So yesterday I found out that the Rivals dev team were using an internal version of the Stream Tool.
And I found it rather depressing. Just to be clear, I am 100% sure that they just took RoA's ST and modified it. Which in theory, is fine! That's something in the realm of predictions. The thing has a MIT license after all. But I felt bad about the fact that after all this time, after everything I've done all these years, I would figure that I would be the first one to be asked to do such a thing, but in the end I wasn't even considered. Which tells me that in the future I won't be of any use to them at all. They can just use the things I already did.
I have worked for Aether Studios in the past. I was paid for every month that had an RCS stream, for 100$ each in paper (which end up being 80€, which ends up being 500€ a year). Which, yeah, is a plus, but no where near to it being a good justification of my time (which I spend not only doing the stream itself but also developing the actual stream tool). I also pitched a website to them some years ago, which got accepted, and I was paid for, but they ended up never implementing it.
More recently, I was aware of an official RoA spanish translation a friend of mine ( @frikinin !) was working on, which was eventually dropped by my friend out of lack of interest. This was a paid job (800$) that was just left there at 80% of completion, so I told the devs I could finish it (back in October lmao), and that I did pretty fast. But after talking about the $$$, they told me they would offer me 600$. Which is less than what was initially offered to my friend! Since it was either taking the deal or having no translation at all, we had to accept the offer, and we ended up getting 250€ each. Which is not a lot of money let's say.
Back to the present, I've had a rough March. By now, I'm out of side gigs. I've spent months trying to find a job anywhere in the webdev field, sending out hundreds of job applications, never hearing back (like holy shit have you seen the market rn??). It has started to take a toll to my mental (among other things), and if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't really mind much about the dev team using my work. But hearing about it at this moment just took things one more step too far. After all this time trying to find any job, not even the thing I'm most known and best at could offer me a chance to get myself out of this loop.
Unrelated but this morning I've received a comment telling me that this person was impressed by my growth as an artist these past 2 years, and it instantly injected the energy my brain needed to actually do anything more than just watch videos and doomscroll websites all day. It's impressive how such a tiny detail can do so much for someone.