I’m sure that nearly everyone has heard of Kickstarter by now, and I was thinking it could be a really good way to fund the development of scripts and 3rd party plugins for 3DS Max. It seems to me like it would be a good fit for their business model, but I haven’t been able to find anything like this on the site.
Is there any particular reason no one has tried it? Something I’ve missed, perhaps, that would make it a bad idea? Or is it just that no one has considered the possibility yet? It’s something I’d like to try myself, so please share your thoughts on the subject!
Maybe because most people realize there is no money in writing plugins and scripts.
That seems a bit pessimistic. While it may not be the most lucrative area in the field of 3D graphics, there are plenty of companies that develop and sell third party plugins for programs like Max.
Besides that, Kickstarter is really geared less to big businesses with massive budgets, and more to the artist/artisan/maker crowd working out of their garages. There are even users who aren’t looking to make a profit, but simply to cover the cost of their development expenses. Beyond that, already-successful companies are starting to use Kickstarter as an early baseline to gauge interest in new projects.
Tools and plugins can be developed by individual coders working from home or by large companies with a centralized office space. But a lot of people are in a situation somewhere between the two. If you have a project that will require more work than one person can do alone, but don’t have the resources of a corporation behind you, that significantly lowers the chances that the project will ever see the light of day.
These conditions are certainly not unique to Maxscript programming, or even software in general, but are exactly the kind of thing that Kickstarter can help with.
First problem:It’s too much of a nichè product to be of any interest on kickstarter(which is US only).
You’ll need to generate a crowd (social media, blogs, websites, whatever)willing to spend money for it which is a job on it’s own.
Second problem: While everybody agrees that it would be a nice or great idea the number of people who actually donate or contribute anything is marginal in the end.
Go ahead and ask Dave from maxplugins.de how much money he got via Paypal from users for supporting his site over the years.