Hi all!

I've spent a great deal of time building my game engine, Ox. I think it's now mature enough to look into monetizing.

The main reason Ox needs to be commercialized is that it requires resources to grow much further. Only by monetizing do I feel I can bring it to the next level. With the discontinuation of Blade3D and general dissatisfaction with existing commercial XNA engine products, I think there is a need for a new commercial XNA game engine.

I'm looking for ideas about how / if I should do this. Pricing, distribution, evolving from MS-PL licensing, etc. Any ideas you all might have, please lay em on me :)

I had a go of your Ox engine a few months back, and well, to be honest, while it sounded great, it has the same issues as TorqueX and the like. Lack of docs and many bugs. I couldn't really get it working.

I think the first think to do is a good free documentation,
so more people should start using your engine.

Then, in a future, when it become a little more popular, you could offer a paid support program for the ones that want. Maybe a "Pro" version with extra features, but keeping the most of the features open source.

A hybrid community/paid version is a good idea in my opinion. =)

Kiveryn,

Did you verify that these were bugs by reporting them? If not, could you let me know what they were?

Did you find the docs that come with Ox? If not, where did you look for them?

The point of monetizing Ox is to have the resources required to improve it. Ox can't improve much without some sort of business model.

I'm in a similar situation with my xna engine, and abandoned the idea of releasing free and premium versions on the basis that it adds too much overhead to development.  It's not set in stone yet, but I'm leaning towards free use and distribution for freeware games (hopefully generating greater interest from amatuer developers) and a small per-game license for commercial games.  A final option I'm thinking of is an agreed revenue share, for people who are mainly releasing to XBLIG for fun and/or as an experiment, and thus may not want to cough up the money up front.

I'm no business pro, but from what I hear the way to monetize a digital product is to get a solid user base first.

Documentation!! I tried the Ox engine and had actually made some progress, however it was not easy and I felt that had I just coded what I wanted to from scratch I would have been further ahead. I looked for answers in the forums etc, but to really no avail.

Whoever makes something usable with documentation to match will have a winner, and I will gladly pay for it. I have purchased the source licenses for both TX, and TX3D as well as subscribed to blade to try it out. Blade also had terrible documentation issues.

Harald Maassen:

What might be a possibility is offering your product for royalties. This greatly lowers the barrier of entry for developers (it's basically free to use unless they actually make money using it) while still giving you a chance at some income. Of course the obvious down side is that your income is very unstable

And ensuring royalty payments are made could be problematic.

Jim Perry:

Harald Maassen:

What might be a possibility is offering your product for royalties. This greatly lowers the barrier of entry for developers (it's basically free to use unless they actually make money using it) while still giving you a chance at some income. Of course the obvious down side is that your income is very unstable

And ensuring royalty payments are made could be problematic.

Well that's basically just another form of piracy, really. But I guess it is harder to check up on than up-front payments.

The only way you can get more resources by getting money is to get enough so that you can quit your job. Given that the market for game engines is a lot smaller than the market for games, and almost no XNA Indie Game developer has been able to quit their day job, my judgement is that you really can't make it happen that way. You'll realistically have to make do with using your free time to slowly improve the engine.

The best things you can do to improve the engine are:
1. Develop and ship a real game on the engine. Make sure the game is good!
2. Develop and ship proper documentation and samples (MSDN style)
3. Test the heck out of the engine in a number of different approaches (this can come from the first two)

You need to do those, before you need to add any more specific features. Once that's all done, ship a version 1, with terms something like "$100 per seat buys you the DLLs, $300 per seat buys you the source; updates are included forever." You may get some takers, but probably not enough to quit your day job. At that point, add features needed by people who are actually serious about creating games with your engine. Once a second game is shipped on the engine, and you have those features documented and tested, ship version 2. At that point, change "updates are included forever" to "updates are included for a year," but respect and honor the updates-forever for any early adopter of version 1.

Royalties really aren't realistic at the low level of business found in XNA IG (both for makers and buyers). If your engine gets good, though, you should start differentiating a "pro" version (where you can charge, say, $10k, and/or royalties, and/or support contracts) for users who ship through a venue other than XBLIG, because if it's good enough, someone might want to use it for an XBLA game.

