Paying any kind of money to support a project that doesn't deliver an actual product is stupid. It is the literal definition of scam "a dishonest scheme; a fraud."
It does deliver an actual product. The game is perfectly playable.
The "bugfixes" and recolor system are meaningless to you, doesn't mean they didn't require a ton of work.
you're wrong about is the time it takes to make them. "Several months of work" is a ridiculous stretch seeing has every recolor voted on is literally on Patreon already completed for the polling (not coded into the game just the sprite).
Yes and that "not coded into the game" part is what takes several months of work, dude. Rendering colored variants of animations in-game is a vastly different problem from just drawing a single sprite with Paint. Genuine question: do you think you can just drop 1 frame of a sprite in Unreal Engine and then it will animate it and code it in the game for you? Seriously, try to code a game, we're all waiting for it, and you can make an easy 6000$/month. (Spoiler alert: there's 100% chance you'll fail and make in fact 0$/month).
Comparisons between a small team of developers (or just 1? pretty sure Anon42 has had help but just an assumption) to Google, Amazon, and Walmart are ridiculous exaggerations.
I worked for a company like Google and imo the work there is less intense than developing a video game or even the mods I do on f95. My manager was basically only asking me about my well-being and never about the actual rate of work, I could spend weeks without doing anything productive, we had all kinds of entertainment facilities at work. And I was making much, much more than 3000-4000$/ month.
The average person can do software development. Welcome to the world of Google and YouTube. If anyone wants to learn and create, they can.
No they can't and that's exactly why the market pays them 5x more than the average household. Well I mean you can certainly watch a Youtube video and write some seemingly-functional code, maybe even a basic demo for a game and you'll feel super excited, but then what will happen is after a few weeks suddenly everything breaks and you'll never be able to fix it, because you have 0 profound understanding of anything that you wrote. And now your company will have to hire an actual software developer to debug it for you, that developer will then look at your code and scrap every single line in the trash, then restart from scratch. But feel free to prove me wrong and try it, go learn and think of how you would make a sprite recolor system in CPE, you can even implement it, the game is super easy to mod.
Yes I understand Anon doesn't actually pocket the exact subscribtion amount. This still doesn't change the fact it is still above average. A single income household in the US brings in on average just over $63,000/year. Stop making wild comparisons to large businesses as they are completely irrelevant. The average income of a video game developer is $60,000-$150,000/year with the middle and higher end all being at AAA studios or as senior developers and the like. You're right, making money off of porn games is hard, it was still the choice made and as a result has made way more money off of that choice then it deserves. Especially since the lack of porn in the porn game has been evident in the last several years.
You're comparing the final taxed income of an average person with an IQ of 80 vs. the gross revenue of a freelancer who has a skill that only 5% of people can do and wrote a game played by possibly millions of people, and somehow still end up proving my point (that the amount he makes is at the bottom of the market).
I don't know if there is a way to see a chart of subscribers over time unless it's your account. So this is just going to be a wild assumption with no backing facts but if he made $2,000/month since his Patreon started that's over a quarter of a million dollars total. Think about that, over $250,000 for this game he has made. This is no small figure for a game not even close to completion.
250,000$ for 10 years so 25,000$/year of gross revenue then 15 000$ / year of real income (you're omitting taxes again for the 3rd time in a row), which would be ridiculously low so not sure what's the point you're making. You just said yourself a game dev makes 60k + minimum (that's for a junior dev btw ie. somebody who's just hired to get trained and won't get in charge of any real product).
Fullfrap (small team) has made 4 full games; Vosmug (solo dev) has made 3 games; Dieselmine (which is a larger developer team but I'm strictly looking at the pixel games) has made at least 6 off the top of my head.
Most of their games are rated <4 while CPE is 4.5 so seems like a quality over quantity thing. I did play Fullfrap games and sorry but they are boring as hell, never finished one. Vosmug's games are better but not to the level of CPE imo.
Also something you need to realize is that these games you mention spend 80% of their effort on H-animations while CPE spends 80% of its work on all these side-mechanics like grapple, swimming, exotic weapons which I agree shouldn't be the focus in an H-game but over 10 years the accumulation of details like this is maybe what makes the game feel different.
