https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/0*X5Zz-PxT8087KG2...

It reminds me a study about the perception of beauty among students of arts.

Before they start their studies, their perception of beauty is similar to everyone's.

But as they go through their course, their perception starts to shift. What they see as "beautiful" doesn't match the perception of others.

They learn what "skeuomorphism" is, and suddenly everything must be flat and undifferentiated.

He calls it a craft becoming “self-conscious,” i.e. the architect’s role is not to create a place to live, but to be an architect, which necessarily entails “competing” against other architects. Nobody wins design competitions by creating the 1000th example of a tried and true form, they do it by pushing the boundaries of other architects’ sensibilities, which are already far afield of a normal person’s. Most results are therefore complete garbage.

Basically "oops we made it too flat, let's make those buttons big and colourful so people can see them again". It's a step forward after two steps back.

v3 is flatter than the flat design that v1 was a reaction against because it had such bad affordances.

yes, it drags people away from the mean, but that doesn't stop large segments of the population from acquiring certain tastes (e.g. coffee).

as a long-time user of tech devices, your tastes too have been dragged in certain ways, even if you couch yourself as an average user.

fwiw. i love android, but I do not really care for their current design direction.

(by the way, you might want to look up skeumorphism. material isn't skeumorphic, almost by intention.

Do you know which particular study this was? I would like to read it.

http://shopify.com/ https://tailwindcss.com/

- Dōgen

After its creator raised €100,000 to release it under the GPL, Blender became the leading open-source 3D tool it is today.

And they make enough money from recurring donations, service subscriptions, merchandise, conferences and trainings.

There are/were plenty of open source RPG makers, but they never gained any real traction.

I considered open sourcing my product in the past (did so with a previous game), so maybe one day. I still have some big things planned :).

I'm not sure if we had that perfect storm in game engines yet. Unity fumbled big time, but Godot wasn't quite mature enough to fully take advantage of that opportunity.

Plus not everyone wants to give their product away. I see that advice all the time here and reddit and other places, "just opensource it" as if that's a solution to every problem a creator might have. I even saw it on a gamedev subreddit where a guy was asking how to make more money and people were saying to make it opensource, as if making it free would somehow increase sales for him.

* Step 2: Open source project

* Step 3: Find other streams of revenue (donations, grants, subscriptions, sponsorships)

A note to the author -- if you ever considered going open source, you could use the same strategy used by Ton Roosendaal to open source Blender:

In July 2002, Ton launched a campaign called "Free Blender" to raise money (100,000 EUR) directly from the community. To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the goal in only seven short weeks.

In October 2002, Blender was released under the GNU GPL. Roosendaal created the Blender Foundation to manage development, and the project kept growing from there. Today, Blender is one of the most popular 3D creation tools, used by professionals, hobbyists, and even studios.

Being free and open source allowed Blender to power countless creative projects, including the 2025 Oscar-winning film Flow.

This would've been much harder if the tool had stayed behind a paywall.

But on the other hand, $100k seems like quite a small one-time payout for a huge amount (obviously years) of effort, unless someone has exhausted all other plans to continue trying to compete with established software by commercializing their project.

For a lucrative game, a reasonable value would be 2 to 4 years of earnings.

For example: if the product makes $10K/month:

    $10k × 36 (a mid-range multiple) = $360,000

Seems like he should have set a higher goal.

Example:

    10 PRINT "HELLO ";
    20 GOTO 10

You could then type:

    15 PRINT "WORLD ";

    10 PRINT "HELLO ";
    15 PRINT "WORLD ";
    20 GOTO 10

If this is something you truly believe in, lead by example.