Junk-Store: Cloud saves, Gog integration & the future...
TL;DR We need your support. If you don’t know what Junk-Store is read this post Introducing Junk-Store
As you probably know we recently ran a survey on Discord and on Reddit asking for community feedback around Cloud Saves. After looking at the results and feedback it’s rather disheartening.
Junk-Store has had an amazing 66,000+ downloads between the testing store and the Stable Store. Almost 20,000 in testing and almost 47,000 in stable. We estimate that there’s at least 10,000 of you out there happily enjoying Junk-Store. We are all very proud of that achievement.
On Discord, 80 out of the almost 1100 members responded, while on reddit we had 65 out of 400 members respond. Due to the lack of respondents, the results are not statistically significant, nevertheless we’ll use the data, because it’s all we have.
The breakdown is as follows:
| Discord | ||
|---|---|---|
| Work on cloud saves only | 8% | 25% |
| Cloud saves without support | 16% | 15% |
| Cloud saves with Patreon support | 8% | 5% |
| Wait for community support to get a team and build it | 69% | 55% |
This is what we understand these numbers to mean:
People really like Junk-Store, otherwise the downloads would be lower (and some of you have told us outright that you really like it).
People really want Cloud Saves (we know because it’s the most requested feature).
Community engagement is very low and the community is very reluctant to support or help out projects like this
Most of you are happy to wait until others support the project so you can get Cloud Saves.
A sizable part of this community is expecting us to keep slaving away at this project without supporting it in any way.
We understand that with projects like these only about 10% of users will be likely to support it and 90% will be happy to use what is free. However the more discerning users will absolutely want more.
We realise that this community is largely not an open source community and does not have the same values, expectations and collaboration culture as the Linux community. That much has become very clear to us over the last month or two.
This is evident by the fact that we have been receiving some vocal, albeit the minority, posts from disgruntled users lately for putting Gog on Patreon first, before releasing it. You can see a discussion between us and a user on reddit explaining why we put Gog on Patreon (if you are one of these users, please read this before you post). The other link is discussing cloud saves. *Edit: our reddut user profile has been arbitrarily banned - our comments back to the OP have unfortunately been deleted. If we managed to get the account unsuspended then you should be abel to see our repsonses in the future.
r/JunkStore - Gog Doesn’t Appear Post “Pointless Money Grab”
Image link to Money grab comments
Cloud Save Poll Post “Are you trying to stir the pot?”
Looking at the data and the entitlement of users, it is clear that we need to take a step back and re-evaluate the project. So we are going to do just that.
We are taking 2 weeks off. We will not be producing any code, bug fixes or offering any support to anybody other than those who have contributed via patreon or Ko-Fi during this period. If a Steam or Decky update breaks Junk-Store it will have to wait until we return from our desperately needed break.
In the meantime, we will move Gog to the Trailblazers tier on Patreon since we have had no bug reports since we released it.
We will also release the cloud save functionality to all paid Patron members. This will be 100% unsupported and we would caution against using it as we do not yet trust this code ourselves. This is to appease those users who have the skill to troubleshoot this functionality and desperately want cloud saves. At the same time we hope this encourages the community to provide the support that is required to build this feature properly (as highlighted in the poll results). If everybody is waiting for someone else to support the project, then by inference it will never get the support that it needs and you will be waiting indefinitely.
We will also be scaling back our community support. Since it’s a community project we expect the community to step up and fill this void. If you have received support from the team in the past, we hope you take this opportunity to pay it forward in our absence. There are also a lot of resources that we have made available for users (Junk-Store wiki).
We will however continue to offer the same (or better), level of support to our Patreon and Ko-Fi supporters. We have created the community spaces for the community to use and we will continue to manage and monitor those.
We will also be happy to take pull requests from users who want to step up and contribute to the code base on behalf of the community.
This started as a passion project, but with the huge community demands and expectations it’s rapidly turning into an unpleasant and energy consuming grind.
The sad reality is that if the community is not willing to help or give us something in return for all our hard work, this project will eventually wither and die. We look forward to hearing your feedback in the comments.
Junk-Store will only thrive through your support! Check out our wiki for ways you can contribute or support the project.