Leaderboard

Having a legal entity makes sense & is fine by itself. I think the issue was more about what formalizing would mean for the team and workflow, because then (depending on what country we do it through) you have to have trustees / board members, a constitution and bylaws, annual reports, sometimes tax forms, etc., and generally team members consider themselves fans just like anybody else and weren't all that hyped about formalizing. (I'm not particularly worried about being sued over the assets and that side of it, because it probably would have already happened by now if it ever would.) I think at the root of most issues is that we're a really small team that does this in our free time as a labor of love. We could be more ambitious if we had more people that we could trust (i.e,. have been a constructive part of the scene for a long time & has the time & initiative to do the work) and that could do everything that needs to be done in the way it needs to be done. The chicken-egg problem there is that we could do better promotion if we had more people, but it takes the promotion to get the more people to do it. A lot of it too is that we have a system that's been working for us, and people stick with what works.

Welcome, to 2017! Thanks for coming out!

That's my personal perspective too, and why I don't use "non-commercial use only" licenses for my own projects. There's a good reason the GPL does not exclude commercial use, and it's not because the FSF are a bunch of raging capitalists. It's because defining "commercial use" is actually not all that easy (I've seen some lawyers suggest that using an NC-only asset on a free Wordpress blog might be a violation, because the presence of ads makes it commercial use), and such restrictions are unnecessary anyway provided the "sharealike" clauses are complied with. Indeed, it's actually quite common for commercial users of GPL code (IBM, Red Hat, even Microsoft these days) to contribute valuable improvements to that code, so locking all of these companies out of the ecosystem would not benefit anybody. However, changing the license of the Dark Mod itself is pretty much impossible for reasons that others have explained.

Speaking of promoting TDM, I emailed Blues News and they agree to make announcements for each new mission ! This would result in TDM regularily being mentioned on at least one gaming news site. Maybe we could contact other news sites too? Also is there a way to get download numbers of the mod? To see whether something like this has any influence at all. And where would I get info about newls released missions? The internal downloader or the board here?

You have to make sure that your internet is turned off, while installing. Otherwise an online account is automatically created. The first time I installed my version was with at a friend's, so I had no internet there. When I reinstalled after a hard disc crash (unrelated to Win10; at least as far as I can tell) I had the internet already plugged in and did not have the option to create an offline account. Had to unplug first. Otherwise you have an online account that runs connects every time you turn on the internet.

About that, here are some topics about that:

The message to Steam Support has been:

I really appreciate this thread and the intentions behind it. As someone who wholly believes in the principles of the GNU GPL and CC-BY-SA licenses, having the game licensed under a share-alike non-NC license would be better for the public good. I personally have no qualms with people reusing assets for commercial projects as long as credit is given to the original authors and as long as they're willing to share their modifications under the same terms. However, like people have been claiming, this is a very difficult task for the Dark Mod. It would require a near full replacement and reorganization of the artwork pipeline. In my opinion the only way this could be achieved would be by joining efforts with similar projects and create shared artwork assets pool while sourcing a bunch of stuff from Open Game Art and commissions. I'm not sure if the effort is even worth at this point, and I would rather put more focus on promoting the game in different ways and getting more people interested in creating FMs. On a side note, I think the biggest impediments preventing TDM from reaching a broader audience are the lack of a full (mini) campaign with an integrated tutorial replacing the current one, and the poor state of the mission downloader interface, which makes it difficult to read and unappealing for people to explore it (which is already being worked on). Other than that, people could organize a bunch of live streams to promote new levels and such. It did wonders for OpenXcom, and I think it could work well for TDM too.