Where the money goes
Ten percent of everything this game earns goes to the Godot Foundation — the people who keep the free, open-source engine it's built in alive. Not a launch-week stunt. For as long as it sells.
EVERY COPY. FOREVER.
Godot is free. Not free-trial free — actually free, forever, no licence fee, and it takes no cut of anything anyone earns with it. Thousands of games are built in it, including this one, and none of them paid a penny for the privilege.
It's kept running by a handful of people — around ten — paid entirely out of donations, and by the Foundation's own published accounts the fund has run behind what that costs. There's no company behind it. There's just the fund.
So when you buy this, eighteen cents of it goes into that fund. That's the deal, and the receipt below shows you exactly where it sits.
On its own, nothing. Nobody's donation is meaningful on its own — that fund is thousands of small amounts stacked into about ten salaries, and that stack is the only reason the tool exists.
But the arithmetic is not nothing either. A thousand copies of this game is roughly a full day of one maintainer's time: someone reviewing a fix, writing documentation, keeping the thing working for everybody else building in it. That's a real unit of a real person's week.
Every other engine I could have used would have taken a cut of this game instead of giving me one. I'd rather the cut went somewhere it does that for the next person.
They're wages. The voice cast and the music team are people doing work on this game, and they're paid out of what it earns rather than out of a budget I don't have. Calling that charitable would be a lie — it's just how a project with no money in front of it pays the people on it.
The cast share is a single pool split by lines that ship, so it scales with how much someone actually says. The details are in the casting packets.
Steam sets a different price in every region, and this sits at the lowest one Steam will let me set in each of them. In a lot of the world that's well under a dollar.
That isn't generosity. It's just not marking up a $2.99 game to people for whom $2.99 is a different number than it is to me.
I looked at making it free outright in the poorest countries. Steam can't do it — a game is paid everywhere or free everywhere, and the cheapest a paid one can go is a floor rather than zero. So the floor is where it sits. If that ever changes, so will this.
The Godot Foundation publishes annual and financial reports — you don't have to take my word for where it lands, and neither do I. If this game earns anything at all I'll post what went out.
And if it earns nothing, ten percent of nothing is nothing. I'd rather write that down now than quietly drop the promise later.