Overview

Hey there reader! A couple of months ago we asked the Thunderstore community to participate in a survey regarding modding platform monetization. We also promised to share the results publicly, which is what this post is all about!

This post will cover the following topics:

1. Why was a survey done?

2. Our breakdown of the survey results

3. How do the results affect Thunderstore’s monetization strategy?

If you just want to see the data, you can find the full results here: 2023 Monetization Questionnaire Results

First of all - why a survey?

The topic of monetization has always been controversial in the modding space. Until now, all the decisions we’ve made regarding monetization have been based on our own assumptions and subjective experiences as end users & mod developers. While that has worked for now, we also recognize that our assumptions could be wrong, which makes having hard data to back up our decisions extremely important.

Running a survey not only ensures we’re not making false assumptions about what our communities think, but it also informs us about what we’re doing better compared to some of our competitors.

In short, we want Thunderstore to be built according to the wishes of our communities, and running surveys like this helps us make sure we’re on the same page.

The who and where of our community

We aimed to get a minimum of 100 responses, but it turns out a whopping 1,150 of you filled out our survey (hats off to you)!

Out of this group, 33% are mod creators. The majority of the respondents were between 13-25 years old (57%), with the 19-25 year olds snatching 37% of the pie.

A good amount of both creators and non-creators participated

Outside of Thunderstore, Steam Workshop and Nexus Mods are the biggest players out there, with the others coming in at roughly the same distribution.

Turns out Thunderstore is the most popular modding platform among Thunderstore users

While the results website only shows an AI analysis of text responses, we also manually went through them to make sure we got the whole picture.

In the case of platform choice, many reported choosing based on what the established location is for the game they’re creating mods for. Besides that, many reported wanting to make their content as easy to use as possible, such as with a mod manager or other tooling.

Mods and Monetization

Here's where it gets interesting. While 73% haven't tipped mod creators yet, a solid 61% are either already doing it or would like to do so.

For those not donating, it's not just about the cash, but worries about how it could affect the modding scene as a whole.

Professional modding? Seems like a 50-50 split. Many creators noted that they would rather focus on developing their own game if they had the option, while others had reservations about their skills as modders or feasibility of the concept overall. However, a solid 45% were open to the idea.

Monetization strategy

Donations? Display ads for free users with an ad-free subscription? Subscriptions with some nice cosmetic benefits? These results suggest you are all in for these. Not so much for venture capitalist funding and paywalls, though - in fact, many of the responses mentioned you would expressly not support platforms that put core features or content behind a paywall.

When we asked about a subscription pricing, the median came out to $5, with an average of $5.26.

73% would seriously consider subscribing if it helped the mod creators, which interestingly enough exceeds the 61% that were ready to support creators directly. Perhaps due to a single subscription being easier to manage?

Takeaways

So, what's the main takeaway? Users love a good UX, easy access to mods, and hate anything that comes between you and your content. 61-73% of users say they are open to financially supporting mod creators.

Thunderstore’s monetization strategy

For a while now we’ve been contemplating the best way forward for Thunderstore as an organization.

Some of our early stage competitors (such as modrinth or mod.io) have sought out funding from VC investors; an option that has also been available to us, but one we’ve wanted to hold out on at least for now. Thunderstore is still majority owned by the dev team, which we feel is important in order to protect the interests of our communities. Bringing on outside investors would undermine that guarantee.

This survey has confirmed many assumptions we had about our communities and their perspective on monetization. However, it is also true that we need funding in order to maintain and further develop the platform.

Soon we will be launching a subscription option that will offer some benefits, such as an ad-free experience, a profile badge, and early access to the upcoming website redesign. We intend to make subscriptions the primary way to directly support us and our vision going forward, and its popularity could ultimately end up dictating whether or not that vision is financially feasible to achieve.

More information about the subscription will be coming out in the next few weeks.

From all of us at Thunderstore, thank you for being a part of this journey! If you have any questions or feedback, you can always reach out to us on our Discord server!

Hey everyone! This is the first in a series of blog posts documenting the internal development efforts of the team. We’re aiming to publish at least one roadmap update per quarter, with intermittent content updates in-between.

We’ll be documenting some of the most impactful work, however, keep in mind that it’s a scant representation of what we’ve accomplished over the past year. Feel free to dig into referenced PRs or the Thunderstore GitHub organization if you prefer the technical details.

Organization

It’s barely sufficient to say that this past year at Thunderstore has been intense. We’ve experienced record-breaking user growth, expanded our team to nine extremely talented developers, and added numerous new communities, all while committing countless hours to improve the ecosystem on numerous fronts.

Big changes at Thunderstore HQ

Ecosystem

The Thunderstore ecosystem has been improved greatly since the start of 2022, with huge refactoring passes, new projects, and new communities.

These changes aim to improve developer and user experience by introducing new development tooling, reworking the UI and UX of our user-facing projects, and by refining user workflows to make modding more consistent, easy, and efficient.

