Why do we want it there:
What would be mandatory to list Zero-K on Itch.io:
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An Itch.io account
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Receiving Paypal or Stripe account (to collect money on Itch.io)
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A Project Page
My recommended measures to take:
Optional measures:
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Zero-k need to be free as in freedom     Licho already had a Paypal account I raised this topic a few times before in casual conversation with a few Dev but the response was lukewarm. You may have better luck. The issue maybe lack of will or effort I do not know.
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The license of some ZK art doesn't allow it to be sold. What are funds needed for anyway? So the real benefit is exposure, but is it really worth doing now? Would this produce more traffic than a single well-placed reddit post?
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theoretically yes, more exposure itch.io is quite big [how big?] and if we can somehow take a lead in a category [say RTS] then we could theoretically get quite a fair amount of player [how many?]. comparatively, other itch.io games are also quite unfinished so our flaw would not stand out too much compare to other service [say steam], and players would have lower expectation/demand. However, is this the right time and the right place for Zero-K? I don't know. maybe we need more polish, maybe we will never get the required polish. Me? I just want to continue playing Zero-K with more people.
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Other Spring game, Cursed is already on Itch.io too. Why not release on Desura btw? /s
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I've looked into itch before. Sounds good but is quote:
Receiving Paypal or Stripe account (to collect money on Itch.io) |
really mandatory?
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there are free game up in itch.io
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You would first have to ask the artists if they wish to relicence. Personally I think making ZK commercial all of a sudden would suck, as many people have contributed on the basis that it was a free and open source game. But most importantly I don't see the real goal of having money (server aside - which I think is fine as it is atm). This isn't a business, no one expects to be paid. There are a number of hurdles that need to be solved once you make it a business (income tax and such). You would also suddenly be judged much more harshly, as it's no longer free.
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  gajop, there is nothing ethically wrong with selling Free Software as long as we pay it forward and allow anyone who gets it full and complete access to the source code and the four freedoms everyone should have over their software. Here is a article on GNU that that reaffirms the rights to sell free software https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html.    Sortale asked about polish. We can use the funds we get after the servers are paid for to polish the game more so Zero-K can go to Steam if we want it to. We can guarantee that Zero-K will remain critically acclaimed year after year. No one is talking about making Zero-K proprietary. If it was made proprietary I would leave overnight.
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Zero-K can't be sold. We have too many CC-BY-NC-ND assets. I know that the music and some of the sounds have this license. The 3D and 2D art licensing is a bit vague because a lot of it was created by various people in the Spring community and released to be Spring community as a source of art. They rarely put a license on their work. Most of the 2D art was made more specifically for ZK but still generally lacks licensing. We can't know what all of these people were thinking so I like to err on the side of restrictive, this means no making money from their work. Perhaps more practically, making a profit is a sure way to inject a heavy dose of drama since there is no clear licensing to back it up. This is supposing that we can replace CC-BY-NC-ND. Once you pay for the server with donations I have trouble thinking of ways to put the money back into ZK without issues. How do you propose to turn funds into polish?
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After the server is paid for, it would probably best to chase down the licensing on all of the assets so we know who did what, and what license it is under. That problem can keep Zero-K off of other market places like Steam. Itch.io is an exception because it supports pure donations. It would be legal, but annoying to polish anything with NC-ND because at least in the United States you would have to exploit fair use exemptions to extend the asset as if it was all rights reserved. If the assets were Free Cultural Works, we could take patches for assets like Wesnoth does. In fact all of Wesnoth's assets are under straight GPL. I don't know what kind of problems that causes. I'll check their forums. Either way, assets could be patched like code.
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I think you should begin by compiling the list of art with ambiguous licenses before suggesting anything. Then you need to find and convince every artist to relicense under something less restrictive like CC0 or CC-BY. There is of course no guarantee that they would accept this, in which case you need to recreate or replace those assets. I hope you have a feeling how difficult this may be. For Steam it's not important as long as all art isn't proprietary, and AFAIK the core devs think it can all be considered CC-BY-NC-ND or less restrictive, which is fine.
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gajop I can do that. I'm telling you right now, some artists would be afraid of licensing to CC0 or CC-BY because they are afraid that some big Hollywood company will hijack it. It would be possible to convince those ones to relicense to CC-BY-SA because it would work more as attended than CC-BY-NC-ND. There are things that can be done before outright replacing the assets like a marketing campaign to convince current Zero-K contributers that changing it to make the game more free is the best thing to do. CC-BY-SA in an aggregate would be no worse than CC-BY-NC-ND. I would rather not ask artists to relicense anything before we know what all of the Zero-K assets are licensed as. There were other projects that were non-free that became free. The Linux Kernel did it. The most notable, recently, was MAME. This page about Zero-K on the Spring RTS site would need to be fixed as soon as we have the information to do so. Right now, I doubt any Spring game have consistent asset licensing because of the unlicensed base parts. A relicense will be difficult but worth it. I doubt anything can get more polished in Zero-K before there is at a minimum an asset license catalog because of NC-ND.
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I see ZK (and spring) as a friendly endeavour to create a game and have fun. As the saying goes, friendship and money don't mix, so I'm really against charging money for ZK. While theoretically you might find some new devs or contributors using this money, it's also very possible you will lose some of the current ones, or widen the rift between ZK and spring which can be just as harmful. IMO there is a place for a commercial spring project, but it has to be created this way from the beginning. quote:
We can guarantee that Zero-K will remain critically acclaimed year after year. |
We're all having fun at the moment, I don't think it's wise to risk it so the impossible might happen.
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I am extremely confused as to why opensource prevent Zero-K from going to itch.io ? they literally have an opensource tag https://itch.io/games/tag-open-sourcenow   GoogleFrog mention CC-BY-NC-ND assets. But as long as we only take donation [as we have always been] then this is a non-issue.[don't even need to change licenses or remove asset] Am I stupid or is there something I missed?
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  hokomoko, my mistake. I thought Zero-K got re-reviewed this year on http://www.moddb.com/games/zero-k/reviews. It was just a news update with the old review data posted.
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SortaleAs you say, if we limit ourselves to donations, we're in the clear. But things like: quote:
Choose cut to give to Itch.io (default 10%) |
Are far more complex. Also, one of the "donation" models in itch.io is "pay what you want" which I'm really not fond of, as you're still charging directly for the download even if the user decides what the amount is.
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There isn't anything stopping ZK going on Itch.io, this is all side conversation. There are a few tasks:
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Put together a page (including screenshots, videos etc..).
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Decide whether we need to put it there with good timing.
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