They paid themselves what came in. If they had been maintaining losses, they wouldn’t have a house because they would have had to sell it.

Because of the losses, right?

How do you think money works?

Not necessarily. But they probably didn't have a good lawyer and accountant. It's certainly possible to have a corporation run a loss while its employees keep their houses. I mean that's pretty much the entire point of corporations.

Why would a worker who owns a house and every year is owed more and more in unpaid back salary from a company they are working at for free, ever need to sell their house to cover the debt that the company has to themselves?

Where do you think the Dwarf Fortress guys got all this extra hypothetical money to pay themselves in excess of receipts?

You seem to be confusing between loss and expenses. Salaries are expenses of the business, while loss is the fiscal bottom line every period X.