godotengine
patreon
Donation Changes, Request for Feedback
🕑 Added 2020-07-06 21:25:35 +0000 UTCStatus
The project situation changed a lot for the better in the past few months, with a steady growth in the amount of users and contributors, and a nice boost to our funding situation thanks to an Epic MegaGrant which will cover my (Juan) and George's work for the next two years, freeing donation funds for new purposes. Therefore, we discussed with core contributors that this is a good time to change how the project manages donations, and give our whole crowdfunding a much-needed update.
Before making those changes public, we would like to ask you for feedback on the final proposal, as well as notify you of upcoming changes to Patreon tiers. We are deeply grateful for your continued support all these years, so we believe it's best to ask you first.
Goals
We are no longer going to have named goals with contributor names. This became a problem for us because contributors may not be immediately available, their situation may suddenly change, or they may not want to have their name listed to avoid conflicts with their current employers. Likewise, we may also wait a bit to hire after reaching a goal, to ensure we have enough savings to give the new paid contributor peace of mind that we can guarantee at least one year of employment. And finally, since some of us have their pay covered through external funding which is not reflected on Patreon (Epic MegaGrant, grants and corporate sponsoring), the Patreon goals did not reflect our current payroll.
Similar to how Blender is now doing, we will be changing goals to increments of USD 5000 for every contributor that we plan to hire. In the end, some contributors may be paid more or less depending on their experience, responsibility, contract length, amount of work hours, etc. This number will only reflect an average and we may eventually modify it according to our ongoing experience. Also keep in mind that Conservancy as a charity keeps 10% of all donations for operating costs (and in exchange, as any charity of this type, they ensure transparency in usage of funds and provide accounting, legal and fiscal services to the project), so this number does not accurately represent what individual contributors will be paid.
Profiles
In May, we had a first budget meeting with core contributors to discuss what future work we want to fund using project donations, be it full-time contracts for area maintainers or project-specific work packages. Some of those will be covered by funds which we already accumulated from previous months of excess funding, while others are dependent on reach a sustainable level of monthly income through Patreon and corporate sponsorship.
Listing the names of the contributors who we intend to hire is difficult for the reasons mentioned before, but we will instead post the profiles of those who we are looking forward to hire. If you want to guess who the person may be from there on it's up to you :) So far, the profiles we will be putting up will be:
- General usability, 2D editor, website
- Contributor for networking, HTML5
- Mono/C#, GDNative
- Junior rendering contributor
- VR/AR/Mobile rendering contributor
- More contributors
Again, keep in mind we will only hire contributors who have proven to be of enormous value to the project over the years. If we can't find contributors for a specific area, we will most likely not open the position. We prefer to keep the donations until someone who can make the best use of them is available.
Once we reach the goal and have cleared all the hurdles of the hire, we will announce who they are. Stay tuned for our next hire announcement soon :)
There may be small exceptions to this, like doing one-time hires for people experienced for specific tasks, like improving documentation, adding RTL support, doing fixes to X11 (which is very difficult to find contributors for due to the extreme complexity), etc.
Tiers
The Patreon tiers and perks will be reworked. They made sense when we were started out with the sole expectation to hire me full-time while allocating some of my time to Patreon perks, but as the project grew exponentially, it became increasingly hard to dedicate time to our complex poll system, and to fit its results in our schedule for the engine, docs and demos. Both Rémi and I moved to positions where we spend most of our time managing other contributors, working on urgent codebase-wide changes, releasing new versions of the engine, etc.
Additionally, we've noticed from the feedback of many patrons that most of you are here to support a project you believe in with your donation, more than for the extra little perks a given tier may provide. As a result, we will reduce the number of tiers for a better overview, and offer rewards that we hope offer some interesting community interaction, while not having too high of a time cost for us.
Also, we'd like to acknowledge the fact that we haven't yet organized any live video Q&A as we promised initially, and we'd like to apologize to patrons who had been pledging while looking forward to that. Yet, we still think that it is a great way to provide the community with insights into Godot development, and now that we have more full-time developers hired or soon-to-be hired, we think it's a good time to start delivering on this old promise.
