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I think he was drawing a comparison to music sights like Bandcamp that allow pay-what-you-like with a set minimum fee. I don't see it being all that successful in the games industry. People don't generally feel the same emotional connection to devs (even indie ones) that they do towards singer-songwriters.
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There’s at least one early example of Patreon being used to fund a game developer, though. From
this GiantBomb article:
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Giving away games for nothing, however, is obviously at odds with the idea of being able to support yourself for a living though game development.
"I just really want people to be able to access it in every possible way," she said. "I’ll probably make things that cost money in the future, but it’s really important to me to have a lot of stuff be free and be a gift. Part of how I’ve been supporting myself is that I have a Patreon account."
Patreon is an interesting, relatively new service stemming from the term "patron."
"a person who gives financial or other support to a person, organization, cause, or activity."
Through Patreon, you can support creators, even if you're not totally sure what you're paying for. Porpentine's patrons collectively pay her $650 per game. She's averaging one release per month, but it's not like being a Kickstarter backer. Porpentine is not required to provide "updates" on what's happening, though if she stopped producing games, people could theoretically pull their support. But that's not the case right now, and it's working out for her.
"It’s really good to have that confidence as an artist, and have this material support," she said. "You can’t support marginalized artists only through singular acts of recognition or through praise. You have to give them jobs, you have to reform their day-to-day systematic existence, you have to make it worthwhile and healthy to be them. Money is a concrete thing that is very helpful to marginalized artists. Rent and food and clothing--these are all concrete needs. I’m just really glad to have that support, and it allows me to make free games."
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And Kickstarter has handed over money to quite a few developers now, with Double Fine as a good example.
I don’t see a “give us extra money†option seeing widespread adoption any time soon – although Mac app CodeKit
gives the option to pay at a different price tier depending on how much you feel it’s worth. So it is possible, just not necessarily in an industry as massively commercial as games.