so some personal insight into HL2VR dev process for all those "this kills passion! You don't need that money to make a living!" crowd



our mod will be depreciated in about 3 months. As in, it will no longer work. OVR is dropping direct X 9 support, meaning our only option is to switch to an OpenGL renderer. This is tantamount to essentially a complete rewrite of a very significant portion of our mod.



Now, all 3 members of our team got together explicitly to try and start a career in VR development. Our artist, Jaz, lives in the UK, and, without violating his trust here, he is in dire times financially. For the past year and a half, one of the only things keeping him sane is looking ahead to potentially getting a paycheck by landing a job thanks to his mod work. To really drive the point home about how dire some of our finances are, two of us had to pitch in to buy one of us a $25 invite to a tech demo we needed to work with. That individual couldn't afford $25.



I am in the process of setting up my own development studio through private funding. I have reached out to Jaz to try and get him to relocate to the US to try and get him making some money here. Setting up my own studio, managing a project, then actually going through with development is a massive undertaking. Nate, our project lead, has a career in Austin now. We all have social lives and day jobs. We estimate the work it'll take to get HL2VR going without Direct X 9 will be hundreds of hours of coding for Nate and I. Any time I put into HL2VR comes at the expense of my day job, which I truly work around the clock.



We have had serious discussions about whether or not we can afford to personally keep HL2VR going. The knowledge that we could eventually sell the mod has been an enormous factor in keeping us going. Speaking of which - this has been known for a good year and a half now. I find it funny that those bemoaning what this means to the "community" apparently aren't apart of said community because they had an entire seminar about this at Dev Days. Black Mesa is releasing under this model. This has been known for so long.



So, about that talk of the death of free mods and all that shit - we could have started monetizing our mod with Valve's blessing a long time ago. We have discussed selling our mod for ages now. We haven't, though. Why? Well, as professionals, we take pride in our work, and we do not want to sell something that is still a work in progress. Thus, for almost 2 years, this mod that we could have sold, has been given away for free. We have hundreds of thousands of downloads of our mod, and haven't seen a dime from it. We don't even operate an ad server on our project website. Nate pays the fee.



The notion some of you guys have that we, who have done work for free for years, are somehow going to struggle to become motivated to keep our monitzation going is ridiculous. If we are selling a mod and an update breaks it, we have more motivation to fix it now because, so long as it's broken, we can't keep selling it. Don't you guys get it?