Monetization and Crowd-Funding of Fangames

Since Sally Acorn exists, please. Those curves were unnecessary in a kids' show/comic, so I'd guess they weren't made for them. And that's only about Sonic, there will be older examples for sure. Oh, yeah, just remembered, that cat girl in the animated series of Star Trek, and that was at the beginning of the '70s.

 

Not all furries are into the sexual/kinky stuff. Most, sure, but not all. Some just like anthropomorphic animals.

Back to the topic at hand...

Ko-fi is mainly used to donate to creators. It doesn't go into their projects.

 

Sonic Omens has a QR code in the game, which when scanned takes you to their Patreon page.

...I don't know what the next Sonic fangame drama will be, but I bet it'll be the last one that Sega doesn't start sending out C&D's after this fiasco.

 

Oh, please. As if 99% of people who donate aren't doing it to support the project, particularly if it's the only thing that has your name on the map to begin with. Both are asking for support for what they're doing, they're just worded slightly differently to avoid legal ramifications.

By linking a Kofi or whatever and saying "Hey, if you like me and want to support me, here's this" you are effectively telling your audience that the thing you're making is more likely to happen, be better, and come out faster, if there is monetary incentive to do so. It's obvious that no creator who opens a donation page is not doing it with the intention of asking for financial support for their projects. Whether it's to fund the project directly, or to fund the individual who makes the project, makes little difference. Money is being funneled to the creator regardless, and it's going to be divided up between personal living expenses and assets for the product they're making. The intent on the creator's part, as well as the people who donate, is the same in both scenarios. The creator is asking for support to continue doing what they do, and the fans will oblige to help ensure that they do so.

All Omens did, in this case, was remove the lie.

 

I wonder if they really got enough money from followers and Sonic fans alike to take such a risk...
It seems they're being quite criticized for such practices.

 

SEGA is extremely lenient on fan content as it is. You don't think they could get more restrictive without resorting to an extreme like "banning all fan content"? Lowering themselves to Nintendo's level would be a huge blow on its own, and game companies have gotten away with worse just in recent memory.

You said it yourself, "it's worded differently to avoid legal ramifications"...which is kind of the entire point. If you do that, you're much less likely to set a precedent for SEGA attacking fanmade content. The Omens devs didn't because they don't care, and that's shitty. If you were someone who gave the Omens team money to play a beta build, that means they were selling you a product. Call it a "lie" to ask for ostensibly-optional donations for youtube videos while continuing to create a thing that's free for everyone if you want, but to falsely equate the two like this is absurd. You're acting like there's as much chance of SEGA attacking fan content over a youtube channel as there is a commercial game plagiarizing their IP. If you're arguing that a donation system for something else counts as profiting off the product, you might as well argue that having a day job is the same as the company a person works for "funding their fan project".

I was worried before that you were making some disingenuous contrarian arguments, but this really clinches it. We're really doing the "Japan exists so you can never complain about pedophilia" argument? Seriously? Not only does this unfairly characterize an entire country as creepier than it is, but do you think I'm not complaining about this stuff in other properties? That's the epic own you're going for here?

Also, I'm criticizing their business practices and conduct regardless of the quality of their product. I have no idea if the game is good! It's 14 gigs, so I haven't bothered downloading it yet. But it could be a masterpiece and these things would still be worth criticizing. This accusation sounds like a confession.

You actually said,

which would imply you think drawing furry porn is both morally-wrong and tantamount to being a sex offender.

Sally's design in SatAM proper is not particularly problematic. It was only once comic artists started drawing her as a nude woman with a squirrel head that things started to get out of hand. Regardless, SatAM started before 1995, so I still don't know what JaxTH was referring to.

 

Maria's bottom (beneth the dress) is full modeled and textured in the lewd way (you can view it on Artstation if want to see for yourself, I'm not sending the link for the sake of my account).
To make matters worst, they have a texture where she wear a different set of "Bad Girl" Panties.

