Words. Edit: Post was deleted so here's an attempt at paraphrasing:
"There are 9 members of staff, so when the money is split they don't make all that much money, even before tax.
They produce a lot of content when you compare it to big games like Being a DIK (and others) considering how long they take to update.
[In a separate post:] I read that 1000 words/day is a good pace for a professional writer, idk how accurate that is. At 1000words/day it'd take about 50 days per writer to produce a large piece of content."
Staff writers: Savin, Skow, Tobs (
You must be registered to see the links
), Wsan
Coders: Upcastdrake, Balak(?), [Edit: Leek?]
Artists: Moira is staff or heavily commissioned, anyone else is rare commissions
Commissioned writers: B, Alypia (recent), Jstar (recent)
Very slow/infrequent commissioned writers: Bubblelord, Gardeford(?), anyone else, but most community writers aren't paid and Bub/Garde aren't paid for everything.
I don't think they're taking home incredible bank from this game individually because of the splits, but your split estimate is off. We're also not including Steam sales of
at least 16,000 at $10~ USD (
You must be registered to see the links
) [Edit: we're also ignoring their subscribestar with 355 subs]. It's not very productive to pretend we have a perfect idea of what a 1:1 pay-to-workflow model should look like for this
team, but when you compare what gets in the game and what
one man developers, like Being a DIK (DrPinkCake) from your example, can produce in a game that requires text
and rendered graphics, they don't look very good.
A large issue with your defense is that it's entirely quantitative and ignores qualitative issues: target audience, subjective writing quality, bugs, and typos. BADIK has one writer and a decently focused target audience that will engage with most of the content in the game without much issue, while CoC2 has such a wide net of content matter and writers that updates will leave people out, which
effectively means no content for them, and is something you've fairly complained about before. Almost every single significant CoC2 patch has a bug that requires a hotfix for a game-breaking or content-breaking issue, and the vast majority of bug reports and typos are ignored or take months to address. Drifa took them weeks (or months, depends on how you frame it) to implement, while
it took a hobbyist a couple days. "Reviewing" is a very strong word for what they do considering how many glaring issues you can notice at a first glance each patch, so I'm not sure how there's a "huge" queue.
The 1000 word/day target you mentioned before is from people trying to produce professionally edited, reviewed, and marketed literature, not passable smut. I do agree it's hard to churn out large wordcounts without writing quality suffering or burnout, but despite taking on more staff, and community & commission writers, updates have only gotten smaller lately. It's so obvious that they're releasing
You must be registered to see the links
, and backers might only get 1 or 2 updates instead of
You must be registered to see the links
. I was willing to give them a
generous pass when they stumbled over the Winter holidays, and for poor coding a year ago, but what is the excuse at this point, 3+ years in?
I don't know how you can look at the evidence and not conclude that they're either lazy or incompetent, by intention or not. It's very hard to maintain goodwill.
