bay-12-games posts

How can you make money from a game that's supposed to be free to download. If you are the indie development team at Bay 12 Games, you ask for donations.In this case the donations are for the very popular free game Dwarf Fortress. The team released a major new update around the first of April and that was enough to generate a ton of new donations.

How much money was raised? According to Bay 12 Games' May newsletter, they generated a whopping $16104.49 in donations in the month of April. On April 1, they day the first major update to Dwarf Fortress was released after a long delay, the team got $3466.76 from over 80 different sources. Which just goes to show you that if you have a good game, people will gladly give you money to support it even if its free.

[Via Computer and Video Games]

One of the more popular Rogue-like fantasy RPG games out there is Dwarf Fortress from developer Bay 12 Games. This week the freeware title got a major new release, version 0.31.01, and you can download the PC, Mac and Linux version of the game at Bay 12's web site.

You can check out the rather massive change list of new features, improvements and bug fixes on this web page. Just a few of the new features include new additions to the combat model, a new weather model and much more. It looks like this new release is a tad buggy, according to Bay 12's April newsletter, but it also states, "I'll be populating the new bug tracker with them over the next days. Then I will be fixing them." There's also a note about the money that has been raised to support the freeware game via donations.

Nothing like good ol' Dwarf Fortress, the indie game you can count on to be developed full-time. Thanks in part to Tarn Adams' development log, we can keep up with all the new additions and bugfixes to this incredible games. And since 39f, there's been quite a few. 40c's big addition over 39f is embark stocking profiles, enabling you to build a profile that you can use with each expedition, saving you the hassle of redoing your items and skills every time to restart. There's also a plethora of bugfixes, from fixing display errors to mood lockups. You can check out the full list of changes between versions on Tarn Adams' devlog, and can download the game on Bay 12.

There are two kinds of games nowadays. Those which tell you a story, and those which let you make your own story. Most mainstream games tend to fall in the former category, including stuff like Devil May Cry 4 or Call of Duty 4. Strictly linear affairs with cool cutscenes and refined gameplay. On the other hand, there is Dwarf Fortress, which almost single-handedly defines the latter category of game. It's a freeware RTS/RPG with the freedom to do just about anything you want. In fact, it's so open that it's almost paralyzing.