hi.

maybe you say its a simple stupid question but i really want to know and i really dont know about it.

a website like facebook, tweeter and so many free file sharing websites, they dont receive money from anyone. they have huge webhosting that it should take lots of money. they have so many engineers and programmers that are certainly well paid.

some game engines like ogre are compeletly free and open source. or some dll libraries.many unity plugins and codes. you can simply find out that very big amount of time been taken to make that and a good team was behind of that and certainly they were no side project.

can you say how they really make money or if they dont make money from those projects what was the goal of that project.

thank you for helping.

solicits companies to sponsor specific feature requests that they feel they could make significant use of.

Bug Bounties work similarly. People add a tiny amount they are willing to pay for a bug fix, eventually someone gets motivated enough to fix it.

But mostly, open source projects usually don't make money and are only supported by volunteers.

That means in a weird twist, many of the core systems of the Internet have historically had a lack of funding, yet they empower the entire Internet to run smoothly.

The NTP (Network Time Protocol) global time servers, for one, haven't had much money for years. Some people volunteer to have their computers run as time server relays, others volunteer some services here and there, but overall they operate on a volunteer basis. Companies like Apple and Google submit 'urgent' changes they want submitted or corrected to to the time servers, but never throw even a $5 donation their way. They got a brief infusion of cash after making the news, but that's about it.

OpenSSL had been running on a tiny budget until the Heartbleed bug hit. Then corporations who were making millions and sometimes billions by leveraging the product were guilt-tripped and pressured to throw some money at them.

Fortunately after these hit the news, a few groups started taking some action to get grant money and perhaps more regular funding to "critical" projects that have no money.

But for all the rest of the products, especially free games, the mantra is simple: If you are not paying for it, you are the product.

Advertisers pay a fraction of a cent every time they get your eyeballs, and they pay another tiny amount when you click a link or buy a product through a tracked ad. Somebody has to pay for bandwidth, somebody has to pay for servers and electricity.

For products I've worked on you can either pay indirectly by being exposed to ads and getting some of your information detected and sold indirectly through the ad network, or you can pay a small cost to get completely removed from the ads, meaning they also stop siphoning your data away through that product. Either you pay, or you become the product.

Facebook make their money from Advertising.

Twitter gets its startup money from Venture Capitalists and Investors and tries to earn a living from Ad Revenue. However they only posted their first profit last year (2014) and it was not a big profit considering the amount of investment but, then it took Amazon 14 years to raise their first dollar in profit.

Open source projects don't actually make any profit but they do raise funds that get invested back into the product some of these funds are from donations. Blender also raises money from selling tutorial books and DVDs and subscriptions to Blender Cloud. GIMP and Inkscape have both recently done kick-starters to raise money for new features to be developed.

Some projects are completely free and the developers do it just because they love coding cool stuff.

Some projects are completely free and the developers do it just because they love coding cool stuff.

Another reason for making a game completely free (of payments, advertisement, sold user data, and so on) is ones portfolio/reputation. Having a good piece of work on his/her portfolio could give a good impression to potential employers, clients (e. g. contract work), or investors. The Android App Timely is for all I know a good example, since the company was bought after releasing this app (without any previous releases). Another one is Öffi, which is developed by a freelancing developer.
A developer could also aim to get some media coverage by making a game related to a hot topic. An example would be "Abbruch Bayer" (which translates to something like "Bavaria demolition", in contrast to "Aufbruch Bayern"/"upswing Bavaria", the original game made by a political party about some numbers and values of Bavaria). Sadly, the linked article is only available in german, since the covered topic only has a local significance.

These are reasons a person, team or company could consider, but there are much less games (and applications) release with this intent, instead of "free" ones with some kind of monetization.