48 replies to this topic

[Russ]

As anyone who was in the Discord server last night is probably aware, there was a rather heated incident that occurred following a proposal to monetize parts of ZC. In light of everything that happened, we feel we need to be completely transparent about several things, including punishments for those who misbehaved last night, our own stance on the proposal, the way the proposal will be discussed on PureZC going forward, and our efforts to support the ZC developers through some challenging personal times.

First and foremost, the conversation last night stepped over multiple lines, and several people are at fault. We want to be explicit in explaining our rationale behind the punishments we're handing out.

• Aslion will be banned from PureZC for one month. This is due to several instances of harassment, disobeying staff orders, ban evading, and a generally callous attitude towards others.
• Emily will also be banned for one month. We do not take banning a ZC developer lightly, but her actions also crossed the line many times, with instances of screaming at other members over text and voice and ignoring staff directions to drop certain conversations after they had devolved. Those in positions of authority should be held to a higher standard than others.
• Majora will be banned for two weeks due to multiple instances of harassment.
• Hubydwyer will be banned for one week due to contributing to the atmosphere of the situation despite being asked to stop and for smaller incidents of harassing others and staff members over moderation decisions.

Now, regarding the monetization scheme proposed, the PureZC staff discussed this among ourselves and have come to the following consensus. While there is some variety of opinions among the staff in regards to the fine details, with regards to the proposal as a whole, we are against the monetization of quests as it has been proposed and strongly against any kind of subscription model for ZC. We wanted to make our stance known, as frankly, several of us are worried both with the direction the proposed changes would take ZC and with possible legal action that might be mounted against it.

As far as discussion of these proposed changes go, as we saw last night, things can get very heated very quickly. As such, we are restricting discussion of the proposal to the PureZC forums. Please do not use the Discord server to discuss monetization of ZC. Things simply spiral too quickly and can't be effectively moderated. While these proposed changes are sure to be contentious with many people, we ask that you please remember the first rule of PureZC. Be respectful in your discussions. We can have civil discussions about controversial topics without resorting to name calling and trolling.

Lastly, we want to take a moment to draw attention to the developers' situations. Emily explained to us last night that this proposal was motivated partially by pressing financial needs she and her family are experiencing. While we don't believe monetizing ZC is the best way to address that need, we want to be here for her to help with these struggles. To that end, we encourage anyone who is able to donate to ZC Development Patreon. We will also be placing a link to it on PureZC's main page.

 

[Mani Kanina]

Oh, huh. Uh, I mean this is a good heads up.

But for those who weren't there, maybe a summery of what the proposed monetization models and similar were could be posted? I was told briefly about this the other day, but I was under the impression that this was for something way down the road that they were just in the idea stage of currently, not something that was meant to be happening any time soon?

[Anthus]

Oh, huh. Uh, I mean this is a good heads up.

But for those who weren't there, maybe a summery of what the proposed monetization models and similar were could be posted? I was told briefly about this the other day, but I was under the impression that this was for something way down the road that they were just in the idea stage of currently, not something that was meant to be happening any time soon?

You can see the full proposal in the locked thread on Pure's Discord. It is in the Serious Discussion channel, and I forget if it's still opt in, or opt out now, but it's all there. It's rather lengthy, but the proposal itself is the very first message (hoping discord links to it correctly.)

[connor.clark]

To be clear, this was entirely premature to share publicly and was meant to remain a brainstorming session. Due to a miscommunication it was shared in a not ideal way, before any revisions could be made after discussing further amongst the devs. With that in mind, to at least give people the full context after things got heated and misinformation was abound, I shared the following in PZC #serious-discussion:

 

 

I shared this among the devs as an early draft to get feedback, and it is by no means a fully formed plan. There are issues with it. I've already corrected multiple problems in this version, after we discussed more internally. We'll find more issues as we go on. But since there's been some misunderstanding in all the excitement, I thought it best to be transparent now.

 

--------

 

I've been thinking about ways to grow ZC lately. I'm willing to invest some money (and of course, lots of time) into this plan. It involves monetization, but done in a way I hope can be respected by the community. If it works, it'll mean more players, more quest creators, and hopefully supplemental income that can replace some developer's part time jobs - resulting in more feature development.

 

An underlying assumption here is that what ZC is good at making - 2d adventure Zelda-like games - are games that way more people enjoy playing than the current size of this niche community would suggest. And we only need to work out some kinks (esp. related to copyright and usability), and find a good way to market ZC, to increase how many people play games made in ZC.

 

I'm trying to summarize here:

 

* Commission pixel artists to create one (or multiple) tilesets, which we would fully own the rights for. These tilesets would either be wholly new, or would be modeled after existing popular tilesets with the idea they'd be a drop-in replacement.

