Stardew Valley Developer Made a $125k Donation to the Foss C# Framework Monogame
Key topics
The gaming world is abuzz with the news of Stardew Valley's developer making a whopping $125,000 donation to MonoGame, a FOSS C# framework. Commenters are hailing this move as a rare display of generosity from an indie developer, with some pointing out that it puts AAA studios to shame in terms of supporting open-source projects. The discussion also touches on the motivations behind such donations, with some arguing that it's a charitable act, while others speculate about the potential risks of not supporting critical open-source tools. As it turns out, many agree that AAA studios tend to rely on established engines like Unity or Unreal Engine, but still use open-source libraries for specific tasks, sparking a debate about the extent to which they should give back to the open-source community.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
12m
Peak period
138
0-6h
Avg / period
20
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 31, 2025 at 10:39 AM EST
9 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 31, 2025 at 10:52 AM EST
12m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
138 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Jan 3, 2026 at 4:39 PM EST
6d ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
For the hundredth time. He's an extremely rare person focused on quality, value, and competency. And he clearly just loves his own game
Edit: if the engine is not maintained, there can be compatibility issues, it can go abandoned and lack new features, etc
You give something, and you don't get anything back in return.
If you give money to someone, and you get something useful to you in exchange, this is called business.
The fact people with this opinion exist also discourages donations from others because "nothing is ever enough" for you.
Also pro-tip, if you do more than a handful donations you'll realize that you as the giver is always the one that most benefits from being charitable. The feeling you get is why you do it.
What, me saying I hate your opinion with a passion wasn't obvious enough?
ConcernedApe's next game is also built on MonoGame, so he has self-interested reasons to want MonoGame to continue to be maintained. But just because ConcernedApe has self-interested reasons to donate doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't also come from a charitable place.
MonoGame is basically getting a sponsor. The ecosystem benefits. I'm personally happy to leave it there rather than asking for moral purity.
AAA studios don't really use MonoGame.
Actually I think Unity and Unreal also both require this too.
I'm sure there is heaps of MIT and BSD style free software in there though.
---
[0]: https://www.supergiantgames.com/blog/bastions-open-source-br...
EA does something similar, and their EASTL is an opinionated and gaming-focused container and algorithms library that they maintain and made open source.
But I think people cynically underestimate the value of the contributions corporations do make and fail to understand just how much of the software we enjoy is only possible due to corporate funding.
Igalia may be a good example as most of have are not even familiar with them. But the Linux distro that I use comes from their, the Servo browser is being driven by them, and many other projects benefit from their contributions.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants
For example they gave $250k to the Godot game engine project in 2020.
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epi...
If Epic Games really cared about Godot, they would align more with their values in-house. Their M&A drives the organization like a propeller.
However, their stakeholders decided circa 2019/2020 that they want to influence the development of Godot and spent their money that way. Corporate donations aren't at a whim like us individuals who spend $3/mo on Wikipedia or a food pantry, it's considered by the executive team, calculated and green-lit by their accounting team.
So yes, funding Godot is A Nice Thing To Do but it also conveniently puts a bit of pressure on Unity, their biggest competitor, without impacting their own business.
Also, if you believe Matthew Ball's take[0] then Epic is all-in on fostering as many gamedev-ish creators as it can so that it can loop them all into making content for its metaverse later. As you alluded to, in the long term funding a FOSS game engine which is focused on ease of use helps that too.
[0]: https://www.matthewball.co/all/epicgamesprimermaster
Yeah, yeah, I know you want to do something else and I need that Shopify. So, I'm going to give you a donation of 500 USD, and then a 5 USD/month donation.
Contractually you have no obligation, and I have no obligation, but if the project stops, then I will have to stop the donations because I will need to pay someone to do it (and it will be more expensive).
Sounds cool ?
ConcernedApe donated to give back to the foundation he came from, while Epic is out for global domination in the virtual entertainment sector.
I'm really still just trying to see the whole "Epic is donating money to take over the world!" argument here. What obligation do they get from these donations, exactly?
Epic values exclusive titles, walled gardens, poor support, and a scumbag CEO who will stomp over every market he can to get his next 8 Billion.
They ruined Rocket League, a game I purchased on steam while supporting Psyonix, which is now unusable until I agree to give them my PID and create an account. It's so egregious you can't even play bots offline. Every goal will move focus to a popped up browser window requesting account creation.
Everyone can decide where to draw the line on personal support, but to act like Epic is just being given shade because it's a corporation (as the comments below implied), is inaccurate.
Despite all the talk from libertarians about how private donations are the solution to the world's ills, open source software very rarely gets substantial donations.