To help us prepare those live Q&As to be packed with interesting content, we'll propose to the higher Patreon tiers to pre-submit questions or topics that will be discussed by core devs in the Q&A.
Here is our planned list of tiers:
- $5 - Discord role
- $10 - Your name in the credits
- $14 - Name further up in the credits
- $26 - Ability to submit questions or topics to discuss to a monthly Live Q&A
- $48 - Mini Sponsor: Name on godotengine.org/donate page and in Godot's About dialog
- $99 - Bronze Sponsor: Name and URL to your site in godotengine.org/donate page and in Godot's About dialog
Important: We plan to remove the $18 and $32 tiers to simplify the lineup, but this means that current patrons at those tiers will be switched to a "No reward" status by Patreon. We encourage patrons at those tiers to update the pledge whenever they see fit to ensure that they select one of the above pledge levels (e.g. $14, $26 or $48). See how to update your Patreon membership.
If you have ideas and feedback of perks and rewards you think could be good for us to offer, please let us know.
Note that during a transition period, we'll process those "No reward" pledges manually to attribute them the perks they're due (unless you specifically ask us not to do it).
As you can see, we're adding a "Bronze Sponsor" tier between the pre-existing "Mini Sponsor" and the corporate sponsorships. This was requested several times by patrons here and on Twitter who want to give even more, so here we are!
Corporate sponsoring
We initially had two corporate sponsorship tiers on Patreon for companies to have their logo on our website and (for Platinum) splash screen. As the project grows and our funding needs do too, we're updating this and we'll handle the higher sponsoring tiers (Gold, Platinum) outside Patreon to simplify the process.
Corporate sponsoring categories will change as follows:
- $500 - Silver Sponsor: Small logo on homepage and name + URL in Godot's About dialog
- $1500 - Gold Sponsor (outside Patreon, min. 6 months invoice): Small logo (icon size) on splash screen, medium logo on homepage
- $3000 - Platinum Sponsor (outside Patreon, min. 6 months invoice): Logo + name on splash screen (like now), big logo on homepage
Combined funding sources
We constantly get requests to use alternative funding sources to Patreon and to show our total donation/grant income combined on the Godot website. This requires a significant amount of work and it will be among our priorities when we can hire someone to do this website work (let's hope soon) - in the meantime, Rémi will put together a simple overview and update it regularly to provide more transparency on our budget and current hires.
We'll work on a visualization that properly reflects the different natures of our funding sources, such as one-time grants which provide us for funds for a limited amount of time. Our policy is to always stay cash flow positive (i.e. we get more donation income than we use) - with a few exceptions for occasional project-specific temporary contracts - so this visualization should reflect it.
Thank you!
Finally, thanks so much to all of you, current, former, and future patrons, for your amazing support. When we joined Patreon three years ago, we never imagined reaching such a high level of funding in support of such a rapidly growing project!
Godot is developed by more than a thousand contributors, and coordinating this massive community requires a full-time involvement of several of us (and hopefully soon even more full-timers), which your generosity enables.
Comments
Evan Nibbe
That is a good take Juan, plus, a bounty system can create perverse incentives such as deliberately creating bugs that contributors see so that those contributors put in a bounty to fix the issue. Of course, GitHub version controls prevent this for the most part with the power to roll back changes, but it’s best to avoid this kind of bounty system anyways.
Godot Engine
The problem is that this would only work if all contributors were generalists that can work on everything, and this is very rarely the case. Our ability to hire depends basically on: -The area a contributor dedicates or has expertise in -How much they have proven to be trustworthy to the project -The availability they have -The budget we have Even though the project has a large amount of contributors, it's not often that all factors converge and allow us to do a hire, this is one of the main reasons why keeping the old voting system was very difficult. That said, our next two intended hires will focus on this exact areas, so keep tuned for an announcement on this around Monday.
Monster Vial
Come to think of it, I would even be fine with just answering a survey of what I am doing and need. Just knowing you guys have stats that include me would probly put me at ease.