    * Same for music and sfx

* Develop ZC as a platform: we can distribute quests directly in the launcher (opt-in? only if not violating copyright?), making it simpler to play. We give quest creators the option to charge for their games (if not violating copyright), and we take a percentage.

    * Some numbers of interest:

        * Unreal's model is 5% of revenue, but that's just a game engine. We'd be that and the distribution / provider of assets.

        * Steam takes 25-30%.

        * Epic Store takes 12% (and waives the Unreal cut, being the same company). My understanding for why this is so low is that they are directly competing with steam via revshare.

        * Roblox is hard to understand, but I think they take 70%. Even then they operate at a huge loss. It's also a very tailored game creation toolkit, way more than ZC.

    * ~30% could be reasonable.

* Given ZC is licensed as GPL, it means that all future versions using the same code is effectively GPL forever. So the game engine would remain free for anyone to use, including via the new standalone packager (assuming they didn't use our new tilesets). Without a full rewrite, we literally cannot put any future engine features behind a paywall, even if we wanted to. External services (optional features requiring communication with some server) are the only exceptions to this.

* Collaborate with interested creators with existing quests to transition from a traditional tileset to one we own, or are creating in cooperation with the creator. Only quests with fully copyright-free assets may be charged for, so that'd be the incentive here.

* Marketing

    * People are begging Nintendo to put out a Zelda Maker, right? Maybe lean into that.

    * This needs lots of research

* (For later, if at all) A premium client subscription, where we (very carefully!) develop client features available only to those with a subscription

    * We should give lifetime subscriptions to everyone already in the community. If all this ends up growing ZC, that won't be of any significance, and we risk far less pushback.

    * Some ideas for premium features include: An external save backup service; FromSoftware-like "player ghosts/messages"; multiplayer networking

    * Some examples of _bad_ ideas to put behind a sub: "Hero Journey" ala BOTW; save states; accessing free quests easily within the client; anything that limits the ability to play or create a quest

    * Gotchas: should talk to a lawyer about legality of charging for client features to enhance playing of free games with problematic copyright (assuming we allow them in the launcher).

 

So this is a mix of ZC becoming:

 

1) a game platform with a low barrier for entry for creators to legally sell their games on

2) a game publisher, in that we'd invest in additional assets to grow ZC's fully-owned asset collection, in coordination w/ what creators need for their games

3) a game engine, remaining free for non-commercial and commerical games alike

 

I have a specific list of projects in mind that are necessary for any of this to work, which I can share later. But for now - what do people think of this idea? Are any devs interested in trying this out?

 

--------

 

/end

 

[Mitchfork]

Thank you for crossposting this Connor.

 

Being as fair as I can with the start of this post - I understand that we are responding to some half-formed thoughts and not a real, concrete proposal. I do get that these are different and perhaps we shouldn’t have an immediate knee-jerk reaction to this in the same way that we would, say, an official announcement of intent. I think that the way that this dropped (mostly on voice calls in Discord which are not permanent record) is unfortunate. I think there’s a strong chance that even if the entire dev team was totally pushing towards this proposal as-is, it would not come true anyway. But I hate this and seeing this discussed as a possibility has eroded a lot of my trust in the current dev team.

Game development and game engine development is work and labor. It seems obvious that charging money for your own labor is okay. (Indeed, even the PoRC dev team has had conversations and exploratory work done about whether PoRC could be more than a fangame project.) I completely support the dev team trying to make money from their work.

What I object to is that monetization was worked into backwards in this plan. ZC was built by dozens of contributors over (close to) dozens of years. None of their work was done with the expectation that they would be able to make money off of this. The way that this monetization plan works is clearly designed to dance around the fact that none of the current dev team own ZC and it is under a strict open source licensing scheme. This plan handles this by putting a barrier between ZC (the software) and ZC (the new distribution platform). While maybe this is legally sound (I am no expert but candidly have my doubts), I think ethically it is not any different - it's just a clever way to mine untapped money out of labor that you had no hand in.

This is not the first time that I have seen this from this development team (and I will call out Connor specifically for all of these) - I think the way that the PureZC database was just sort of conveniently packaged into the web version of ZC is suspect. People uploaded those quests to a specific website and community that they chose and didn’t give consent for them to be distributed this way. (I personally rankled when I saw that a screen that I made was used to advertise it, but I didn’t bring this up.) Most recently, the proposed TOS modification here (https://www.purezc.n...showtopic=78284) is now incredibly suspicious to me, as it seems now like a way to sneak in a “feature” to ZC of being able to use community-created assets for free. These indicate a cavalier attitude towards the community’s creations - that these are valid to use as tools for “the program” and not independent works with their own artistic merit.

The suggested idea of opt-in paid editor features is horseshit. Really no need to go further than that. I have no idea how this is even an option, legally.
 

We should give lifetime subscriptions to everyone already in the community. If all this ends up growing ZC, that won't be of any significance, and we risk far less pushback.

