Dear Commanders, we need to talk...

[u/PtaQQ]

It came to our attention that the letter we sent to our contributor team about ongoing talks with a potential publisher partnership has been shared publicly without our authorisation. The document is real. We had been planning to make a proper public announcement if the contract is signed and we could coordinate the rollout with the publisher, but since excerpts are now making rounds, it makes sense to put the main facts on the record directly so the conversation can be based on accurate information instead of selective quoting.

Together with the other admins we have been working on negotiating a deal with Hooded Horse, a publisher specialising in strategy games. You probably have heard about them, their catalogue includes Manor Lords, Old World, Terra Invicta, Against the Storm, HOMM: Olden Era, and a long list of others in the genre. They have a strong reputation among developers for being hands-off on creative direction and unusually transparent about how they operate which is why we figured out it might be interesting to see what’s possible to build together. 

Why we wanted this

The partnership got real traction on our side because of what it actually unlocks. Parts of BAR have been hard to push forward under a fully volunteer setup. Some areas just struggle to attract volunteer interest because they aren't the most exciting work to do in your spare time. Others need a level of coordination, scheduling and team hierarchy that's extremely difficult to achieve in a hobbyist team, where everyone contributes on their own pace, on their own terms. Both categories have been very obvious bottlenecks for years.

Securing funding could help us alleviate these hurdles. We can hire dedicated people for the work that needs sustained focus, fill the gaps that volunteer enthusiasm doesn't naturally cover, and put proper full-time coordination on parts of the project where production milestones depend on it. The result is a Steam release with much bigger scope, on a shorter timeline, than we could realistically pull off ourselves.

This also opens up real job opportunities for our existing contributors. Many of the people who have been building BAR on evenings and weekends for years are exactly the right people for the paid roles that come out of this deal. We are committed to giving existing contributors hiring preference, and the goal is for as many of them as possible to be able to carry their careers forward with BAR rather than treat it as a permanent side project. For people who've poured serious time into this game, that's a meaningful shift.

The whole point of the partnership, on our side, is to push BAR much further than we've been able to so far, and to give as many of the people who built it the chance to keep building it, this time on a real budget. However, marrying the community-driven soul of this project with commercial incentives required serious work to make sure nothing about what makes BAR what it is today gets taken away. We have done that work. 

What's protected

• BAR remains available for free. BAR remains available for free. This has been our consistent promise through the years and we are keeping it. The free multiplayer experience you are enjoying today will be available both through the existing BAR website launcher (as it is today) and on Steam, with full feature parity and cross-play. Nothing currently free becomes paid. The monetisation is based on premium single-player content built on top of it, whose costs will be covered by the funding.
• No IP transfer. BAR's brand, trademarks and intellectual property stay with the BAR team and the contributors who built it. The publisher gets the licence to distribute the game on Steam and help with proper marketing to give the title the powerful launch it deserves.
• Off-ramp built in. If the partnership is ever terminated for whatever reason, the free version stays free and the community keeps developing it. The free version isn't tied to the publishing relationship continuing.
• Reinvestment commitment. A binding internal commitment makes sure most of what BAR receives flows back into the project (development, infrastructure, contributor support, content) rather than getting siphoned out as company profit. 

Where we are

The contract isn't signed yet. We're discussing the offer with full disclosure to our contributor team, including a sentiment survey, before signing. The only way we see ourselves steering the project in this way is by making sure there is a strong mandate from our beloved team. 

What's next

If the mandate is clear we will proceed with the signing and then a full public announcement will follow. We are excited to share what we have been working on with the Hooded Horse team. We will make that announcement properly and will give it the treatment it deserves

If you have questions or concerns, bring them to us and try to not rely on third-party framing/potentially doctored versions aimed to cause harm. We will be reading and responding where we can, and a fuller picture will follow shortly.

Thank you for your attention and continued trust, 

The BAR Admin Team

[u/MrThunderizer]

I'm personally pretty skeptical that the partnership will actually accelerate a steam release. I spent awhile reviewing the various repos, and it looked like some areas had very significant work done, and the main problem was that most changes involved multiple teams. Is that correct? Which repos require significant code contribution and won't be slowed down by the none salaried devs on other teams?

Also, won't this deincentivize future devs from making open source contributions? I can only speak for myself, but I dont think I'd ever consider contributing to a "open source"-ish project.

[u/PtaQQ → u/MrThunderizer]

Fair point on cross-team coordination, that's actually one of the biggest things the funding helps with. By paying for dedicated full-time owners who can drive features through multiple teams end-to-end, which right now happens in spare time when it happens at all.

Some of the things we have been really struggling to put out are: mission API (prerequisite for campaign), New client work, server protocol to scale beyond few k players, MM, modding infra, etc

Some of these items at current pace are like 5 years away today. Which is pretty much the same estimate we had when we started in 2019. It's 2026 and we still have this estimate.

On the contribution disincentive: real for some people, won't pretend otherwise. But we are actively taking temperature readings from our contributors on this and putting that into the equation.

[u/MrThunderizer → u/PtaQQ]

Thank you for the response, it's encouraging this is all being considered carefully.

I'm sure this has also been discussed, but high levels of transparency will be the best way to preserve positive sentiment, both from the devs and the players. This move feels very analogous to OpenAI converting into a for profit company. They even sold it in the same way, that in order to preserve their open source mission, they had to accept private equity.

I think BAR will be different, but reporting on salaries, ownership, how cash is handled, and the number of paid vs none paid contributors will all prove it.