what about whoever has/will buy democracy 2 will get 3,4, and so on free upon there release
The people who want Democracy 3, 4 etc. (should there ever be such games) are likely to be largely the same people who want Democracy 2, this would mean that Cliff would make hardly any money from making Democracy 3 and 4 (as most of his potential customers would get them free). Considering that he needs money to live on, I don’t think that it’s a very good idea.
Though when you’ve already bought “x” games, you could get a discount… 
More seriously, if I had not thought that Cliff’s initiative was to be supported and funded, I’d have downloaded the games. Making Democracy 3,4 free for those who bought a previous one, that probably would not be an incentive to make a Democracy 3 or 4…
Indeed, I need to sell a lot of games to pay the bills, and they take a hell of a long time to design and program. Plus now I have to pay real artists and musicians. With a weak dollar and strong pound, the situation is even worse. I’ve love to be able to make democracy 3 a free game (if I get around to making it) but to be honest I’d need to have made a lot of money from other games to be able to justify making a free one 
I think the games are reasonably priced. I’ve spent more than $22.95 on pizza and I’m sure the game lasts longer 
Considering how different the current version of Democracy 2 is from the release version, you could almost say that you were getting a “Democracy 3” for free: voter cynicism, term limits, variable political capital, various new modding abilities, new policies and dilemmas, viewing potential ministers…
Most other companies would release what Cliff has released as free patches as a paid for expansion pack.
There is this thing called “Street Performer Protocol” (SPP). You can find its description at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_performer_protocol. In short, it’s a method of raising funds for software production. The idea is that a developer announces, that he/she will release to the public domain a certain, precisely described software product, after receiving a certain amount of money. After release, the product is available for free, so there is no need to use any e-commerce for handling transactions. There is also no risk of having to return money to someone, who cannot run the software for some reason. The main problem is to convince enough people to donate and provide them with some form of gratification, like earlier access to the software or something else. Of course, there is another problem, which is even worse: No one has actually tried SPP, or at least I haven’t found any good example. Blender was released as open source software using a similar technique, but the software was developed earlier as a closed source commercial product, so the public fund-raising concerned only the release of the source code. And yet I think, that some future version of Democracy, or an extension to the game, could be released using SPP. The game has a pretty large community of players, so potential benefactors can be reached easily and its costs of production are not very high, at least in comparison to commercial games like “The Witcher”, so the sum of money, that has to be raised will not be very high either.
Just a thought.
There’s nothing to stop people going with that model right now, but 99.99% of software is made on a commercial basis of people buying it when its done. Thats because its the best system we have of getting people the things they want.
The idea that any serious quantity of games will ever be made on some donation basis is just a fantasy. people are just too self interested to contribute towards anything .
Yeah, you are probably right. Darn it…