- Sep 12, 2018
- 220
- 364
Going to get a very decent monthly income through Patreon, and then development will slow down to a crawl since at that point burnout sets in, and people keep paying no matter what so there's no longer incentive to deliver anything other than the occasional symbolic bugfix.
On top of that: Getting work done through commissions is far more expensive, and easily takes 10-20 times as long, as what you get with an in-house artist that puts in real hours, so any project that rely on the notoriously fickle work ethics of internet freelancers will always hit a bottleneck in the visual department. And since commission based work doesn't come with long term contracts, the artists lose interest after the first short while, because suddenly they have to act like professionals instead of hobbyists. So art direction is forced to change as someone new has to take over. And that then repeats again 6 months later.
There are a lot of very good reasons these project always die at exact same point in the process. Because that is when it requires a professional, in house, team to build the actual game on top of the system and engine framework. Coming up with the ideas, and building the framework, is the easy part. It's the part that's fun and engaging. When you have to put in the tens of thousands of hours mass producing and polishing content to fill out that framework, that's when the passion starts being in short supply. And at that point you just stop putting in the work, unless you are at a very acute risk of losing your job. Patreon makes sure that that never happens.
But good luck, for sure. I hope to be proven wrong.
On top of that: Getting work done through commissions is far more expensive, and easily takes 10-20 times as long, as what you get with an in-house artist that puts in real hours, so any project that rely on the notoriously fickle work ethics of internet freelancers will always hit a bottleneck in the visual department. And since commission based work doesn't come with long term contracts, the artists lose interest after the first short while, because suddenly they have to act like professionals instead of hobbyists. So art direction is forced to change as someone new has to take over. And that then repeats again 6 months later.
There are a lot of very good reasons these project always die at exact same point in the process. Because that is when it requires a professional, in house, team to build the actual game on top of the system and engine framework. Coming up with the ideas, and building the framework, is the easy part. It's the part that's fun and engaging. When you have to put in the tens of thousands of hours mass producing and polishing content to fill out that framework, that's when the passion starts being in short supply. And at that point you just stop putting in the work, unless you are at a very acute risk of losing your job. Patreon makes sure that that never happens.
But good luck, for sure. I hope to be proven wrong.