Come on.

I also want to really emphasize how much all of this changes ZC development. One of the arguments put forward was that all of this does not change the "product", it just offers a way to make money while ZC as a tool simply marches forward as-is. I am not accusing anyone of lying but really consider how much overhead needs to be built to maintain a distribution platform, contracts with people using that platform, payments, and remuneration for program developers. You will not be able to just handle this on an honor system. You will need a company formed, you will need a payroll, you will need stakeholders who get paid from the profits. These are all difficult and completely change the dynamic of how you interact with the community.

[Mani Kanina]

I guess I'll summaries what I told Emily in voice on a completely different discord server the other day, in regards to this.

Moving the engine towards a state where it's a generic engine and it's feasible for people to make and package commercial games with it is actually a good idea. We've seen some pretty massive leaps towards allowing this in recent times (the implementation towards just a single game/quest executable, etc).

I feel commissioning a built in tileset with the engine that is another great step in that direction. This would allow people to just jump in, make their game, and potentially then selling it. I mention to Emily a few other issues towards monitised released games with the engine, like how the UI and options are built into the client and you can't modify them from the game itself, etc.

I like these (specifically mentioned) things, they are good ideas. Most of the other stuff I feel more iffy on.

ZC as an platform is an awful idea. People hate all the clients they have to deal with today. People tolerate having both Steam and Epic store, but they do so because the prices on the former and the constant free give aways on the latter; not to mention the exclusives. But this is only because they have to not because they want to. Trying to make a platform is a doomed idea.

I suggested having a web based platform not tied to the engine itself might be a better idea; but it's still a lot of overhead and work to set one up. Also, the notion that ZC could have a 30% revenue split is laughable. The reasons the big commercial engines and distribution platforms can have such a model is because of what they offer. Steam can have such a big cut because they have the leading market split and have millions of users there. Engines like Unreal can have a cut of 5% is because it's a full modern cutting edge 3D engine that is constantly getting updates and improvements.

ZC is not offering either of these things. If you want a 2D engine and want to make something commercial, if ZC takes that large cut, then why would anyone want to learn this engine? Godot is right over there.

No, what makes a lot more sense to me is to offer licensing for the built in assets (Which are currently only theoretical). Have a cheap cost to license those assets for commercial releases bam, there you go. It's not any different from people going and buying assets for their game on itch.io, or similar. But the benefits here is that it comes with the engine and it's fully configure and ready to go. And anyone who just want to use their own graphics or similar? Well they can just keep trucking on as before.



I don't feel like I need to comment on the notion of a subscription model, not only was this idea the most under-baked, as admitted openly, it was also just ideas on the table to consider, and nothing else. I think it's a patently bad idea. For engine development I think a better model would be via patreon, where people could donate monthly if they wanted. You could also have this avenue for top donators after a certain threshold be able to dictate new engine features they want made. Critically the features would then become available for everyone to use once finished.

But yeah, idk, I see no reason to go hard on this consider that it was just up in the airs.


No, rather, what I'm concerned about now is the elephant in the room. Mitchfork brought up some good points.
 

This is not the first time that I have seen this from this development team (and I will call out Connor specifically for all of these) - I think the way that the PureZC database was just sort of conveniently packaged into the web version of ZC is suspect. People uploaded those quests to a specific website and community that they chose and didn’t give consent for them to be distributed this way. (I personally rankled when I saw that a screen that I made was used to advertise it, but I didn’t bring this up.) Most recently, the proposed TOS modification here (https://www.purezc.n...showtopic=78284) is now incredibly suspicious to me, as it seems now like a way to sneak in a “feature” to ZC of being able to use community-created assets for free. These indicate a cavalier attitude towards the community’s creations - that these are valid to use as tools for “the program” and not independent works with their own artistic merit.

I've heard about it, but I've generally not looked up the web version of ZC all that closely. I do agree with the notion that I don't think it's acceptable to scrape a different site for uploads there and the reupload and host elsewhere. This is also in violation GDPR because quests are generally authored, even if a user invokes the clause to be forgotten on Pure, if you've scrapped the info to use elsewhere, not only would not be contacted, the people who had their data might not even know you've done this.

Oh and, I'm pretty sure it's kind of a direct breach of copyright.

Like, people don't take copyright very seriously on the internet at all. Case in point all the copyrighted materially being used here. People generally have a line of what part of copyright they think is okay to follow and what they violate freely because it's just seen as not being a problem. All in all, it's kind of whatever, but if you want to seriously make this engine commercial, then it's not a great look exactly.

It's also a pretty bad look when it comes to the community to showcase that you've got no interest in giving a shit about the wishes of the users.
(Like, I'm not trying to be inflammatory here, but taking something for a thing without asking if the makers were okay with it? Is kinda the same thing as those facebook accounts just taking youtuber's youtube videos and re-uploading on another platform, you know?)