 

No, I don't think they could, unless they pulled a CBS, which I don't see as necessarily being a bad thing. Let's assume they lower themselves to Nintendo's level. What does Nintendo not allow with Super Mario fangames? They don't seem to allow remakes, and...that's about it, really. I don't approve of that, but suggesting that Omens could have any bearing on what happens to Sonic fan remakes is silly, since as I said, it's not a remake.

This is just a cartoonishly illogical series of events:
"My god, Sonic Omens is making money off our IP! What do we do, sir?!"
"That's the last straw. C&D every other fangame except that one!"

I'm sorry, but, no. I know Sonic fans are so detached from how corporations like Sega operate that they jump to the worst, most exaggerated conclusion, but it is patently absurd to believe that they would treat fangames the way Nintendo does without it being a major PR disaster. Sega simply can't afford going to war with fans, especially with how much money they're losing right now. Plus the fact that they're in WAY too deep, having directly responded to Nintendo taking down fangames with "Well, WE would never do that!" The only, and I mean only scenario that could ever come from this is Sega C&Ding (or, in an extreme case, suing) a fan project that monetizes itself like how Omens does. Then they say "hey, don't do that" and we all move on. And even then, it's only going to happen if it makes a ludicrous amount of money, somewhere around $100k possibly.

It seems like you're saying that making money off your fan project is actually perfectly ok, as long as it's within the realm of "technically legal".

If you paid money to see a page or two of Evan Stanley's Sonic fan comic early, is she selling you a product? Is she shitty? Is she competing with IDW? Keep in mind that Omens at the end of the day IS a free game and it was always intended to be a free game. Having perks for donors does not equate to a commercial release, nor does it even equate to a timed exclusive. Any donation that went to it was ostensibly optional, unlike how it would be if it was a Gofundme or an IndieGogo or a Kickstarter. It's just as legally grey as anything else discussed in this thread.

I must confess that Lapper has shut down the original Sonic Studio twitter and youtube channel, and removed (most) references to it off his Ko-fi (likely due to Omens's controversy), so I don't blame you for seeing it as a "second job", but this was not the case a year ago. The original page has not been archived, but you can still find remnants of what his true intentions were originally.

Not that I blame the guy, mind. He had the best of intentions. He wasn't out to make financial gain, he was only out to make the best fangame he could.

Oh come the fuck on. No, I am not literally throwing an entire country under the bus. You know exactly what I meant.

If you're going to condemn Omens' devs as pedophiles, and use that to justify why they deserve to burn, then you also cannot view, play, or otherwise financially support any anime, manga, or video game that contains that sort of thing, and this likely includes several series' you're already into. If I'm wrong, then that's on me. But I have a feeling I'm not. You either tolerate all of it, or none of it.

 

Nintendo has C&D'd a lot more than just fan remakes.

Okay, so every other game company to ever attack a fan project is just hundreds of times more resilient and capable of "taking the bad PR" than SEGA? That doesn't seem right. Bad PR in the gaming industry is plastic, it barely matters if they can spin it as an isolated incident, like that Streets of Rage fangame. There is nothing that is too horrible for any corporation to do so long as they are convinced it could benefit them somehow.

It's also weird to suggest that no fangame could ever land other fangames in hot water when there is already overwhelming precedent for fangames being punished with extreme prejudice, even if you don't think this specific instance was bad enough to do so. Do we really feel like pushing that envelope? If we do, then why aren't they selling it as a commercial product? Apparently it wouldn't matter anyway.

Obviously? I don't care about the well-being of SEGA as a company.

I don't see anything about access to the game itself there, but I wouldn't really condone that either if I did.

Even if I were to somehow accept how these things are supposedly the same (there are many pieces of context that would weight them differently), the comparison still feels made in bad faith. These are devs trying to kickstart their career as an actual game studio, and they're doing it by using someone else's property to get people to fund it, and taking it as an opportunity to attack critics, SEGA and Sonic fans alike. The fan creators hired onto the Sonic series usually do what they do without expecting any kind of monetary value from it, it's out of passion for the series. Ouroboros's calloused attitude and disrespect of both the series and it's fans signals to me that passion isn't playing the lead role here.

