The game is made for the love of making it and what little money they made was always just about allowing them to keep doing what they love. The resulting good will from their 20 years of labor and refusing to sell out paid off in the end when they needed it. Honestly, I'd have bet that if they released the "premium" version for free on bay12 but $30 on Steam they'd still make the majority of what they have.
Instead he just hung onto it, and eventually used it for his own bud delivery company, once recreational cannabis was finally legalized.
He was much happier that great three-letter domain name be used for something he loves, strong kind bud, instead of something he hates, weak piss beer.
https://bud.com/history-of-bud-com/
>In 1999 I was contacted by a lawyer Steven M. Weinberg, representing Anheuser-Busch, makers of Bud beer.
>We chatted by phone: “So, you’re a college student!”
>Actually I graduated the year before.
>He continued: “Well, how does $50,000 sound for bud.com?”
>I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated. I remember reading that the marketing budget for Budweiser beer that quarter was $16.1 million. BUD was the company’s stock symbol.
>I wasn’t going to sell lightly, and they weren’t going to bid against themselves, so we didn’t get anywhere.
The story about his fight to register the four-letter domain name fuck.com is also hilarious:
On the other his reasoning for not selling was really unrelated to any of that. His response was standard squatter logic - I registered it first and you have a lot of money + will actually use it heavily so I'm not selling unless it's for tens of thousands of times what I got it for. It wasn't like he responded "I think I will get more than 50k of use out of it" or "It's more than 50k of inconvenience for me to change my email" it was straight up "I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated". Kind of ruins the inspiration when the thing he actually held out for was rent seeking.
On the third hand Budweiser is indeed really shit beer...
I have a story similar to this. My friends and I had a joke about some famous person in high school (in the 90s). We registered a domain with his name and used the domain extensively.
10 years later the guy tried to sue us for control of the domain. We were actively using it though and it was just an inside joke. Random internet people with no clue about the situation would have thought we were just squatters.
bud is probably worth 100,000s if not a million.
Corps will drop millions for celebrity endorsements. Why settle for less?