We're already being taxed like crazy while that money subsidizes things almost everyone disagrees with. The libertarians believe that if people weren't taxed as much they could voluntarily spend money on things that are valuable to them. Some people would donate more and others wouldn't donate at all, and that's okay. I believe we would see a lot more voluntary donations without the burden of high taxes.
Claiming "libertarians haven't solved this yet" while continuing to take everyone's money is not a fair argument.
To stay on topic, this thread is about a private individual donating to a project he supports. That's something everyone should be happy about. And he did not do it as a political statement.
The best example that low tax rates don't increase giving: in 2017 the TCJA reduced tax rates for most people, and increased the standard deduction (but reduced the charitable deduction). Even though they were being taxed less and had more money to donate, Americans donated several billion less to charities each year (estimates very, but they're all between $15 and $20 billion less each year).
From my findings, I could not find anything directly correlating the 2017 TCJA to total donations. The TCJA did change how deductions are treated, and more people opted to go with standard deductions instead of itemized deductions, but this is not the same as total donations. It is possible this incentivized people to donate less because they couldn't get as much of a tax write off.
For total donations, it has continued to trend upward despite some fluctuations, and a $20 billion swing is not a large deviation. The numbers I saw were $400+ billion during that time. Again, this has many more factors than the TCJA.
Most importantly, I'd like to reiterate that libertarians do not claim that cutting government will "solve" problems like open source projects getting enough funding. Just that it will give the free market an opportunity to find a balance. No big bill is going to solve these problems either, it will only make it worse. The end does not justify the mean. Stop taking people's money, and let them spend it on the things they find valuable even if you disagree with it.
Its hard to see SDV as some niche 'indie' project and more and more pedantic definitions of 'indie' aren't helpful. This is a game with an estimated half BILLION in sales. He's extremely wealthy and could have given 50x more easily. Its a bit arbitrary on who or who hasnt done enough. Why no metrics like 10% of your income if you use the tool? "Volunteerism" doesn't work and stuff like this seems like mostly PR.
This sort of "we are and aren't a business" gray-zone these foss projects live in needs reform, imho. Expecting the kindness of strangers doesn't work. Look at how many foss projects get little to no donations. I don't have the fix here but these developers should probably roll up a LLC and market some kind of service these companies can just easily write invoices for instead of just expecting a random middle-manager to fight the execs to write a $100k check to some guy named Phil in Minnesota that maintains something called blah-blahlib, which is one tiny part of a larger ecosystem that maintains their backend.
Epic has a grant program that has given out thousands of grants, including over a million dollars to the Blender project
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/megagrants
Yes. It's incredibly rare. And suggesting otherwise is silly. Go ahead. Compare all the indie games released and see how often they succeed.
Sure, you can find successful ones, but you are ignoring those that do not succeed. There is a name for that, you know—survivorship bias.
At 10k new indie games a year, maybe a dozen gross over a million. A larger studio can't afford those kind of odds. That said, they should be able to make more games with a better focus on gameplay and a bit less on leading tech graphics.
Most indie games don’t sell for more than $10 USD, but let’s be generous and say you manage to convince your audience to pay $20.
And now you need to get lightning to strike every year to maintain your annual income so you can retire before your Methuselah.Could you work on the game part-time while holding down a full-time job? Sure, but you've got to have some iron stamina to want to sit in front of a computer for another 4 hours after a full day of work. Furthermore, not being able to focus on the game means dev might take significantly longer.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases
There are thousands of new games each year. The handful lucky outstanding low-budget games won't put anyone to shame.
> There's an uptick in indie devs that have broken through the barriers with good gameplay despite the graphics not being AAA quality.
Don't confuse indie with AAA. Indie is about control, AAA about budget. There is usually a correlation between control and budget, but there are also many long-running indie-devs with good budget now. Supergiant, who made Hades 2 for example, are such an AA(A)-Indie.
> Edit other games that come to mind: Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Schedule 1, and R.E.P.O. > More obvious examples: Minecraft, Terraria, Factorio were all indie studios as far as I am aware. Minecraft being one of the most successful games at 350 million copies sold.
Those are long-running, genre-defining games, which also received a good budget over the years. Many of them are in the realm of AA, probably AAA now. Those are naturally grown services-games which could grow from success to become even more successful. Big studies tried to emulate this in the last years, but ultimately failed big in most cases.
The general problem is, the bigger your budget, the bigger the anxiety, leading to more control, conservative micromanaging and throwing every shit into the game to cater as much people as possible, which in high numbers cannibalizes the market eventually. Low-budgets can take on more risks, focus on their gaming-mechanisms and don't have to sell big. Making small money to cover your costs is already good enough, and they all can always explode by luck if they get their marketing right.
Games like Schedule 1 or R.E.P.O. don't have to offer 100h+ of fancy fun and high level entertainment. People are happy if they can get their 10+ hours of fun out of it, because they didn't waste big money on it anyway. So you will always see cheap games occasionally explode for a short while, while everyone is waiting for the big games going on sale, especially when the cheap games are coming with a social aspect.
