- Thread starter 7767
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I really suggest to people who constantly accuse them of milking their patreons or inflating the size of the game to look big to take a look at their last website post:
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None will pay 50$ for this type of game , they sell best at 10-15$
I think the shark in this case would say:
If you can work for 1.5y on a game and sell it for 15$, it is stupid to spend 6y on it and sell it for 20$.
While i love FI and i know patron support allowed it to become this big, i also believe that it is better to make smaller games that they can sell normally and not rely on patron support as much.
@"milking"
Patreon system is bad there are no incentives to finish projects, hell it is risky to finish them as your next one may not be as popular. So there is a lot of milking on patron and so it is reasonable that there are people don't want to engage in this. They want to pay once for finished product. If you don't follow the project and only look for when it is gonna be finished it sure will look like milking.
BTW. I feel like these days everyone and their mother wants to have patreon.
- Jun 23, 2018
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I would never pay 50$ for a h-game myself, but we're not talking about buying a game, we're talking about making the game's existance possible. I'm against patreon, don't like this kind of payment, but i like the people behind this project. So i'm likely paying them a beer every month, and yeah, those are people i would gladly spend a day with as friends.
I guess the future games will be smaller, similar to the formula you posted, 1y and a half of developement time and 15-20$ price tag. FI is something so big i almost can't believe it's ""almost"" finished. I hope the game release can give them the visibility they deserve as developers.
- Nov 8, 2016
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You grossly misinterpreted the analogy, in more ways than one even. It's not about selling it for 50$, the whole metaphor meant that it's hard to advertise how good the product is because it's unbelievably good. They also have already announced it will sell for 20$. You're also wrong about the average sales prices.
Yes, anyone that cares about money will tell you that if your goal is money and you can get 15$ for a product in a year and a half, you should not get 20$ for 6 years, thankfully for us they don't give two shits about money as they have often shown.
Steam money is vastly more than whatever you can get on Patreon unless you're one of those top Patreons like NLT, Summertime, ICSTOR and others. In fact, most people that sell on Steam end up closing their Patreon because it's not worth having to deal with the players that represent something like 3-5% of your yearly profit.
Case and point, and that's why they made that post. Thanks for representing the misinformed who talk without having any knowledge about the subject.
it was simply different analogy and it was not about representing misinformed but explaining why they exist, why 6y of development is not a good thing. Honestly hats off to anyone that supported them continuously for 6 years, that is such a long time to wait, you can easily go from being single to having wife and kids, and no time/interest in such games.
I just used what appears to be average price they are sold at.
Do you have any basis for saying that steam is more money then patreon ? I especially would like to know about devs that abandoned patreon in favor of releasing on steam.
From my quick research non affiliated/ small devs seem to be selling 1-2k copies while the bigger names get like 10k sales.
10k x 10$ (steam fee , taxes) they look at 100k , that is 20 months @ 5k - a lot of projects got such level of support.
Even if they are making only 2k/month and are able to release game every year i can't see how is that 3-5% of yearly profit.
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- Nov 8, 2016
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Publishers showed Starke Steam numbers and he said that to me a long time ago. I didn't see the actual numbers but I take his word for it. That's on people that make an average of 5k or below of course and if they release a game every 1~1.5 years. Not if you have a big milking cow like Icstor or Summertime Saga.
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Oh that is no good here is why. If we look at Kagura released games something like Dark Hero Party sold 5-10k, Apostle 15-20k and then you have summer memories that sold 100-150k for whatever reason.
We can't be applying numbers from top selling game to average ones, because the top ones had then been on patreon would be making 10k+. Also the actual dev cut is smaller if they go through publisher.
But even if you would know the names we can't discuss them publicly given the nature of the info :/
How about this then
Do you have any dev names that closed patreon after releasing on steam ? That is surely public info that we can find in databases.
You touch on an important subject. While I don't necessarily share the opinion that having a Patreon is inherently bad. I myself know quite a lot of content creators who don't get lazy with the easy money; I do agree though that this is a rampant issue on the western adult gaming scene.
A 6-year development cycle, bringing in an average of $2000-3000 per month is an abysmal track record.
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.
Value in art is inherently subjective, and in my perspective, despite considering FI a good game, its simplistic structure that houses cliché story premises and is overly padded with more-of-the-same type of content makes it very hard to justify its long and costly development cycle.
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- Nov 8, 2016
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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.
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- Dec 13, 2016
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3 besti scenes on discord for the next patch - they won't hit twitter unfortunately for "reasons".
- Nov 8, 2016
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You guys really went nuts with those comparisons this time.
Fundamentally if game dev is doing slow but regular updates and has been doing like this from the start i can't blame them. (that is within current patreon model that is shit as i have explained previously). Being a Dik is such a game for me, the dev support skyrocketed over the project duration but he is doing slow updates as he was doing. While i would love that he would speed things up, he never promised faster updates and so it is not right to accuse him of milking when it his success is just result of him doing good job. Naturally being able to find the market, advertise and provide incentives for people to support is part of the business.
Unfortunately i never followed Summertime Saga so i don't know how the project started, if the slow updates were from the start or they became a thing ones the project became popular. But their goals capped at $30k that they achieved in 2018. I know the updates been slow for last two years yet they kept growing despite that - privilege of being in the top? Also we gotta remember that the game is free so it may make people more willing to support. But forget about comparing to the top 10(?) projects they just don't play by the same rules.
Subverse - "throw 2 mil at ... and see what they come up with" that is basically what has happened for FOW. They never did game before and just like you are fan of HS they had their fans that believed in them. Just one more day and we will see what they came up with. (BTW. Anyone can start KS campaign but not anyone would catch 2 mil with one)
Hallow Knight - different game in all regards. Just because it is good game for small funding does not invalidate other games.
- Dec 13, 2016
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Regarding summertime saga:
From my own personal experience, I followed that project from the very very start, and damn I was exited - I cannot remember how often he updated exactly, but it was really often, if it was not monthly it was certainly bimonthly. Lot of content was getting into that game so fast, and he also grew in popularity really quick.
IMHO nothing good have come out of him getting the amount of money and traction he have right now. Every updated are so slow and they are bare-bone.
BUT im pretty sure he can relax and do his 5 scenes over 6 months time, meaning he properly work 1-2 of them, and slack for the rest(im proberly exaggerating a bit) but hell, 6 months.... 5 new scenes.... properly some background fixes and addons, some story and some dialogue - and what 65.000$ per month somebody mentioned... damn
For me its hard to get why people support him/the devs. the way they do
, but hey its their choice of cause
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