Again, if you just draw a circle around every single instance of a licensed property making money for someone other than its direct owner, that's such a wide range that you could basically excuse anything. I feel like people should actually be able to approach these discussions with nuance and judge a situation according to their actual standards, is all.

Um, not really? For one thing, all I said was that it "adds a layer of ickiness" to what was already a bunch of jerks. Second, your claiming it's somehow impossible to consume media without tons and tons of that media featuring sexual content of minors is a little weird. I had to wrack my brain trying to think of even one thing, and the best I could come up with were Berserk and Dragon Ball, and even Dragon Ball is a stretch. But not only are there contextual differences between those works and their respective creators, I'm far more critical of both of those' series approach to sexuality and minors than anything I've said about Omens, and the knee-jerk reaction strikes me as troubling, to say the least.

I just feel like you're responding to any criticism people make with whataboutism, and it's tiring.

 

Well, I found this doc through a Reddit post on the matter.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mXC2FHMieDdt3giLxmPNz92-Ghips1EOCwsB1LRGudc/edit
It seems Ouroboros is in a worse state than I thought...

 

Thank you for putting into words what I was struggling to articulate. Nobody's under the particular assumption that this specific game is harming SEGA's bottom line (I went and watched SF94 play through it and BOY is it not harming their bottom line), but every step taken towards it as a trend is a step worth resisting.

 

Note that I specifically said Super Mario fangames, but even if we extend it to every Nintendo franchise, I challenge you to come up with a single fangame Nintendo has shut down that was not either:

1. A remake (AM2R) or something that could easily be seen by Nintendo as a remake (Zelda Maker, Mario Battle Royale)
2. Monetized or otherwise gaining revenue in some way, shape, or form (Pokemon Uranium, Gamejolt)

While Nintendo has punished people who make fangames for the reasons above, it's never been the result of one particular fangame. They've been very consistent about what fangames they choose to take down for the past 20 years. In fact, the only instance I can think of where a company has actively changed how it treats fan projects due to one person fucking up is, yet again, Axanar. And that wasn't so much "punishment" as it was them laying out what was legally sanctioned, and what needed to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

There is also a WORLD of difference that occurs once you sell it as a commercial product. It may seem subtle, but it goes a long way. Because once that happens, that removes any and all doubt about what your intentions are. It is now a codified fact that your intentions are to create a competing market with Sega's products and to profit off of their IP without a license. Prior to that, even what Omens was doing was up for debate. Yes, they did advertise that those who donated would gain access to a closed beta test. However, that can be argued as a reward for those supporting the project, not "fuck you, pay me" as it would be as a commercial product. While they did remove all advertising for the beta test from their Patreon, they still gave their Discord members access to the beta, as advertised, as a reward for their donations. If they had done that from the beginning, would that be ok with you? Since the advertising seems to be your #1 problem.

A Sega community rep was in the server (still is) watching every second of it. If Sega sent them there, that means they're fully prepared to pull the trigger. So far, it doesn't seem like Omens has done anything to warrant that, regardless of everything. And even if they did pull the trigger, there is absolutely no reason to believe that they would enact collective punishment like this is Full Metal Jacket. There's no precedent for it, there's no logic in it, and there's no benefit to it.

First: for someone who advocates for nuance, you sure saw fit to throw personal insults at me prior to editing your post. Don't think I didn't notice that.

Second: the Omens devs' attitudes and disrespect should have no bearing on whether their project should be in disfavor with Sega or not. If you choose to argue from a legal perspective, then that argument would have no place in a court of law. The law does not care about how much of an asshole you are. Even still, I have seen no evidence of them attacking SEGA, not even in that Google document, and any criticism towards their critics and fans was simply them being defensive about the monetization controversy. Even if you were to argue that their attitude would land them in hot water, how would that also make other, non-asshole fans look bad? Do you think Sega would stereotype all their fans as thinking the way the Ouroboros guys do? I'm not going to excuse their behavior, but I'm also irritated at the idea that all these arguments about how they might hurt other fangames or that they did something illegal are a thinly-veiled disguise for simply not wanting bad people to get away with having good things. Why else would there be a document digging up every piece of dirt on them possible?

