OTOH, if they would have asked money for it from the beginning, it may never have gotten as far as it did. The market for a commercial game with text graphics was pretty small even back in 2006...
Minecraft released in 2009 with a price of $13 a copy. How'd that work out for them?
I am a bit older as a gamer so to hear that "2006 the market was small" is crazy to me! I grew up playing MUDs and believe me, the market for text games in 2006 was a lot bigger than it is today! From my perspective, monetizing the kids from the 80s/90s who loved text games with the best text game of all time as they turn 20s and 30s in the 2006... that's the best time in history to sell a text game.
I think that as part of DF being monetized, the graphics would be replaced, as it was for Steam, and potentially had it been done in 2D back in the 2000s, they could have envisioned and scaled into a 3D implementation by now. Who knows!
1/ they obviously didn't do it for the money
2/ Minecraft is an extreme outlier
3/ how many 2006 games with ASCII interface and costing have been successful ?
I get your argument about Bay12 potentially making more money had they commercialized earlier, but I think the comparison with Minecraft isn't so clean. DF is orders of magnitude less approachable than Minecraft, so there is not even a remote possibility of generating any kind of mass appeal to gamers.
