Patreon changes (Patreon)

Hello everybody, there's been some controversy in some circles of the emulation scene.

Some people thought I was just reselling the emulators we install under the false pretense of being early access perk.

That's never been my intention, what I offer to you it's early access to features that are yet to come, but I don't want to create any drama or upset the emulation community so I need to make some changes...

EmuDeck was created to help people relive theirs childhood memories and also a way for me to unwind all the stress I have in my daily job.

So I'm making changes so nobody will take our early access program as a way of profiting out of some other people work.

We are gonna apply 3 rules to what kind of content we offer in the early access tier:

1.- No third party tool will be exclusive to early access users unless we have the explicit consent of the developer of said tool to do so, separating functionalities from a new tool/emu might be impossible in some cases, but if they refuse we will comply and we will keep that part private and won't be added to the early access builds until it's also made also public.

2.- We won’t keep new platforms exclusive for early access users, so we will release a public beta as soon as we have something stable enough ( at least one emulator and his configuration working with no issues ). And then we will add the rest of the functionality / emulator / tool making sure we always comply with what was stated on the 1st point.

3.- We will give timed exclusivities only for the features that we code ourselves inside our team, if somebody else does a contribution to our code we will ask them for permission too as soon as they start working on it, allowing them to decide if they want their contribution to be added to the early access branch or not.

So that means that we will release a Public Beta of EmuDeck Windows next week, stripped of what's exclusively made by us, this includes stuff like CloudSync that will stay an early access feature only, at least for the time being.

We will keep offering new features only in in the early access tier, probably with months in advance. Some of what we have already planned as only Early access functionalities are:

- Local Multiplayer machine to machine, no internet needed.
- Multiplayer over the internet.
- Integrations with other Emulation platforms like Jelos, OnionOS, Batocera, etc so you can use cloudSync and the multiplayer features with people that don't have EmuDeck.
- The Mac release, it will have a public beta too, but I intend to talk to all the devs of every tool we use so they allow us to do it just like we were doing with Windows, and the same goes to the Android port.

I forsee some of you might just leave after reading this, and that's ok but we really really appreciate your support to help us keep going, your contributions makes possible for us to get devices to test EmuDeck on them so we can be sure it works as intended, we also use your contributions to give donations to the rest of the community and for the people that's not on the team we can gift them  Steam Decks or Ally's as a way of thanking them for their work.

All of that is possible thanks to every single each one of you, so thank you for that.

PS: The new CloudSync is ready, I'll release it next week, with this issue I haven't been able to prepare the release.

If you have any question pease ask in the comments and I'll try to answer all of them asap.