Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

why is dolphin not patreonized?

It's a team of volunteers who come and go as they please. If there was a single Dolphin Emulator Patreon, then it would be very hard to work out who to send the money to. That said, there's nothing stopping an individual developer from creating their own Patreon and then somehow using the money to work on Dolphin more (e.g. if it was a lot of money they might be able to switch from a full-time to a part-time job to get extra time to work on Dolphin, or if it was a smaller amount of money, it still might be enough to motivate them to get out of bed an hour earlier on Saturdays).

Something like this could lead to confused users, though. For example, someone might donate to one developer in the hopes that a certain feature will be developed faster even though a different developer is the one working on the feature and only they have the necessary expertise to do anything useful. An each-developer-has-their-own-Patreon system works a lot better when one developer is obviously working on one big thing which is easily understood by users, for example, if someone was making a PR to add VR support and had their own Patreon, it would be reasonably obvious what someone was supporting. The big PRs that Dolphin has aren't always easily understood by users, especially before they get merged and a blog article covers them.

Well this question was badly framed. It should be "why would dolphin use patreon". We wouldn't really get any benefit from it. Dolphin gets enough money from ads on our site to run all sorts of backend things, if anything we have too *much* money because it's become annoying with taxes! If we set up a patreon and started paying people there are also all kinds of questions about who should get what and why, and it's just a mess that we have no need or desire to deal with.

patreons only work when who the money goes to is clear and if they even have enough from the patreon to work on the project full time (rather than a job at a company)

that makes sense

"Ads on our site" lol