Description
Per a conversation with @leijurv and @nacgarg on Telegram. This is meant to summarize our general ideas and provide a few action items for next steps for our goals.
Sparking this issue were two events: Baritone has been trailing FAR behind Future (@0-x-2-2 🙄) in recurring revenue (Baritone has only received a few one time donations) and @leijurv has disappointingly taken a internship instead of working on Baritone full-time during the summer. This is despite Baritone being a far more powerful tool than Impact or Future. @ZeroMemes has also opted not to share Impact donations with @leijurv. The goal of this issue is to lay the groundwork for a sustainable revenue model for Baritone - allowing full-time development for at least one developer. Potential ideas discussed are laid out below:
🌟 Baritone Premium ™
We could gate a few Baritone features behind a recurrent membership fee and introduce a so called "Baritone Premium". A few ideas for what features could be moved to the premium version are below:
- Parkour Functionality
- Path Color Customization
- Custom Cape
- Builder (more on this later)
- Auto farmer
- Freecam Pathing
- Tunneling / Clearing Areas
🏃 Charging per a Block Traversed
Users would have a limited number of blocks they could traverse using the path finding functionality per a month before they would be asked to pay a few cents for each 100 blocks walked. @leijurv seemed very supportive per our Telegram conversation.
⚡️ Surge Pricing
Building off of the idea to charge per a path, we also discussed dynamically pricing different paths (2B2T is almost exclusively our target market here). If you wanted to move along the nether highway for instance - that would cost more based on how popular that destination was among the player base. Pricing would also be more expensive based on the time of day that path was popular during.
💰 Market-based Builder
Baritone's builder functionality is about to receive a few much needed upgrades (being able to use chests as a source of items, in-game previews to name a few), one option is just gating these behind premium - another is having players pay per a build. Each block placed would be priced based on its blocks popularity within Baritone built structures. This would cause items such as wool blocks to have a higher price than say cactus. Besides promoting diversity within player creations, this would also provide a marketplace where players could select from a library of previous structures that they could then pay to build in game.
🥇 Next steps
@nacgarg has offered to write the backend and @c0nn3r offered to do both the web frontend and surge pricing strategy.
@leijurv mentioned needing to focus on DRM to prevent illegitimate usage of premium features and pathing.
We look forward to improving Baritone's sustainable development. 👍
@c0nn3r, @nacgarg and @leijurv