No problem, Cold.The fundamental understanding is wrong. Devs don't receive "payments" it is support/donations from people. In return some devs are willing to return the favor by sharing "beta" releases aka early-access to their supporters. Keep in mind they don't need to do that, they could release single renders or be quiet for 5+ years and hopefully release something then - no guaranty (see Gumdrop)!
I'm not a supporter of Deepsleep or any other dev out there. Supporting a dev with $1 - $5 per month is acceptable, everything above that is ridiculous imo, because the amount of money per update or development time isn't equal in terms of what you get in return.
As soon as the game has been officially published online to buy in a store for $20 - $30 it would be a fair price for me.
About piracy: I would be a hypocrite if I say it is piracy's fault for dev's low numbers of supporters, but it isn't always the case. Thanks to Unity's Analytics tool I know that approximate 90 to 100 thousand people worldwide play a certain game, even more for popular games as Milfy City, Summertime Saga etc. If every single player would donate a single buck as soon as they download the game a dev could easily survive. A buck per update looks reasonable compare to $25+ monthly. This way a dev still could renew his rig and maybe hire people for doing other tasks.
But even then, people would demand faster updates with more numbers of renders and animation and still would complain about "small" updates. They think it is enough to have a powerful rig to render, but it isn't! Render time isn't an issue at all, post-production is! Means, doing all the shitty work with Photoshop. And yes, many "successful" devs don't do that in their games (looking at you WVM - [Braindrop]).
Because of all of that I started to avoid playing update by update and pushed games further and further behind. Now I'm less "addicted" to games and updates as when I was waiting for each update - also, assist other game developer helped to get a better understanding how development (coding, render creating, etc.) works "behind the scene".
Sorry for the wall of text.. I simply wanted to get something off my chest which isn't directly pointed to you personally.
I've no beef with you, or anything you've posted there.
But, still, I disagree.
Let's just leave it there, shall we?