I’m really not sure what it is. Usually, when a company begins to abandon/shaft their user base like that, it’s because they found a more lucrative market to chase instead.
(To be clear, Stardew Valley is a great game. But "making a breakout indie game" really does feel akin to winning the lottery to me, even if the game is fundamentally great.)
If you want to create indie games—and you can make it work without quitting your day job—go for it! But I don't think it would be smart for EA or Ubisoft to, like, stop making big-budget games and make indie games instead. If you can make a breakout hit, you can make a huge profit—but you have to make a breakout hit, and that comes down to a lot of luck.
---
Now, I do think it would make sense for EA/Ubisoft to try more mid-budget releases, which explore something new instead of continuing a 10+ year franchise. A lot of them will fail, but if a few are extremely successful, they could make up for the failures. It kind of felt like the studios were doing this for a while (Grow Home, Little Nightmares) but my sense is that it has kind of stopped? Although caveat, I also haven't been following gaming as closely as I once did.
Absolutely. People tend to assume that 95% of video games turn a profit, when it's the reverse. There are highly polished, incredibly high quality video games who simply just don't sell.
I think the problem comes from marketing budgets. For any given game a marketing budget can push some amount of sales, but applying a marketing budget to each game makes it much harder for the winners to make up losses on the rest.
Small releases also need to be 'lean' releases; management overhead is another cost that's hard to make up in scale.
Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
Hearthstone (Blizzard) is another rare exception of an indie-scale, in-house game that was a breakout hit that could not have come from the outside (because of the IP involved), but even that existed because it started as a "closet-scale" project with senior developers who insulated themselves from management pressures.
> Combined, large developers don't have any natural advantage at making small to mid-scale games, and their structures impose fixed costs that are hard to avoid. It would almost be better for large developers to get indie-scale games by funding partners who act outside of the corporate structure, but anybody can do that.
The advantage would be funding. I love indie games but I do get tired of 2D pixel art. With just a bit more money—still an order of magnitude less than Call of Duty, mind you—the possibilities really expand.
I started playing Psychonauts 2 this week, and I think it's such an incredible game—and a great example of what can happen when an "indie" developer manages to secure a real budget. (I don't know if Double Fine is indie, but their games contain the sort of outside-the-box thinking I associate with indies.)
Perhaps some sort of YCombinator-esque model could actually work here.
Go for it, but most will not achieve a similar outcome.
Sure, take your shot, but it is unreasonable to think that many people have the opportunity to drop everything for a five year vision quest, hoping to come out the other side a financial success.
If you can take the chance and want to, do it. I just recommend having a backup plan.
I doubt its that high for Stardew Valley though. Simply because popular games are sold via network effect and people ususlly know what they buying.
https://a.co/d/4OIUtsN
The only thing they still do better than Google and Apple really is a few promotions throughout the year that target specific genres for released games developers can register for (whereas Google and Apple select the games they promote), and the "Next Fest" 3x a year for unreleased games.
They used to do stuff like "visibility rounds" that would reach 100,000s of people who didn't know about your game - the same feature today targets people who already wishlisted your game, so these days most developers have to put significant effort and money into promoting their Steam page on other channels like tiktok/youtube/reddit.
There's a reason why everyone launches on Steam.
Everyone launches on Steam because they are an utterly-entrenched monopoly, all other PC game distribution channels are collectively a very small percent.
However, Valve has since removed most barriers to entry and these days Steam sees than 350 releases every week (nearly 20k in 2025), a number that is constantly growing. Add to the fact that there are already more than 130,000 games on Steam, that every new release has to compete with, and it is no wonder that median sales are low:
The low barrier to entry means that a lot of crappy games being released on Steam, that were never going to sell a lot, and the actually good games have to compete with all the other good games on the platform, that are probably also being sold at a much greater discount than your newly released title
There's nothing preventing a game dev from selling exclusively on their own site. It's not as though Steam has exclusive access to Windows customers like the App/Play Store do on their platforms. Steam earns its customers and their trust and developers follow.
If you are an indie team that makes a 50GB game and has 50k players, distributing and update management would be a gargantuan task without Steam or something like it. 2.5 petabytes of bandwidth isn't cheap.
Yes what they do is profitable, I'm not saying that it isn't. But paying for what they do is (clearly) still more attractive to developers than rolling their own infrastructure to do the same.
It pays to be the middle man!
Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
This, however, is one area where eventually Epic Games shines — they take a much lower cut and if they increase in popularity with gamers then steam might be forced to lower their share.
This is basically almost public information: 25% cut on earnings between $10 million and $50 million.