Monster Vial
It would be nice to have a general area our donation would be focused in. I, personally, would love it if my donations could be focused toward C# dev and 2D dev. It may be hard to make a system for this that wouldn't get people upset, but it would still be nice to have a "We'll sorta try to put your money in that direction..." thing. I could see something like roadmap voting, but for very very broad budget areas once a quarter... or something...
Godot Engine
We discussed this in the past many times, but the main issue is that generally it's code owners who have the best judgement on how to implement a feature or fix an issue, so you need their time and involvement either way. Many fixes/features are created that take a while to be merged because code owners need time to review them, or because they are not entirely correct. Bounties would not improve upon this situation. Becuase of this, using donations to hire code owners seems like a much better investment than just doing a bounty system, because it is what helps the most to unblock fixes to issues.
Khore Fluxo
Just thinking here: how about a system of bounties? Where people can attribute say half of their contribution to a certain issue. Let's say 50 people at the 5€ level attribute it to an issue, solving that issue can make a contributor earn a one-time (50*2.5€=) 125€ reward. If it's not attractive, perhaps people's next months attribution makes it more attractive? Of course, devising a system like this would also take time; and it might take away from the whole idea/spirit of contribution. Suddenly you might have people trying to solve an issue because it has a 300€ bounty, being mad if their solution is rejected because violation to a standard or what happens if two people get a solution at the same time... On the other hand, since the project also hires people, it's not that all contributions go uncompensated, so there might be something similar that motivates, provides patron influence on roadmap prioritisation, and doesn't kill the FOSS spirit. :-)
Juan Linietsky & Godot Core Contributors
We discussed at some point that a potential reward could be to have an issue looked in one of the contributor meetings, or a proposal looked at a proposal review meetings, but the main problem with this is that most contributors in those meetings would have their time they donate taken away even if they are not working paid for the project. Likewise, things changed a lot the past years and now most areas of Godot have dedicated contributors who maintain them, so it's difficult to promise implementing something if this contributor is not being paid by us. A reward that just gives more visibility to an issue may work, but it's difficult to figure out how to do this.
Core Flux
I did like being able to vote on features to be added to a roadmap. It would be nice if there was a way to retain some if that. Especially since I have some 2D issues that don't seem to get picked up and I wonder if, with all the attention to 3D, 2D is on hold for a bit. I came to Godot especially because of its 2D advantages, and hope we continue to strive for improvement in that field. I wonder if we have numbers on what percentages if users mainly use 2D/3D, what number is working on bigger/"professional"/shippable games. These numbers might offer perspective.
Jasper Brooks
In the end, it has to be done a way, that makes people behind it feel comfortable, anyway I wish we could hear from more core contributors, even if it seems simple, or even a silly feature, always a joy to read more Godot goodness, more fun . . .
Jasper Brooks
The NEWS updates we get, on the official pages, are SO cool, I just wish there was more, I know any given core contributor can't just write things, all the time, so it has to be reasonable . .
Jasper Brooks
However, if it was possible, maybe more people from core contributors could share a little article, about what they're doing, even if it is just a half-way update, I mean like, there's nothing to show, anyway tech - news always make me smile, and I'd love if there was more, since making a massive thing, like Global illumination probably takes MONTHS of work, to post a strong update, it would be nice if important contributors, maybe to C#, could give some updates, or maybe user interface improvements, if that makes sense . . I think the engine is being handled superbly, flawlessly already, I just wish there was more news, from people working on the biggest improvements, across the board . . Like, not just Juan, since there needs to be 2 - 3 months work, or sometimes less, to post a result . . . Would LOVE if some of the core contributors, other than Juan posted either done features or, half-way descriptions of what they're doing, tbh whenever I hear something, it blows my mind, so it doesn't have to be super in-depth or, only when things are 100 %, it would be cool to hear from someone making C# better, a. what they doing, b. how far they've come and, c. how long they estimate it would take, so we get a small road-map, for work-packages, by core contributors, ideally 1 - 2 news updates, every week, on various topics, from rendering, to code, basically anything Godot related . . . Thx . .
Jasper Brooks
You are doing a fantastic job, when we get a new update or, announcements, it's well worth the money, since they really make me very happy, I just wish there were more, but also understand it can take MONTHS to code a feature, so updates simply have to wait, until the work is done . .