Perhaps passion wasn't playing the lead role. I'm sure that, to Sega, that's the most important thing. Unfortunately, they simply don't have any way of knowing that, especially since any revenue earned from Omens was far too small for profit to be the main motivator. To me, this is all the more reason why it would be a good idea for Sega to come out and lay down some guidelines on what's ok to do and what isn't.

I'm just sick of people moving the goalposts every time they're questioned about where their priorities lie.
"It's illegal"
"It's unethical"
"It's endangering other fans"
"It hurts Sega"
"They're practically selling it"
"They're assholes"
Fans need to pick a narrative and stick with it, otherwise it's just outright paranoia and it makes them look like hypocrites. I can't help but imagine a warped alternate reality where fans openly call for shutting down a Sonic Adventure remake because it sets a bad example for Sonic fans by competing with an official Sega product that's still being sold. I wish fans would stop attempting to police Sega's IP for them and instead band together and tell Sega that even if Omens went about this the wrong way, there is a case to be made for allowing fangames to be crowdfunded so long as it does not compete with Sega's business and does not hurt Sega's bottom line. If Trek fans could do it, I don't understand why Sonic fans can't. Instead, they're slowly becoming more and more like Nintendo fans.

 

For me this is very much a "death by a thousand cuts" kind of situation.
Yes, what they're doing isn't the worst thing in the world and some other content creators are also getting revenue out of copyrighted IPs, but this project always seemed so...greasy ever since I learned about it.

Putting content being a paywal; AND getting revenue from gamejolt; AND harrasing people; AND sexualising a minor (ew); AND stealing music; the list goes on and on lmao

I think they're lame and I wish they would crawl back in whatever stinkhole they came out of so we can all move on and stop talking about them.

Is this really the hill you're willing to die on? Like is this really the big ambitious project that's gonna show Sega crowdfunding is totally okay for fangames? You even said yourself they went about it the wrong way, and now they're rightfully getting shit for it.

I don't want you to think I'm being hostile or anything, your posts are very interesting and made me rethink my stance on the matter a little bit tbh. Maybe we could give a chance to crowdfunded projects on a case by case basis instead of being agressive from the get go.
But in this case, well, I can't help but think they're getting exactly what they deserve. I'm at a point in my life where I just...can't spare compassion for greedy idiots trying to piggyback popular franchises for profit.
I respect you for trying to be objective about it tho, you might be the only person in this thread putting their personal feelings out of the equation.

 

I am upset that people are approaching Omens from a biased standpoint simply because of the kind of people the devs are. Changes in copyright law would be nice, but that's not what I'm advocating for. I'm advocating for fans to stop having double-standards and to stop pretending that Sega are idiots and don't know what so many fans are doing with the Sonic IP at all times.

Let's have a little thought experiment: let's say I have a youtube channel. On this channel, 99% of my posts are updates for a fangame I'm making. 1% is meme videos and YTPs. The fangame I'm making is getting a lot of attention, so I open a Patreon. The Patreon has absolutely no mention of the fangame anywhere on it. It's just for "my channel". It's just for "me". I then make several thousands of dollars a month based on how my fangame is going. But that's ok! It's just to fund those quirky YTPs, right? It's technically legal!

Sega is going to see right through it. Nintendo will shut down a fangame simply because it's bringing traffic to a website that runs off of ad revenue. You think Sega wouldn't do the same, if they wanted to? But they don't, and that's the point. They have never seen fangames as a threat, and they never will, so long as they don't pull an Axanar and make an absolutely stupid amount of money. Sega are smarter than you think: they have been cherrypicking fan talent when it comes to almost everything related to the franchise, from art, to music, to writing, and from comics, to movies, to even the mainline games themselves. And they know how awkward that's going to look if they start treating fangames the way Nintendo does. Katie meant exactly what she said: their goal is not to stifle everything. They're not going to adopt any kind of formal policing effort. They will consider different fangames on a case-by-case basis.