And I do absolutely agree with Mitchfork that the earlier suggested TOS modifications on Pure are now extremely suspect, and don't exactly paint you in a very good light. You've already taken peoples stuff for a product (the ZC web player) without asking or thought to those users wishes. And now you wish to have full right to just do whatever with all resources on Pure.

No, I don't like this. I prefer to not think badly of people without given reason to, but all of this feels very bad.

 

What I object to is that monetization was worked into backwards in this plan. ZC was built by dozens of contributors over (close to) dozens of years. None of their work was done with the expectation that they would be able to make money off of this. The way that this monetization plan works is clearly designed to dance around the fact that none of the current dev team own ZC and it is under a strict open source licensing scheme. This plan handles this by putting a barrier between ZC (the software) and ZC (the new distribution platform). While maybe this is legally sound (I am no expert but candidly have my doubts), I think ethically it is not any different - it's just a clever way to mine untapped money out of labor that you had no hand in.

I will, however, push back on this a bit. It's absolutely true that the devs who have worked on the engine over the years had no perspective on making any money off of it. For the wast majority of the engines life it was just "the zelda fangame engine", and before that it was the "zelda 1 fangame engine". Making money off of it wasn't even an option, even if the developers wanted to.

But I think that's kinda side stepping the point a bit. It really does not feel like the goal here was to make fat dough or whatever. Frankly, anyone who thinks they can rake in a lot of money in regards to anything with this engine need to reconsider what it takes to sell a product. No, it really seemed more like a way to bring in funds so the current developers can spend more time working on the engine.

Which, I support.

If people want to work on a open source project like this, then fine, you know? But if someone feels like "yeah, I'd want to work more on it, but I can't economically justify it", well, I really don't see anything bad with that. I don't think that alone is shitting on anyone's legacy, and at the end of the day it might help the engine get more features. We've already seen that the current team can deliver on that, what with all the huge improvements the engine have had over the last few years.


It's just a matter of finding a model of getting in money that makes sense. Others have suggest Patreon, for example, which I'd also mirror.





But yeah, idk.

It's a pretty broad topic that people will naturally have strong opinions on. These are mine, take em or leave em. If the engine goes down a route I don't like, I will not hesitate in the slightest from moving on. And should Pure or any other hosting place for quest related content end up with bad policies then I've got no problem just nuking my content from that place.

Edited by Mani Kanina, 03 September 2023 - 04:11 PM.

[Jamian]

I haven't visited the Discord for a while, and I don't have a good grasp of what exactly happened and what the arguments were really about, so forgive me if I'm missing the point, but I'd just like to say that:

 

- I found out about ZC by, one day, randomly typing something like "Zelda level editor" into Google. This was what I wanted to do: create a Zelda game, and ZC allowed me to do just that. I remember the idea to take the "Zelda" out of "Zelda Classic" was already mentioned a long time ago by Zoria, but I never was a fan of that idea. There are many game makers out there that allow you to "do anything". Several of them have a large active community and professionally released projects. Why dilute what makes ZC special (creating Zelda games) to make it just another generic game maker? Why not just use Unity, Godot, etc.? 

 

- I have been happy to contribute fan quests to the database, and I've worked hard on at least some of them, and I'm proud that several of those were well received and played by a lot of people (within the scope of PureZC, of course). Those were a work of love and I actually found it great that I could share that with other Zelda fans for free. I would not want to get paid for my quests, and this atmosphere of sharing fan stuff for free is part of what made me appreciate the community. I feel the same way about playing quests uploaded by others, and there have been several quests that I've enjoyed more than even professionally released games. I dig the generous "this is a gift from a Zelda fan, to another Zelda fan" vibe, and if ZC ever becomes a big game maker where money transactions are involved, well... a page will have been turned.

[Sheik]

I would not want to get paid for my quests, and this atmosphere of sharing fan stuff for free is part of what made me appreciate the community. I feel the same way about playing quests uploaded by others, and there have been several quests that I've enjoyed more than even professionally released games. I dig the generous "this is a gift from a Zelda fan, to another Zelda fan" vibe, and if ZC ever becomes a big game maker where money transactions are involved, well... a page will have been turned.

I can get fully behind that and I'm happy that Jamian brought it up. I feel that angle has not been as represented in the related discussion yet. I don't feel entitled to say anything about other people's work but I have always considered my own ZC-related work to be freely accessible contributions to the community -- though of course not to potentially monetize on. All sprites, palettes, designs etc I throw together are always free for everybody in the ZC community to use as they please. I wouldn't want to have it any other way but I wouldn't want my stuff integrated into or associated with any kind of scheme that involves payment (even if that was limited to vanity or QoL features only).