Yet most likely very big share of sales is well below $10 let alone $15 due to sales and regional pricing.
So yeah I doubt numbers anywhere close to those adverised.
> Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
Steam no longer provide any discoverability on its own unless you either bring your own community ftom outside or spend $10,000-100,000 on marketing to gain wishlists.
If you're small 2-10 people indie gamedev studio and have external funding Valve will earn more from your game than you.
It's probably the big name studios who already have entire departments to do that kind of stuff that feel they're being ripped off.
Truly? I believe he lives in Washington State. It's really HALF of his income?
Just checked, seems it's now 37% for the top federal bracket... for what it's worth, I think it's amoral to tax more than half of what someone makes, regardless of how much they make.
However, this is business income, not compensation, so it's taxed on a net basis, not a gross basis (even though it may still be included on his personal income tax return). This means his taxable income is the amount left after taking into account the retailer's fees, subcontractor costs, etc.
So, for example, if he made $100 selling games, $30 would go to the store. Assuming no expenses and overhead (since we have no data to come up with those numbers), the remaining $70 would be subject to tax. Assuming he lived in NYC, he would pay up to $36.26 in combined taxes (not taking into account the SALT deduction or the progressive tax rate calculation), for a post-tax net of at least $33.74. Assuming he lived in WA as other commenters note, he would pay up to $25.9 in federal taxes, for a post-tax net of no less than $44.1. (But note: Washington has an excise tax on businesses which is based on gross income...)
Who did that?
This thread seems to be filled with people who don't understand what marginal cost is.
The video games industry is filled to the brim with gatekeepers who take their cuts. Valve takes 30%, just for their store. Publishers start at 10%. Your engine might take a cut.
Estimating that Stardew Valley, the big success video game with the lowest overhead bar none, has made 10% profit might be too low. 20%? Might be high.
Um, exactly the sort of numbers that you're providing. I'm baffled by the question or what possible relevance you thought it had here.
> 10% profit might be too low. 20%? Might be high.
You think an indie game like the one in question is making less on each copy sold than Valve is making on it? That's nuts. If the creator isn't clearing 50% on each marginal unit sold, then something is seriously wrong.
For whom? The manufacture? It's closer to 10-30% for the manufacture (lower for white label goods, higher for "premium" brands). And it's higher for products that enjoy monopoly status.
For retailers, it's 2-3%, but retailers also get products on loan and negotiate various agreements that help cover the costs of displays, shipping, marketing, and wastage. So even that small percentage margin is skewed a bit.
There's a reason that retailers and food manufactures ("canned goods") were some of the largest American companies prior to technology taking off. It's a highly profitable industry.
There's also the cost of selling through Steam / Google Play / Whatever - typically 30%.
I assume the developer has some professional expenses - an accountant at a minimum, probably a lawyer, certainly insurance. Maybe they also have a PR team, advertising, and the like. I don't know whether they pay for testers, translators, and things like that.
Then we get on to things like buying a new development machine, going to tech conferences, taking an educational course, backups, and all the other things that a business needs to spend on in order to be effective.
Maybe a profit margin of 10% is unrealistically low - but developing software has legitimate costs. The margin is never going to be 100%.
"MonoGame is a "bring your own tools" kind of framework, which means that it provides the building blocks to build your own engine and tools, but it isn't quite an engine itself.
If you are expecting a scene editor (like Unity or Unreal), MonoGame is not that.
If you love coding and understanding how things work under the hood, MonoGame might be what you are looking for. And fear not, getting a game running with MonoGame only takes a few minutes."
With MonoGame/XNA/FNA, LOVE2D, libGDX, HaxeFlixel you are getting a bunch of tools instead, which is probably not bad if you like coding and your game doesn't fit into one of existing popular genres.
But it's good that code-first engines still exist. There are always going to be projects that are more experimental, or don't have a clear pattern of entities, or are dynamic enough that that kind of thing doesn't make sense.
Thinking here especially of the Doom / Quake / HL1 era where they were basically building the level design tools in parallel with the game.
I remember one year, someone bought me an old book on game development. It was a book using DirectX 3.0. To this day, that was probably the most intimidating programming books I’ve ever read. I remember hearing about XNA at the time and it just made so much more sense to me.
I’ve tried a few times to get back into game development, but I don’t like most big engines. The opinionation of them doesn’t square with how my non-game dev mind wants to model things, and I’m too retarded for the math/physics involved in rolling your own engine.
I did briefly toy with monogame though during a period where I was unemployed. It certainly had me the most comfortable as someone who’s career prior had been enterprise .Net crap.
At this point though, game dev seems extremely tedious. I have much more interest in game design. I’ve considered picking up genetic coding just to try it out for that purpose.
Really glad to see mega successful devs giving back to the tools that they use.
85 more comments available on Hacker News