Many of you are right and justified in your criticism of the developpment time from what I've read but I don't share the doomer energy from recently.
I too would have wanted two releases this year but if you take into account all factors, the dev time is really not that bad for the best game on the platform.
There was the minigame overall that took like around 2 months (yes I know some of you don't care about mini-games but some do, including DPC apparently), the 2 weeks vacation which was very much deserved after so many years of developpment without ever taking time to rest and finally the PCs upgrades which took about 2-3 weeks of dev time if I remember correctly.
All in all, that's about 3 months of developpment that we won't be seeing allocated in the following updates. Furthermore, we've seen noticable progress of the time taken for the animations since the hardware upgrades !
Try to take into account those 3 months, the fact that all his side content is now streamlined with an established process and the fact that his computers are more powerful and finally calibrated as he needs them to be.
If you do so, you end up with an estimated 7 months of actual dev time for episode 10 instead of more or less 10 months without thinking about these factors.
It could be very much possible that we do go back to the 6-7 months dev time between updates if all goes well !
Of course it's also possible that I am very VERY much wrong and nothing changes or worse, dev time keeps on increasing with every episode...
Time will tell.
This would be a completely reasonable and rational argument, if it wasn't a team making tens of thousands of dollars a month. Assuming the average amount they make per person on their patreon is just $5 per person, with the current 12,639 patrons, that's $63,195, minus 5% for fees, that's still $60,035 a month they get. Or $720,420 per year. That's pretty close to a real game's yearly budget (most of those $10+ mil budgets are mostly just marketing and publishing costs), and more than a lot of indie dev budgets, and this is just a mostly linear visual novel that uses Ren'Py and DAZ. So the game isn't particularly difficult to code and the renders and animations aren't super complicated to make. So much of the work is done for you, or in the case of DAZ, you can just buy an asset instead of doing any of the work. It's overall significantly less work than a real game. Being this many years into development, they should also know what they're doing at this point. They shouldn't be spending a lot of time experimenting and trying to figure basic things out. They're experienced enough and making more than enough money to be working more efficiently, rather than less. If they're really falling behind, they have the money to bring on more people. Or if there's certain people dragging them down, they should be replacing them. They simply choose not to.
There's also the fact that there's plenty of other games without these same issues. My favorite example are games from the team over at NLT Media. They've put out two full games with better animations and incredibly high quality gameplay and renders in the time this game has been in development, and they're almost done with a third. They put out substantial updates significantly more often too. NLT has about 1.5k more patrons, but don't have the higher tiers that this game does, so they likely make roughly the same amount too. When they start getting to the end of one game, they even start on another and are able to put out regular updates on both. That way when one game is done, the next one has a decent amount of content in it and has had time for people to find it and get invested in it.
This is a professional team, and from what I've seen, one of the biggest earners in the adult game industry. They need to be held to a higher standard than maybe one update a year that only has maybe a few hours of content. It's one thing when it's one person or a game without much support, but this isn't that kind of game.
So many of these older games seem to be slowing down development as they get closer to the end, seemingly to milk their fanbases as long as possible. I imagine it's out of fear that once the project is done, people wont be interested in another. Or worse, out of laziness and greed. They're just trying to make as much as possible while working as little as possible. It's a real problem that people should really start calling these big devs out for. And more importantly, stop supporting. Because no matter what's going on, you can be it would get sorted out very quickly once people start jumping ship.
. The scammers that release a trickle to milk, go radio silent or abandon because they're 6 grandmas and gerbil tragically died don't help people's patience.
