Hey guys
I just thought I’d pipe in here and tell you my experiences with Patreon. I’m going to be brutally honest because that’s how I roll and I think it’ll be useful for everyone to understand how it works from the creators perspective.
So, first up, I’m the creator of MonoGame.Extended. I work on it with every bit of spare time I get (hopefully without burning myself out). In reality this adds up to about 20 - 30 hours a week. At first the project was small and relatively easy to work on but as the library got bigger and way more popular than I ever expected this amount of hours isn’t really enough to cover everything. Luckily, there’s been a number of great contributors to the project that have fixed a lot of bugs and made a lot of improvements (thanks guys!).
But… this really is my “spare” time. I’m a pretty normal 37 year old software developer. I have a full-time day job and I have a family (3 kids and a wife) to support. Sometimes real life gets in the way. Sometimes I get sick. Sometimes I do burn out and need a break. So while I try my hardest to work on it each and every week there are a handful of weeks that don’t work out that way.
Roughly estimated, I’ve put maybe 4000 hours into the project since I started it in 2015. Almost all of this time has been unpaid (if you don’t count the few bucks I’ve received through Patreon already). I’ve also had a handful of expenses in that time (software, hosting, etc) and these costs have come out of my own money. My point is, this really is just a hobby for me.
I started a Patreon page for MonoGame.Extended maybe 2 years ago. Honestly, I really had no clue how it would pan out. It was just an experiment to see what would happen. For quite some time I’ve struggled to understand how to make it work. I only have a few patrons but I really appreciate the support I get and I really want to deliver something valuable to them.
Setting up the page is a little scary of course, because you don’t know if you can actually create things the patrons will appreciate. I figured if I was honest with people and responded to any feedback I got as best I could it would work out okay.
I’ve tried a bunch of different ideas for reward tiers. Some of them were a lot of work to deliver and as far as I can tell not really appreciated by all of the patrons. Most of the feedback I get from the patrons seems to be along the lines of “I support you because I like what you’re doing”. So it seems that the rewards are not actually the primary motivation for most people (as far as I can tell). I would love to find some reward tiers that works for both sides though.
I don’t really have a good way to keep the communication open with the patrons yet. I’d love to get to know them better to understand what they would like from me. This is probably my fault, but I’m always trying to think of ways I can improve it.
This year I’m trying to put more effort into Patreon. I’ve been trying to post each week-ish with updates on what I’ve been working on. So far it’s been positive in a limited sort of way. A couple of the patrons have commented on the posts and answered my questions. This kind of feedback is really helpful and hugely motivating. It’s difficult to know how many people are actually paying attention.
I really hope I can make Patreon work but the amount of money I’m making is not my primary concern right now. My main focus is figuring out how to spend my time on the right things. For me, Patreon is a tool to figure out how to help game developers with the libraries and tools that I make.