After two or three years, if your engine is good, and the shipped games are good, you may start making enough money to be able to live in a one-bedroom next to the freeway and eat Ramen noodles based on the engine. Or not.

To do some market research, you ought to compare your engine, and terms, to other engines, such as Unity3D, or C4 Engine. Realistically, if you don't have a really strong background in shipping real games (like Eric does for C4 engine), don't expect to make a living off a game engine anytime soon; especially not for as nascent a market as XBLIG.

I agree with what Jwatte is saying here.  This is basically the model a lot of the more successful studios have used to license their engines.  We are talking about id Software, Epic as well as Torque.  You really need to put something together that demonstrates the power and ease of your game engine.  You may not need to make a complete game, but you should have something along the lines of the starter kits that the XNA team offers. 

The Ox engine was the first one I found when looking for an example 3D engine.  I never really loaded it up or tried it out though.  I think mainly because I didn't see any materials on getting started.

If I were working on something along these lines, I think initially I would aim for a really low license fee.  Something in the $39.95, $49.95 area just to see how much interest is out there.  Perhaps aim the engine towards a learning system and those prices are more in line with print-based learning materials.  With that purchase I would give away a license for the customer to use my engine under their ID, so up to 8 games.  Assuming there was some interest in this, I would then look to ramp up with the next version of the engine with a higher license fee after adding significant functionality.

I've thought about your responses and talked to a lot of indie game developers. I've discovered the key to giving Ox market value is to make it incredibly easy to use. This requires documentation, but goes way beyond.

I think a lot of people here know that making working software is only half of the time and effort. The other half is making it easy and fun to use.

Ox is at the stage of working very well (ignore the people who claim bugs but don't bother to validate their claims). But in order to get Ox to the stage of extreme user friendliness requires hundreds or thousands of hours of extra development time.

Now, open source projects usually do not try to reach the stage of extreme user-friendliness. They compete by being simple, effective, and free. As an open source project, I think Ox is already successful.

At this point, I do not think there is enough incentive to bring Ox to the level of extreme user-friendliness. Building Ox's market value is not a fruitful effort compared to just making games themselves. The consequence is that game developers with less than a year of hard experience will not be able to use Ox without a large amount of personal effort. Because of the way the incentives are at this point, I find this acceptable.

Ox will remain a free and open source project. It will improve slowly, over time as it has been for the past year or so.

I've added a few tutorials for common cases. I am now distributing the documentation separately from the installer file. Hopefully this will clear up some confusion.

Find the new documentation here - http://oxgameengine.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=30892#DownloadId=78417

Let me know if there's another type of tutorial you'd like to see!

Well, I've got an idea...

One model that I found while surfing was giving away the software but selling the manual / support. I could spend several months writing up a nice manual that could then be sold in physical form and maybe given away electronically. This may make sense because what people want most from game engine software is documentation. But that documentation is best with a goal of funding since it's just as time consuming to make as the engine itself!

Any thoughts?

Selling documentation is a bad idea. It's a bit like giving away the car for free but charging only for the keys. If you know how you'll be able to start the car and get away with it for an incredible price (free) but most people won't, so they'll just look for something else.

I also beg to differ about the Open Source part. Yes open source software more often than not lacks in quality documentation and usability. But in many cases it's - as i see it - simply a matter of a close-knit group being too attached to their own project to be able to actually reach out to costumers. Instead the mantra "but it's free and you get the source" is preached over and over again. Who cares? Other developers like them. And the cycle repeats. This is why i believe so many OS projects get stuck in an endless cycle.

About selling your engine ... i think the most important part is to add value to your engine that no other (free) engine provides. It must be compelling enough for people to charge for it. As they said documentation is one thing, i would add tutorials (maybe even videos) and lots of sample projects with how-to's to explain how things work and how to get things done. I think this is absolutely crucial but it takes a lot of time. The best way to go about this is to actually consider this from the start, to build documentation etc. into everything you do.

Then we have the userbase and to build that you'll need active members which are giving feedback, maybe someone you can collaborate with on building a game with your engine. I agree that a completed game which has a "built with" feature and your website showing off "games built with Ox" and listing some of the popular projects can really boost your engine. I disagree that you have to build the game yourselves but rather help the early adopters and collaborate with them any way you can.

