As you might have heard on Discord yesterday, PixelTail Games has decided to use some donation services to help fund our work in addition to game sales.
We had wanted to wait until we had an update out in order to begin asking for support, so with phase one of the Arcade finally released and the demand for more servers creating a greater necessity, we are finally opening our Patreon and Ko-fi pages to our community.
What are these services?
Ko-fi is a donation service that allows for one-time donations at a base amount.
Ours is set to $5, for example. So, you can make one or more donations of 5$ whenever you want!
Patreon is a subscription based service that allows for monthly donations at different amounts.
We will NOT be offering exclusive items to patrons.
We do plan to give patrons tags in-game and on Discord, along with access to a private Discord chat.
We are also continuing to use our RedBubble store if you want to support us through buying merch.
Supporting us through these donation services is your choice. We are still dedicated to not hindering the experience of our game with microtransactions or exclusive content of that nature.
We are constantly figuring out new ways to get the game out to you all more efficiently and will continue to be very open with our development process.
We are working as hard as we can to finish Tower Unite and move on to future projects, and your support will be extremely helpful. All donations will help us pay the developers fair wages, along with paying server costs and other expenses.
pretty unfortunate to say, this amount could sustain them for like 2~3 years at the max based on the current number of players online. let alone with the wages to the developers (30% to steam + 5% to Fortnite Epic Games).
however, if they are doing this while they are not needing to pay much on servers, you have a point.
“Ha! Guys I am subscribed to their Patreon and now I have such a huge advantage over everyone in game with my tag that says “Supporter” in game and my orange name on Discord! Obviously no one will be able to beat me at anything in game now that I have paid more than the base price of the game!!11!”
For real though, sure this might be the definition of microtransaction, but as opposed to every other game, it’s not even skins, accessories, inventory space, extra stuff or things like that. It’s literally just a tag that will say you are helping them. If you guys are really mad that there are ways that we can support the devs now and that we get an extra few things that do not in any way improve or change the gameplay, that’s just sad.
It’s highly amusing to me that you think an in-game Patron tag is a microtransaction. Do you think the Backer tag is a microtransaction too? They both serve the exact same purpose.
The game also didn’t make $100k on Indiegogo, no idea where that came from. There have been plenty of people asking if they can donate to help fund the game, and this is finally a way for people to do just that. Redbubble also takes most of the profits from any merch store. I would be surprised if it had made more than a couple hundred dollars at this point.
And finally, this game has been on Steam for 4 years now, with a player peak of about 1500. A more reliable revenue stream that doesn’t rely on continuously attracting new people to buy the game is always good.
On an unrelated note, I noticed that your account says “unhappy with the state of Tower Unite, inactive since February 2020”. Clearly you do still care, or else you wouldn’t be posting here. I would suggest you either permanently see yourself out if you don’t care like you claim, or actually try to make an effort to understand things.
You do understand that to keep a game running long term is a lot more than that? The only money they were making was the money from the kick started thing, the $15 game purchase and the merch store, not everyone wants to buy lots of merch for a game must because they want to support them and they would rather just donate them money for nothing in return, apart from a tag, it’s not like Pixeltell games are forcing you to donate or telling you to, it is just an option for users who want to support the game with nothing in return.
