Mmmmmhmmm...
Look. I get it. The amount of money they make between Patreon and Subscribestar is nowhere near enough to fully cover the costs of a proper studio. Depending on where these people live, it might barely be enough to cover a single person's full living expenses, taxes, insurances, etc. It includes all those costs that a lot of people don't think about because they work for more established companies and said costs are covered by the company/state-organization/whatever.
I get it. They need to make money if they want to keep pumping out content.
However.
Not their issue here. They make enough money between all their platforms to sustain themselves at least. Patreon and Subscribestar wise they are not making a lot because it doesn't attract a Western audience but they more than make up for it on Steam just on China alone.
The issue as explained before is that the guy who ported the game never made a dime out of all the ports he did. He keeps giving people stuff for free and in the end he has like 8 patrons. No one ever thought he should earn money for all his hard work before he decided to port Fleeting Iris and Heaven Studios said "no, this is bullshit, you should get paid".
The fact of the matter is that the majority of people that don't buy the product and pirate it... will not buy it any sooner or faster because it has anti-piracy measures and may in fact opt out of ever buying it depending on the measures in question. Hell knows I don't want to have this sort of product listed in my Steam list, and I definitely don't want to need to have some shady log-in stupidity to get hentai. I'm hardly the only one and plenty of people will be put off by that sort of thing.
Absolutely and unequivocally wrong.
On piracy, there was one huge study filled with fallacies that tried to show the opposite but it mostly featured huge AAA games that had lots of advertisement done beforehand. They forget to mention that 22 out of 25 accepted studies showed the opposite.
In sum, for the majority of games, exposure and marketing and sampling effect does not make up for loss in sales and market distortion, especially nowadays when you can try a game for less than 2 hours on Steam and if you don't like it, ask for a refund. Making games "cheaper" also has little impact in piracy, people who pirate will pirate even if they can afford it, the end. That means that all your favorite Patreons selling their game for 3$, 5$, etc. won't make people want to pirate less, in fact most people would be willing to pay 10$.
This is the reason companies like Rockstar Games are gonna start by selling GTA 6 on consoles much earlier than PC. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is only exclusive for three months, yet won't release on PC for at least a year. Why shun such a big market? Because these guys want to keep the cake and eat it too and found a way to actually do it.
This is amplified a millionfold in a small niche market like hentai where the urge to buy a game goes as quick as it takes to nut. In fact there's many statements from Patreons that show if a game isn't leaked in the first
2 to 4 weeks, then the engagement on subsription websites goes up a lot.
2 weeks to not share the fucking games shouldn't be too much to ask, but no.
Starke used to have a system where he could tell exactly who was leaking their game and banning them. In the following months the piracy on F95 and other forums decreased and around the 1 year mark their patreons almost doubled but then they became too many to manually do this. I could just take his word for it but you can double check this information in certain websites like graphtreon so there's that on hentai piracy.
I'll honestly be VERY surprised if their sales increase in any genuinely significant manner if they pull off what you're saying. Generally, it didn't work for any of the other people that tried it. It didn't work for EA either, and they invest ridiculous amounts of money in their anti-piracy bullshit.
Once again you can't tell the difference of why this doesn't work for AAA games and why this doesn't apply to small niche markets. One thing is a few tens of thousands if that many, players on a porn forum trying to crack your game, the other is countless people who can make a profit out of cracking your game, doing it but it's besides the point here.
Fact of the matter is, I try to support as many artists and projects as I can, but at the end of the day, my ability to consume media vastly outpaces my income. It's a reality for pretty much most people where I live. It's even worse in some other parts of the world. Such is life. I wouldn't have even known about video games, much less hentai, if not for piracy. A lot of people like me will just be gated out of content that they couldn't buy anyway. Some might have made the effort to pay for it later, some, like me, may decide that perhaps our limited funds are better invested in creators that aren't as focused in maximizing their profit, rather, you know, focusing on the quality of their products.
Quality is massively subjective, especially when it comes to hentai. However, Heaven Studios has released enough stuff where at this point if you didn't want to support them, you probably weren't going to anyway.
There's a reason why The Elder Scroll Series became stupidly, ridiculously well known and profitable, even though for all the time while Bethesda was still Bethesda, they put about as much effort into preventing piracy as most people do into critical thinking... that is to say, none at all.
They would be profitable
regardless but not less than if people could pirate their game especially since they can often afford it for these prices:
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And
once again AAA games. Word of mouth. We've been through this,
not the same.
Basically, if Heaven Studios have issues earning money, the majority of those issues won't be because of people pirating. They'll be because their content just isn't as amazing as they're hyping it up. And at the end of the day, whether it is or it isn't is a huge matter of subjective enjoyment. As for me, well, as I said, there's plenty of other, less scummy creators out there that can benefit from my limited funds.
Right, they're scummy because they want people to pay for their work. Landlords are scummy because they want people to pay rent. People in stores are scummy because they want you to pay for groceries. Imagining people actually wanting you to pay for stuff. Such scumbags.
The fact that they made their game free during Covid, no one says shit.
The fact that they made the bestiality, shota and the upcoming Christmas DLC for free while other people in the market with far more engagement charge you close to 3$ for pubes and hair pallete swaps, no one says shit.
You know how many people got the game for free, just by messaging Starke in Discord and telling him they love their work but are too broke to support?
To wrap it up, for the
vast majority of these devs, the sales come from Steam. Talk to a few devs yourself and check this information if you want. Very few 2D games breakthrough on Patreon, even "high quality" ones and this is even more veracious for RPG Maker Games.
TL;DR People going apeshit because the dev decided not to share their game on Patreon and instead told people to get it on Steam where he is offering a "big percentage of sales" to the guy who did the port. Apparently, this is scummy.
And by the way, shitty MTL's shouldn't discourage people to translate games, if they're good enough the game will be properly translated eventually or at least it should, right? Right? /irony
Shoutout to
michaelcros for doing the Ren'Py port in such a short amount of time. Ignore the haters, you're the real mvp and they're right, you deserve to get paid at last. I got my copy on Patreon, I'm getting a new one on Steam when it comes out.