[connor.clark]

The ideas that were suggested have two things that should be kept in mind: it attempted to only increase options for players and quest creators, not decrease them; and it's addressing the reality that the majority of development could stop at any moment due to financial reasons. Yes, we could push the donations a little more, but without growing the community of players that isn't a long term solution. People want stuff for their money, so a work-for-donations model doesn't give a very strong foundation for a community of this present size.

 

First, backing up a lot, as I think we may be spending too much time on the fine details: the main goal for this proposal was "Growing ZC", in service of increasing how much time we could dedicate to features and bug fixes. We could possibly accomplish that without any revenue share (via an optional distribution model) or optional client features (via a subscription model) --- in other words, by commissioning tilesets and making them freely available + finding ways to market ZC, and hoping that the donations increase enough to make up for said investments. It's correct that building out what's needed for a platform is a lot of work, so this is a valid alternative to all that. It could be more productive to shelf everything about monetization, and seek solutions to this goal directly. With that said...

 

Now I'll try to clarify some things I feel might not have been clear with the early ideas.

 

Mitchfork:

> While maybe this is legally sound (I am no expert but candidly have my doubts), I think ethically it is not any different - it's just a clever way to mine untapped money out of labor that you had no hand in.

 

It's an optional distribution method, which would have zero impact on doing it yourself on other channels. The idea is to enable the type of game creator that wants to sell something with little custom artwork or handling anything to do with distributing their game.

- For those who don't want to charge for their game (the vast majority of this community), nothing changes - except an optional inclusion in a launcher quest directory.

- For those who want sell their game, and are also willing to invest more effort by providing their own assets and dealing with Steam/whoever - again, nothing changes, and we continue to make possible a standalone executable to enable that.

 

I understand that actually _selling_ a game is not what drives people here. The idea is that we could attract people that want to make and sell Zelda-like games, and may have discounted ZC in the past due to usability or copyright issues.

> Most recently, the proposed TOS modification here (https://www.purezc.n...showtopic=78284) is now incredibly suspicious to me, as it seems now like a way to sneak in a “feature” to ZC of being able to use community-created assets for free. These indicate a cavalier attitude towards the community’s creations - that these are valid to use as tools for “the program” and not independent works with their own artistic merit.

That was about seeking clarification about how people view the assets they share with the community - framed as a proposal to help structure conversation. A big topic in the past year has been about copyright in the engine, so it was natural to extend that to the assets people share here. It's not sneaky to suggest it could be good if submissions to the database could be clearly marked with a license in some way. I know I approached that topic without a good understanding that most of the prolific creators would never want to allow their stuff in commercial games - but that's kind of the point of making such a thread. It feels like I'm being characterized in the worst possible light for making a recommendation. Just as there are people who will share their creations "just not for commercial purposes", there are also people that just don't care. Something as simple as a field in the submission entry to convey that is what I felt was missing.

> The suggested idea of opt-in paid editor features is horseshit. Really no need to go further than that. I have no idea how this is even an option, legally.

Do you mean "client / player" features? Assuming you didn't typo, but just misread something: editor features was explicitly marked as not a good candidate for a hypothetical subscription, and it isn't even feasible (anything in the main codebases is GPL forever and we'd really have to tie ourselves into knots to portion off parts of that behind a paywall). Not only is it an awful idea to make it harder for some to use the editor, it isn't legally possible.

 

Assuming you really meant "client / player" features: The idea seemed feasible legally because it'd be interfacing with and wholly require an external service to work. Such an external service would be a new work by the current developers, but still made open source. At the risk of delving too deep into the implementation of a hypothetical plan: we'd probably license it under MIT or GPL, which means someone could (and likely would, I suspect) just take it and run their own free version. But that's a occupational hazard in open source and in many cases can be good for everyone. In addition, the way the client would actually interface with external services would be done in an entirely open and documented way, making it easy (not obfuscated) for anyone to provide their own extensions.

> I also want to really emphasize how much all of this changes ZC development. One of the arguments put forward was that all of this does not change the "product", it just offers a way to make money while ZC as a tool simply marches forward as-is. I am not accusing anyone of lying but really consider how much overhead needs to be built to maintain a distribution platform, contracts with people using that platform, payments, and remuneration for program developers. You will not be able to just handle this on an honor system. You will need a company formed, you will need a payroll, you will need stakeholders who get paid from the profits. These are all difficult and completely change the dynamic of how you interact with the community.

Yeah, it'd be a lot. I'm not lying. You can't go from "A -> B" on a big idea and discover that it's actually more like "A ----------> B" without talking it out (does that make sense?) ... which is what my draft proposal was meant to facilitate. These are good points and I thank you for bringing them up. It makes the direction of the second paragraph of this post more appealing.

 

Mani:

> ZC is not offering either of these things. If you want a 2D engine and want to make something commercial, if ZC takes that large cut, then why would anyone want to learn this engine? Godot is right over there.

