You're quite right, but come on. Let's not fool ourselves, if they're selling it then we assume they're doing it commercially and we need to expect a minimum of effort and quality in a product.
Do you expect the highest of quality from children selling lemonade in a stand on the corner of the street as you would a multi-billion dollar company selling billions of gallons of lemonade annually? Or an indie company making a game vs Activision-Blizzard/EA/Ubisoft?
Many developers don't initially intend to do it commercially, they start it off as a pet-project and it either fails, becomes mediocre or in very few occasions becomes a success. The majority quits after their first failed project, some remain after a failed or mediocre project and my bet is that those that have a modicum of success as in they can pay their monthly dues with their project will continue on doing so. Regarding success the outcome is the same for those thinking to make a buck out of it initially vs those that do it as a pet-project.
Personally I expect higher quality content from
Dr. Pinkcake creating
Being a Dik, having almost
13.000 subscribers on Patreon and at least
6.000 sales on Steam ranging from
8.25 - 11.59 euro.
Opposed to
Patriot of Lust creating his seemingly first game
Crazzy Summer with:
To me anybody that
earns less than 2500 euro/USD a month on creating games is not doing it
commercially but as a hobby and I'm talking about
net income not as what you see on Patreon. Because Patreon takes between
5-12% +
payment processing fee of what you earn and you have to
file this income to be taxed in your country as well which is
variable depending on where you live.
But aside from that I was speaking in general terms about developers that don't earn anywhere near a monthly wage from their games, I wasn't talking about this game or developer specifically. There is also the fact that many games are offered for free by the developers themselves, so in that case you can't really call it being done commercially when they don't ask you to pay xxx up front, even if they earn 50.000 bucks on Patreon a month
without locking game content behind Patreon.
It's a complicated matter, as each developer is free to choose their own method of delivery and payment thereof and thus it's not always black-and-white in terms of it being commercial or not.
Right now most of those Hentai style games are low effort cash grabs using tags as bait for the desperate degenerate.
It would be another story if it was, for example you, who decided to jump on Honey Select or Daz and Ren'py, making "baby's first ntr game" and put it in this website for free and accepting patrons. Instead of disparaging it, we would be criticizing its flaws so you know where to improve. The attitude wouldn't be the same, either.
Going into this game specifically, going by the number of sales on the DLSite link it's not that very popular, it has been sold
883 times of which is unclear how many at
full price and the current
50% off and it might have been on sale for multiple periods. What the developer earned from creating this game is anywhere between
3.557 - 7.114 euro or 485.650 - 971.300 Japanese yen from this site alone at least.
Going by this data: The average monthly expenditure of a single person in Japan in 2020 was
150.506 Yen, the games earnings would be money to last an average person about
3-6 months. I personally don't know if this is a single guy in his basement creating these games, a company with multiple people or a group of friends. If it's a single person it's a decent amount of money but if there are 2-3 people or even more working on it, it's not that much.
Games on DLSite are mainly for the Otaku-culture in Japan, which are people that throw their money at a lot of (useless) short-term stuff such as hentai games or doujins. I don't think many of them buy a game like this to play it over the course of days/weeks/months like some of the VN's created on this site. It's just a quick fap for a night and they're done with it. So in terms of content it's bare, but perhaps with a proper translation it's decent to wank one out for some?
Honestly it's the same deal with 50 Shades, Twilight, or even shit like Incest. People jump on bandwagons and ride it until it stops.
But if you took someone, let's say ten years ago before GoT was made into a TV series and had 100 people read the book? Out of those 100, I guarantee you maybe only 5 would have liked it and the rest would be shocked and disgusted. That's Society for you.
That would be hard to tell because knowing society, the majority are closeted freaks, so whilst they may tell others they were disgusted by it, in reality it might be vastly different. During my teens I've seen so many (way) older people glancing at female classmates or others in school. If you'd ask them head-on if they are attracted to the girls they glanced at or any girls in that age group the majority would flat out say NO. But imagine if it was socially and legally acceptable tomorrow, they would all go on the hunt immediately lol.
Society is something you should never put your trust in, because people simply parrot what is socially- and legally acceptable and when lines herein are shifted, they would immediately take advantage of it.
