About Lost Dimension Games

Lost Dimension Games is a small group of gamers who are sick of the games industry. We love games as games. Games inspire us and entertain us, and we've seen far too many games ruined by the industry putting profit before quality. We believe that it's time someone took a stand against that, and we think we're the people to do it. Since greed is part of the problem, we decided to make Lost Dimension Games a non-profit. We're not out to become rich people; we just want to make rich games.

Further, we believe that games ought to be available to everyone. We believe that anyone who wants to play our games should be able to. And we believe that if they want to, they should be able to learn how those games work and make their own improvements. Software that works like that is called "open source". We believe in it so strongly, we wrote it into our bylaws: every game we make must be open source, eventually.

That "eventually" hurts. In a perfect world, it would not be there, and every game we released would immediately be open source. Sadly, this is not a perfect world. We're human, we need to eat, and that means we need money. We put "eventually" in to give ourselves room to breathe, but by itself, it's too vague. Much like "tomorrow", "eventually" may never come. So we put a time limit in: each game must be open source within 5 years of release or 10 years after you hear about it, whichever comes first. That's the worst-case scenario; our target is 1-2 years from release, and we'll go sooner if we can.

In that window of time, we plan to release our games for free, and distribute them as widely as possible, but with occasional messages asking for donations. We do mean "occasional"; this approach is often called nagware, because it nags you every few minutes until you give up and donate, buy, or stop using it. It's every bit as annoying as it sounds, and we want no part of it. Our games won't bug you more than once a day, and less often if you don't play much. If you stop playing the first day, you'll never see one, because if you don't want to play for more than one day, we've failed.