I mentioned above wrt Mitchfork, but I see it as maybe being an attractive option for users less advanced than one that could "just go use Godot and figure out publishing".

> No, what makes a lot more sense to me is to offer licensing for the built in assets (Which are currently only theoretical). Have a cheap cost to license those assets for commercial releases bam, there you go. It's not any different from people going and buying assets for their game on itch.io, or similar. But the benefits here is that it comes with the engine and it's fully configure and ready to go. And anyone who just want to use their own graphics or similar? Well they can just keep trucking on as before.

Your suggestion of charging a fixed price for assets we commission is along the same lines as "allow anyone to use the tileset, and hope it helps grow the community and thus the donations", fwiw. My feeling is that the small amount of money we could get from fixed licenses of these assets, would not outweigh the effect that would be seen if they were made free for everyone, resulting in more marketable quests and attracting more people to ZC.

> You could also have this avenue for top donators after a certain threshold be able to dictate new engine features they want made.

Speaking for myself, we should continue to evaluate feature requests on merit, not for-pay like that. Some open source projects have things like "corporate sponsors" that may have specific projects tied to a donation, but that's usually in the form of them donating _a developer_ to drive that work.

> I've heard about it, but I've generally not looked up the web version of ZC all that closely. I do agree with the notion that I don't think it's acceptable to scrape a different site for uploads there and the reupload and host elsewhere.

To be clear I've immediately removed anything upon request. I admit I have trouble understanding why someone would be ok sharing their game online in a pretty inaccessible format (read: ZC), and be unfavorable towards the simplest possible way to get people to play their hard-made game (read: share a link). But that's besides the point, so to respect the majority of the opinions I've heard on the topic now, I'll make listing in the web version opt-in. 

 

It's an unfortunate side effect that the majority of the quest database being from people long gone, and I suspect wouldn't mind their quest being available here, will be shut out from simple click-to-play for web users.

> This is also in violation GDPR because quests are generally authored, even if a user invokes the clause to be forgotten on Pure, if you've scrapped the info to use elsewhere, not only would not be contacted, the people who had their data might not even know you've done this.

I don't know about the GDPR bit, but the current system accounts for this, FYI. If the quest is gone from PZC it gets removed from the web version.

> It's also a pretty bad look when it comes to the community to showcase that you've got no interest in giving a shit about the wishes of the users.

I have respected every request to remove something from the web version. Please, assume good intentions. Mine were to make these amazing games more accessible.

 

Sheik:

> I wouldn't want to have it any other way but I wouldn't want my stuff integrated into or associated with any kind of scheme that involves payment (even if that was limited to vanity or QoL features only).

Tying it back to the proposal above, is this not addressed by the "opt-in" quest listing in the launcher? I suppose not, since your spritework would get used by other quests and its them deciding to be in the launcher, not you. Another note in the proposal was only listing opt-in, copyright-free quests, which would exclude any quests using your artwork. But let me know if this is related to more than just the launcher "quest directory" idea.

[Nightmare]

I will comment on this on a later date.  I am aware of it and processing it as we speak.

 

-James

[Sheik]

Tying it back to the proposal above, is this not addressed by the "opt-in" quest listing in the launcher? I suppose not, since your spritework would get used by other quests and its them deciding to be in the launcher, not you. Another note in the proposal was only listing opt-in, copyright-free quests, which would exclude any quests using your artwork. But let me know if this is related to more than just the launcher "quest directory" idea.

It is not related to more than this technically. It's actually more like it never even occoured to me that somebody would want to make money off ZC. I've been using ZC on and off since 2007 and I always felt like having joined an afterschool just-for-fun club. Now I'm getting all kinds of start-up energies and it tastes just kind of bad.

This is just my personal gut reaction & I wouldn't actively try to stop anybody from actually selling stuff that included any of my amateurish assets or design ideas anyways. But I probably would choose to just not be a part of a community with those energies should they take over.

Edited by Sheik, 04 September 2023 - 12:06 PM.

[Nightmare]

I need to start talking to people before I can even go anywhere, but I have read a few things, and I need to make a few things "at least clear:"

1.  There have been, and always will be, people practicing to make professional games.  I am no exception to this.  "ZC" was always friendly to these kind of people since its dawn; however, there is an agreement to limit this to quests and not so to the engine:  If you paid for the engine, we were crossing the line  The engine was never to be sold as per agreement when Nintendo made with War Lord, PM,and me back in the day.  This agreement technically still exists, even in the forums that held them do not anymore.  There's a reason why only the original characters in James Quest:  Sidestory were copyrighted and not necessarily the game or assets:  It falls along these lines.

 

2.  "ZC" is open source and may be used by reference by other game developers or whomever wants to understand how games work.  This does not mean the individual parts are open source and people just have the right to dilly dally and use what they want.  Many people over the years have contributed (yes, that includes even Zoria), and that has to be respected.  If Emily and Connor do want to branch off and/or continue down this path, they might have to pay or work out new licensing deals.  They would also have to ask for permission.  That would be outright disrespectful to them to the community NOT to do so.