Btw, i checked the page statistics and if i remember correctly there were about 60k page views with 23k visitors. Do you have any stats about number of downloads btw? One of the models you could work with is to say if you get 1000 downloads a month when the engine is free, you may get somewhere between 5-20% of that if you charge at least 1$ (most people will not download as soon as it costs just a little bit). Then you'll need a model that allows you to estimate how many sales you can expect if you charge 10, 20, 50, 100, and so on. This depends mainly on two things: your competition and your edge over them, and their price point. If none of the competitors charges for their engines and you can provide 2 or 3 things that aren't trivial (like outstanding documentation or continued support) you can still be confident to get sales and you're in addition free to set your own price point and play with that. I believe it would be a lot more difficult if there were a good engine already out there charging only 20$ for everyone and unlimited upgrades and almost has the same features as your engine. You'd have it much harder to convince people to pay 50$ for your engine. You can maybe go for 25$ and try to build a better edge over the competitor over time.

So much for business insights. Anyway i'm happy to see you keep the engine for free. No, i don't say that because i intend to sell my own engine. ;)

bryanedds:

Well, I've got an idea...

One model that I found while surfing was giving away the software but selling the manual / support. I could spend several months writing up a nice manual that could then be sold in physical form and maybe given away electronically. This may make sense because what people want most from game engine software is documentation. But that documentation is best with a goal of funding since it's just as time consuming to make as the engine itself!

Any thoughts?

Selling documentation doesn't looks like a good idea. Try a shareware model instead or a mixed model where there is the shareware offer and a "you must pay" model if a game published uses your engine.

At the end of the day, Jon has hit the nail perfectly on the head.  Out of curiosity I just took spin around the C4 Engine website, and yeah -- it's a competitive market out there.  And that goes for just about anything you can think of.

I say read (and re-read) Jon's advice and try to be realistic about the prospects.

jwatte:

The only way you can get more resources by getting money is to get enough so that you can quit your job. Given that the market for game engines is a lot smaller than the market for games, and almost no XNA Indie Game developer has been able to quit their day job, my judgement is that you really can't make it happen that way. You'll realistically have to make do with using your free time to slowly improve the engine.

The best things you can do to improve the engine are:
1. Develop and ship a real game on the engine. Make sure the game is good!
2. Develop and ship proper documentation and samples (MSDN style)
3. Test the heck out of the engine in a number of different approaches (this can come from the first two)

You need to do those, before you need to add any more specific features. Once that's all done, ship a version 1, with terms something like "$100 per seat buys you the DLLs, $300 per seat buys you the source; updates are included forever." You may get some takers, but probably not enough to quit your day job. At that point, add features needed by people who are actually serious about creating games with your engine. Once a second game is shipped on the engine, and you have those features documented and tested, ship version 2. At that point, change "updates are included forever" to "updates are included for a year," but respect and honor the updates-forever for any early adopter of version 1.

Royalties really aren't realistic at the low level of business found in XNA IG (both for makers and buyers). If your engine gets good, though, you should start differentiating a "pro" version (where you can charge, say, $10k, and/or royalties, and/or support contracts) for users who ship through a venue other than XBLIG, because if it's good enough, someone might want to use it for an XBLA game.

After two or three years, if your engine is good, and the shipped games are good, you may start making enough money to be able to live in a one-bedroom next to the freeway and eat Ramen noodles based on the engine. Or not.

To do some market research, you ought to compare your engine, and terms, to other engines, such as Unity3D, or C4 Engine. Realistically, if you don't have a really strong background in shipping real games (like Eric does for C4 engine), don't expect to make a living off a game engine anytime soon; especially not for as nascent a market as XBLIG.

One idea I had when considering this would be to sell the documentation in hard-copy on a self-publishing site like LuLu. If you buy the documentation, it also comes with a non-GNU version of the license, so you can use it commercially. Meanwhile, if you download the source, put a viral GNU license on it, and don't include the documentation. The drawback is that it's really hard to evaluate code without the documentation. It also excludes probably the biggest potential market: people who like to take things apart to see how they work, drive them around for a bit, but won't actually ship anything on it.

Or you could make the documentation free, and have downloadable demo binaries for Windows, but charge for the source code and the right to ship with it (including Xbox).

That being said -- the XNA indie games developer market isn't that big, and that rich. I wouldn't expect to make a living from this kind of approach.