Just to put things in perspective, even if I greatly lowballed the figure to a constant rate of $1000, that would mean that in 6 years they had a budget twice the size that of what Hollow Knight asked in their Kickstarter(AU$35,000), a massive hand-drawn game made by just 2 people(well, 3, technically) that set the bar higher for the Metroidvania genre and that it took no more than 2 years to get made.
Because art wise it's
a lot harder and
much more time consuming to build a Fleeting Iris than a repetitive Metroidvania. You're sugar picking the good out of one and the bad out of the other so let's look at this factually.
They made after converting the AUS 57.138 roughly USD 43.210 which actually sponsored some of the creation incentives, that's development money. Heaven Studios did not always average what they have now in fact they had some off Patreon period at the start and only started becoming profitable and working on it full time after a year or so which should actually make for around 4 years of being paid and working full time.
Also, Hollow Knight "sold over 500,000 copies by November 2017 and surpassed 1,000,000 in
sales on PC platforms on 11 June 2018, one day before releasing on Nintendo Switch, where it had sold over 250,000 copies in the two weeks after its launch. By July 2018 it had sold over 1,250,000 copies." so you're checking production cost when sometimes you can afford to make an investment but an hentai game won't have that big of a light at the end of the tunnel unless you're Subverse or something like that although I'd rather throw over 2 million at the team of Heaven Studios and see what they'd do with a bigger team than the constantly delayed episodic meme that Subverse is at this point but that's preference.
When you look at both games objectively comparing the quality of one and the other is like comparing apples with tomatos but when you compare the amount of assets being made one has the other beat and it's pretty easy to know who, in fact it is obvious. Furthermore, the Hollow Knight guys were devs before they started working on their game, they had previous projects and a backing, Heaven Studios used Fleeting Iris to learn and get started.
Also, officially, Hollow Knight took "after math was done" at least 2 years and 10 months to be made if you take the devs word for it after they backpedaled on how long it actually took to create, and that's after they switched engines to Unity but they had already started creating assets way before that, but you're here comparing a cult game like Hollow Knight with an hentai game so... props I guess? You can also compare it to Hades, Cuphead or Super Meat Boy I guess? Or... you can compare it to every other HENTAI game developer in the genre and realize the only team that actually is whatsoever comparable to Heaven Studios is NLT Media. Wanna talk about their budget?
Let's actually talk about the team that I think is still the leading team on the genre? Summertime Saga guys who in over 6 months have released 5 hentai scenes and reviewed some dialogues. Heaven Studios does that with higher quality in 3 weeks? One is making little over 3k while the other is making 65k right now.
I don't even know what are we arguing at this point, it's like arguing for the sake of arguing.
If it's such a good business and apparently everyone can do better than the simplistic structure that houses cliché story premises and is overly padded with more-of-the-same type of content, what's keeping you? Seriously, backseat geniuses.