3.  There is a lot to process and it is going to take some time to get through this all and understand what happened.  But understand that technically, War Lord, PM, and I are the executive producers, and anything that happens with the project legally or decision wise, ultimately falls on us in the end as we "own" the project equally from the start.  I just caught wind of this last night and I have had no time to even look at everything, let alone talk with War Lord.  Please be patient.   A resolution is going to take a bit of time, and I'd prefer to keep all parties somewhat happy, even if they're technically not 100% "right"  While upset, I'd rather not handle this iron-fisted, as this would be bad for the community AND for future game developers in general.  It is rather delicate.

 

tl/dr, Individual quests have the potential to be monetized.  The engine really does not. (for now) 

 

I'd also advise anybody in the serious game dev world to have at least an advisor and/or a legal advisor, as I'm no expert at this.

This may not tickle anybody's fancy, but I needed to make some things crystal clear.
 

Cheers.

[Taco Chopper]

I'm in a similar position as Mitch, where I understand that the ideas that have been proposed are very much incomplete, but that the delivery of said ideas was far less than ideal. I also feel like the fact we're at this stage, where the monetisation of ZC is being considered, in a reverse engineering kind of way, is incorrect for where ZC currently sits in its place as game development software.
 
On the topic of monetisation, two points I raised in the thread last night were around the following:

• currency conversion rates - to which Emily suggested localised pricings would be in effect - and
• my personal ideology that "features" like premium clients and subscription services are scummy business practices that only exist to divide

I've seen both of these issues pop up when it comes to music software. The former is more of an issue with marketplaces that could easily open it up to a wider, international market - especially while the Australian dollar is absolutely tanking against the US dollar, for example.
In the case of the latter, it's something I tend to see it from companies like Avid, Waves or Antares that only appear to prioritise the bottom line rather than consumers' needs - it's an awful, capitalist-focused approach.
 
Paywalling anything behind a premium client is predatory, to put it nicely.
 

    * We should give lifetime subscriptions to everyone already in the community. If all this ends up growing ZC, that won't be of any significance, and we risk far less pushback.

What's a lifetime subscription? 5 years, 10 years, 30 years? What's not to say the definition of what is deemed a "lifetime" subscription could change at any time? And what's not to say you could follow the model of what Avid do, and have a "perpetual licence" that only allows for a fixed period of service?
 

For instance, from the link I've attached:

For example, let's say a customer purchased a perpetual license on November 25th of 2018, which came with a 1-year "Standard Support" service contract.  The user is able to upgrade the software to every new release that comes out all year long.  The service contract expired on November 24th of 2019.  If a new version of the software came out on November 30th, they would not be able to run it.  They would need to downgrade to whichever version came out prior to the expiration date on November 24th.  To upgrade to the newer version, they would need to renew their service contract within 30 days of the Upgrade & Support plans expiration.  The license can not be renewed after the grace period has expired.

Anything involving "lifetime subscriptions" would only exist to separate the community into haves and have nots. Nobody wins from this.
 

If people want to work on a open source project like this, then fine, you know? But if someone feels like "yeah, I'd want to work more on it, but I can't economically justify it", well, I really don't see anything bad with that. I don't think that alone is shitting on anyone's legacy, and at the end of the day it might help the engine get more features. We've already seen that the current team can deliver on that, what with all the huge improvements the engine have had over the last few years.

It's just a matter of finding a model of getting in money that makes sense. Others have suggest Patreon, for example, which I'd also mirror.

I agree with all of this; the leaps ZC has taken in recent years feel enormous in contrast to the heady days of 2.10.
I have already proposed to the rest of the staff that we should put a link to the ZC dev Patreon onto the PureZC homepage, as I believe that is a step - a small one, to say the least - in the right direction.

There has to be a better model.
 

That was about seeking clarification about how people view the assets they share with the community - framed as a proposal to help structure conversation. A big topic in the past year has been about copyright in the engine, so it was natural to extend that to the assets people share here. It's not sneaky to suggest it could be good if submissions to the database could be clearly marked with a license in some way. I know I approached that topic without a good understanding that most of the prolific creators would never want to allow their stuff in commercial games - but that's kind of the point of making such a thread. It feels like I'm being characterized in the worst possible light for making a recommendation. Just as there are people who will share their creations "just not for commercial purposes", there are also people that just don't care. Something as simple as a field in the submission entry to convey that is what I felt was missing.

You made that thread about licencing, replied to two people, and left everyone else's input untouched. I know I can't help but feel like there's a sense of disconnect between the developers and the community right now, and a situation like that will only cause more distrust when situations like this arise.
If you're going to make a recommendation like that, then why did you choose to not engage in the feedback from the community? You've said yourself that it was proposed to help structure conversation.

