When we first started building Luduvo, one question kept coming back around: how does this thing pay for itself?
It’s not a glamorous question, but it’s an honest one. Luduvo is a great place built by great people, and none of that matters if we can’t keep the lights on and keep our developers paid. So rather than being vague about it, I want to lay out exactly how we fund this platform, what we’ve decided not to do, and the fairly significant change we’re making because of it.
How Luduvo actually gets funded
There are two ways, and only two.
Outside investment. We know the reputation investors have in our corner of the industry. We know the pattern: money comes in, and slowly the platform starts optimizing for something other than the people using it. We’ve watched it happen more than once.
Luduvo was built from day one on user trust, and we made a decision early that we’d serve users before we serve anyone’s quarterly expectations. That isn’t us being naive about business. It’s actually ironically quite the opposite. We believe a genuinely loved platform is a valuable one, and that the shortest path to a company worth investing in is a community that would be upset if we disappeared. Chasing the bottom line at the community’s expense doesn’t just feel wrong, it also tends to produce worse products.
My personal motto, and one the whole team has taken on: UGC platforms are nothing without their users, so act like it.
Platform revenue. The second path, and the one we’d much rather lean on, is the platform paying for itself. In-game currency, subscriptions, sponsorships, and other parts of the experience. Our goal is to get to sustainability as fast as we possibly can with this aspect of our income, because every step toward it is a step away from needing outside money and a step toward spending our time on the thing you actually care about: building Luduvo.
That’s it. That’s the entire list. We may find other ways to bring in revenue down the line, but for the foreseeable future, that’s the whole picture.
Where free-to-play players fit in
We want Luduvo to be a place for people from every walk of life. Part of taking that seriously is admitting the obvious: plenty of our users can’t spend money, and plenty more simply don’t want to.
We appreciate everyone who does spend, and we’re never going to not try our best to please our paying users, because that spending is a real part of how this place stays alive. But our free-to-play players are not a rounding error or a conversion funnel. They’re a huge part of this community, and a platform that quietly treats them as second-class isn’t the platform we said we were building when we started this company.
So the question became: what do we actually do about that?
Why we’re not just handing out free currency
The obvious answer is free Lunes. We looked hard at it, and here’s why we’re not doing it.
Free currency sounds generous right up until you follow the math. It kills the incentive to ever spend, which starves the revenue that keeps us independent. It’s a magnet for botting at a scale that would genuinely overwhelm us. And most importantly, it wrecks the economy for the exact people it’s meant to help.
Here’s the part that’s easy to miss. Pour free currency into an economy and you get inflation. Prices rise to absorb it. Items that used to be cheap stop being cheap. Free cosmetics become rarer because giving things away costs us more. The free player ends up with a pocket full of Lunes that buy less than what they could afford before, and the paying player watches their purchases lose value. Everyone is worse off, and the only way to patch the hole would be to monetize Luduvo in ways we’ve already told you we won’t.
On paper it’s a gift. In practice it’s a slow tax on the whole community. We’re not doing it.
We kicked around alternatives for a while. We seriously considered splitting Luduvo into a two-currency economy before dropping it over similar concerns. And then someone put a different idea on the table, and the room went quiet in the good way.
Starting September 26th, uploading creator assets for games is free
All creator assets uploaded to Luduvo will be free of charge. That includes, and isn’t limited to:
- 3D meshes
- Textures and decals
- Audio
No upload fees. Not reduced, not discounted for subscribers. Free.
Uploading onto the Luduvo asset store where your assets can be bought and sold for Lunes will still cost Lunes. However, it will be a small universalized fee of 20 Lunes. Keep in mind that selling your assets on the Luduvo asset store is optional and should overall not affect our creators.
Why this is the change that actually matters
Think about the position a creator is in right now.
Luduvo is a platform for players and creators, but the way our upload costs work, a creator who wants to make something great has to spend money before they can earn any. You need meshes. You need textures. You need sound. Every one of those has been a small toll, and those tolls stack up fast when you’re iterating on something ambitious.
Which means the current system quietly asks a question we never wanted to ask: how much money do you have? A teenager with a brilliant idea and an empty wallet has been paying a tax that a well-funded creator simply doesn’t notice. That isn’t a level playing field, and it’s certainly not “creators first.”
So here’s what changes.
If you’re free-to-play, the door is now genuinely open. You can build a full game, iterate on it as many times as you want, and never spend a cent to do it. The most meaningful thing we can give a free player isn’t currency, it’s the ability to make something and earn from it. That’s worth vastly more than a Lunes handout, and it doesn’t cost you anything when the economy catches up.
If you’re already creating, your ceiling just went up. The cost of experimenting drops to zero. Try the weird idea. Upload the fifteen texture variants instead of the three you could justify. Add the ambient audio that would’ve been hard to rationalize. The work you were rationing is now free to do.
If you’re a player, your games get better. This is the part people will feel without knowing why. Lower creation costs mean more creators, more attempts, and more polish per game. A platform’s library is only as good as how cheap it is to try something on it.
And for us, this is the bet we’re making. We’re giving up real revenue here. We know exactly what that number is and we’ve decided it’s worth it, because we’d rather take our cut of a thriving creator economy than a toll from a thin one. If our creators do well, we do well. That order matters, and it’s not going to flip. If this bet proves to be unsustainable and the costs overwhelm us, we will let you know.
We are nothing without the people who build here. This is us acting like it.