Do I think that fans should be following in Omens's footsteps? I don't know. But I do know that if they did, and they were a little smarter about it, they would have the same results that Omens has without being drug through the mud.

This is what I mean when I say that people aren't thinking objectively about any of this. It has nothing to do with their objective actions towards Sega, the Sonic IP, or the fans: it's just that they're greasy slimeballs and people can't stand the fact that they're successful. That's all they really care about. All this other fluff is bullshit next to that. I'm upset at the dishonesty, that's all.

No, of course not. But Omens could be the Axanar that Sonic needs: something that would result in an official, permitted outlet for fan creativity rather than this awkward grey area that's persisted for so many years. I believe that Sega is ready, perhaps even willing, to take the next step.

 

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=no+mario's+sky

We've been over this, but it doesn't need to only be one game. We shouldn't be pushing this envelope in the first place.

The thing is, they were still using other paysites to get money for the game the whole time. It doesn't come down to whether they outwardly show their intentions to everyone, I just have very little confidence that they wouldn't be doing the exact same things no matter what response it got.

There's very little "logic" in shutting down any fan project. That's not what this is about. You seem to be under the impression that I think SEGA is some collective consciousness with one opinion that will suddenly change that opinion at the drop of a hat. What I believe is that the executives and legal team at SEGA, or whoever you want to say calls the shots on DMCA, have not been made wholly aware of the things that could "threaten" their IP, and I'm not interested in any game that takes us closer to that place. I feel like the difference between Omens and Joe Fancomic that isn't trying to be a AAA game should be obvious.

Well, your post was kind of disrespectful and built on a series of poor opinions from the start, so at worst I overreacted a bit.

I mean, do you have some reason to assume the Omens gang was hated for their conduct before taking money for someone else's property? I don't. Again, this is why I keep phrasing it as adding a layer of scumminess. The duplicitous behavior of claiming they weren't monetizing the game through patreon but continuing to do it through other sites should be obvious.

If you want people to do that, I feel like rigorously defending what might be the most obviously-corrupt example of it is not a good starting place. Getting upset over a bunch of randos espousing opinions you don't like doesn't sound very productive to me. I can find the gang of people who perpetuate white supremacist conspiracy theories and implicate SEGA at the center of it because Ian Flynn made Sally and Nicole gay whenever I want, but that's not actually a productive endeavor.

This does not strike me as a particularly strong motivation, especially since earlier you seemingly implied they were being attacked just because people didn't like their game. Regardless, if someone is a complete jackass, do Sonic fans not have the right to critique them in whatever manner they feel necessary? Why do you get to be the judge if your primary issue isn't even with the dev behavior itself? You think that's somehow going to deal more real damage to fangame legitimacy than Omens itself? I don't. Even if your Evil Sonic fans vs. SA1 remake fantasy happened, there's just as little stopping fangame devs from making that project as there is stopping the company from murdering it.

SEGA has little to no reason to give half of a shit about promoting or allowing fan projects. Sonic fans keep buying the games anyway, they keep making fan games no matter how little affordance the company gives them. Do you think Nintendo would be doing half the shit they are if they thought there was a financial incentive not to? Is everything you think people are saying about SEGA just magically true for Nintendo?

No. I think it's wild to suggest that a remarkably poorly-done case of fan monetization will somehow bring us closer to a real fan-company collaboration than, y'know, actual organization and dutiful cooperation with the company itself would (accelerationism is a load of bunk), and especially to suggest that this outcome is more likely than one heartless megacorp out of a million deciding it doesn't care about the life and death of fan projects anymore because it detected the potential for slight revenue loss.