Notable New Communities

• Titanfall 2: Northstar (https://thunderstore.io/c/northstar)

• Enter the Gungeon (https://thunderstore.io/c/enter-the-gungeon)

• BONELAB (https://thunderstore.io/c/bonelab)

• Hard Bullet (https://thunderstore.io/c/hard-bullet)

• V Rising (https://thunderstore.io/c/v-rising)

• Chrono Ark (https://thunderstore.io/c/chrono-ark)

• Stacklands (https://thunderstore.io/c/stacklands)

• ULTRAKILL (https://thunderstore.io/c/ultrakill)

• Sons of the Forest (https://thunderstore.io/c/sons-of-the-forest)

Cyberstorm

We’re finally ready to show off a teaser of our heavily in-development site and mod manager redesign, Cyberstorm.

A teaser image of Thunderstore’s upcoming “Cyberstorm” UI redesign.

And yes, you’ll be able to leave comments on your favorite packages.

You can expect more updates before Fall of this year. Refer to the thunderstore-ui repository if you’d like to keep track of development.

Note that specific elements featured in these images are prone to change as we continue to refine their design.

Website

While most of our website development efforts are focused on finishing Cyberstorm, we’re continuing to invest ample time into maintaining and improving the legacy Thunderstore site. Here are some of the most visible changes we’ve made over the past year.

Package Donation Links

Toss a coin to your favorite creator

Package Management

We’ve expanded package management to enable creators to change the categories of their content without needing to upload new versions. This new functionality was wrapped into this fancy new modal, along with deprecation and visibility options.

Package Changelogs

Dedicated package changelogs can now be displayed by including a CHANGELOG.md file with your package upload.

Expect lots of “bug fixes and enhancements”.

Community Listing

As the number of communities on Thunderstore grew, we had to expand the community selector a bit to keep them navigable. It’s still not great, but we’re hoping it can hold out until the new website is ready.

Nice

Mod Manager

A huge amount of work went into the mod manager this past year — refactoring huge swaths of the codebase, adding new features, and implementing support for numerous new games.

Our most evident frontend change will be the tweaks we’ve made to the profile selection and navigation menu. These design elements were chosen with direction from the Thunderstore Discord community, so a huge thanks goes out to those who cast their vote.

Expect to see further UI changes as we smooth-over and finalize what’s left in the development pipeline.

We’ve also finally implemented an ad-free subscription model, available to those who wish to hide adverts while also supporting Thunderstore hosting and development costs. Another huge thanks go out to those who have already begun to support us via this method.

❤

Desktop Tooling

We’ve made massive strides in improving our desktop tooling over the past year with the introduction of thunderstore-cli. This tool, in short, allows you to install, author, and otherwise manage your mod installs without leaving the comfort of your terminal. It hosts the same functionality as the Thunderstore Mod Manager, but in a form ready for use by community tooling.

thunderstore-cli is ready for testing and can be downloaded from its Github repository.

What’s Next?

There are several ongoing projects we’d love to talk more about, and you can expect to hear from them in future posts in this blog.

If you’d like to get notified about new posts via email, you can subscribe to our mailing list here!

Technical Changes

As a final note, here’s a high level changelog of some ecosystem components for those that are interested. It doesn’t include everything as that list would be far too long, but we’ve done our best at hand-picking the more interesting changes.

Frontend

• Added support for team donation links on package pages.

• Added management dialog for uploaded packages. This allows authors to control the listing and overall visibility of their content.

• Added ability to assign packages to multiple communities during package upload.

• Added CHANGELOG.md support to uploaded packages, making it possible for authors to separate changelog notes from the package readme.

• Added a dedicated panel for displaying changelogs if a package contains a dedicated changelog file.

• Added support for extended-length package readmes.

• Improved the community selection menu by organizing communities into columns and sorting by overall popularity.

• Improved the package management dialog to enable authors to change package categories without needing to upload and release new package versions. Also ported the existing dialog template to React.

Backend

• Added numerous new API endpoints to support future site redesign work. See PR #504 for additional details.

• Added package listing pagination support for use within the site UI redesign.

• Added new v1 community URLs (thunderstore.io/c/{community}/api/v1/package/), with the goal of replacing the current community subdomains (gtfo.thunderstore.io, for example). All newly added communities will be accessible through this new path, with others migrated over time.

• Added support for user accounts via Discord and GitHub OAuth login.

• Added API support for legacy profile codes in order to migrate away from Heroku-hosted services.

  • Profile code exports are now stored indefinitely, as opposed to expiring in 30 days!

• Improved API cache builder memory usage by applying several massive optimizations. This change has resulted in an 80–90% reduction in peak memory usage. See PR #761 for additional details.

Mod Manager

• Added support for games installed through Xbox Game Pass.

  • Contribution by starfi5h, thank you!

• Added the ability to change the currently selected game without needing to restart the client.

• Added display element for package donation links.

• Added ad-free subscription tier ($3.99/month).

• Refactored much of the backend to improve general performance and stability, aiming to construct a solid foundation for future development.