 

It is not related to more than this technically. It's actually more like it never even occoured to me that somebody would want to make money off ZC. I've been using ZC on and off since 2007 and I always felt like having joined an afterschool just-for-fun club. Now I'm getting all kinds of start-up energies and it tastes just kind of bad.

This is just my personal gut reaction & I wouldn't actively try to stop anybody from actually selling stuff that included any of my amateurish assets or design ideas anyways. But I probably would choose to just not be a part of a community with those energies should they take over.

Those were a work of love and I actually found it great that I could share that with other Zelda fans for free. I would not want to get paid for my quests, and this atmosphere of sharing fan stuff for free is part of what made me appreciate the community. I feel the same way about playing quests uploaded by others, and there have been several quests that I've enjoyed more than even professionally released games. I dig the generous "this is a gift from a Zelda fan, to another Zelda fan" vibe, and if ZC ever becomes a big game maker where money transactions are involved, well... a page will have been turned.

I agree with both of you.
 
The problem with all of this, which I think tends to get missed, is the point we're at with ZC. It's not a 1 or 2 year old program, it's nearly 25 years old. If this was a situation where the program's life was in its relative infancy, so to speak, I don't think this would be as controversial an issue as it is.

But on the other hand, I can't see this working out in any way other than crashing and burning. Not because it's not possible to separate the ZC from the Zelda, but because of the years and years of content that has been built upon it being a Zelda engine first and foremost. There'd be a short term gain in terms of monetary value for the developers, but is the risk of a DMCA worth that?

The reality of it won't be Nintendo hitting the developers with DMCAs for a commercial version of ZC and its non-copyrighted assets; it'll be coming after the wider community regardless of whether or not anyone who's made a GB quest has profited from it. Especially when the most popular assets are - you guessed it! - based on the GameBoy games.
 
I mentioned it in the Discord thread, but if the development of ZC heads down this path, with little to no consideration for the wider community and our input, I will definitely be walking away from ZC, and potentially the community too, probably instantly. All of the work I - and many others - will have ever done to that point will be on borrowed time, and I would see no point in working on - or finishing - any projects I have a hand in.
 
The minute that any sort of money is exchanged for ZC licences will be the minute that ZC, PureZC, AGN, etc is finally on the supposed deathbed that everyone's been worried about for years. There is no way that ZC can become a successful for-profit game engine that creates, publishes and plays both non-commercial and commercial content.

I cannot state any of that enough.

[Bagu]

To me, ZC has always been and will always be a non-profit community and plattform, to introduce and present yourself and your skills.
If anyone would like to try to sell his ZC Quests, why not...!?
But in this case, the creator should use his/her own (or free available) gfx, sfx, music (etc.)
...or else, be responsible and liable in case of copyright abusement.


...and yeah, I'm working on various fandomprojects (like He-man or Doctor Who stuff), but I'd never try to earn money, this way.
...and if Mattel or BBC will cancel my projects or take proceedings against me, it's my PERSONAL bad luck.

Edited by Bagu, 04 September 2023 - 08:57 AM.

[NoeL]

Oh hey, what's going on in ZC land today...

 

including punishments for those who misbehaved last night

Naughty naughty! 

 

As for the topic, I've always viewed ZC similarly to RPG Maker: predominantly fan-game stuff freely distributed within a community. But with easily available distribution platforms nowadays, there's been a shift to commercialisation of RPG Maker games, and TBH I'm ok with that. Most games are simple and aren't worth more than the 1 or 2 bucks the developer is charging, but some are exceptional and the developers deserve financial compensation for their craft. And there's still (I'm assuming, at least) a ton of free fan games, and likely even free original games.

 

The big difference is that RPG Maker is a product that can be sold, and ZC is not. Why should quest creators be the only ones to profit, and not the developers of the engine that enabled the creation of the quest?

 

Given that fact, the history of the program, the history of the community, and its inseparable ties to a third-party IP, I don't think ZC and monetisation belong in the same sentence together... unless that sentence is "ZC shouldn't have monetisation." If current ZC devs are passionate about a Zelda-free "Top-down ARPG Maker" that they can monetise, they'd be better off using their time to develop that engine from scratch rather than try to rework ZC into a mould it'll never fit. If they really wanted to maintain those ties to ZC, they could always write an interpreter that translates .qst files into "Top-down ARPG Maker" files (and the existing quest password feature could be used to provide at least SOME measure of protection for authors that aren't on board with having their quests ported, i.e., the quest password is required for the interpreter to translate it). If ZC is open-source, this shouldn't be an issue, right?

 

Side question (and my finger is way off the pulse here since I no longer develop with ZC): is there even a demand for new ZC features? Does scripting not already open the door to whatever else a quest author would want to add? Is the goal merely to make these features simply more accessible?