Board Thread:Update Hype/@comment-28592066-20170106122430/@comment-28592066-20170111181809

He did say that at some point it won't make sense to allow anyone to download the game for free. It does make sense - if you give away every build for free save for the final release people will say 'hey, why the hell should I pay $20 for a few bugfixes'? If you want to be able to sell the game you will have to stop the free downloads before the game is close to being feature complete. With this in mind what you said about only bugfixes after Osana does make a lot of sense - it would make a lot of sense to give away a shareware version with just the first week for free - and this is exactly what's going to happen once Osana is complete. Obviously you'll have bugfixes, but anything else will probably only be released with the final game.

What I meant when I was talking about kickstarter backers and patrons (maybe also preorders?) is that there may be a tier that grants access to all the intermediate builds between Osana and the final game so the fans willing to spend a few $'s can still have these regular updates they are used to.

The Monkey Island example is just an example of what can happen to a game and why an independent game designer should never pass copyrights to anyone else (if you really want to release it to other people then release it as GPL or even give up copyrights completely, but never ever transfer ownership to someone else). Think about it this way - If you're an author of a book, would you like it if someone else wrote an official sequel without your consent and worse - prevent you from writing your own continuation of the story?