You seem to get it from this response, but I'm amazed at how many people who are on these boards don't know the difference between revenue, expense, and profit. Between buying assets and buying/upgrading/operating computers, plenty of the hobbyists who make these games are likely in the hole for a while. For U.S. or Euro based creators, $1000 a month in revenue before expenses isn't that much money at all and I wouldn't be surprised if early on it didn't even get up to some States minimum wages when breaking down net revenue per hour of labor. Even though this is porn, it's also skilled labor considering the art/coding that goes into it - so I think that many of the hobby folks are likely doing this for intrinsic motivators since short term you could likely make more cash just taking a second job.
...but nonetheless, every thread that doesn't have giant weekly updates has at least one 'business expert' complaining about how someone is getting obscenely rich grossing $5000-$15,000 a year on a side gig. I just can't wait to see a pic of Ianva's new sports car from this month's take.
I get venting at someone pulling $10000+ a month and lying about update progress, but this ain't that, and it's often not.
I'd be scared to go onto Daz Store, Renderotica and Renderosity and total up how much I've spent on assets.
And if I was pulling $10k a month, I'd not hesitate to build six computers, quit my job, and just render porn for you fine people forever!
Well I can tell you this also, that there are devs out there with a notebook with 8 GB of memory etc, and only received maybe between 200-300$ Patreon support, but are able to bring out a monthly update without any problems, so if someone says he has a full time job, health, family etc. then I will be the last one to say anything against anybody taking to long for a game, but for me as a computer technician since the early 80's, I upgrade my 4 Sopranos to the newest hardware every 2 years an that doesn't cost me more than 6000-7000 dollars being the graphic card and Prozessor.
So me not knowing the exact specs that you need to produce a game I will leave it to the other devs to give some info on that.
Just my thoughts, and my Respects go out to the devs producing these games on a 800$ discount Computer.
Right now I run on an Intel i7 8700k with a pair of GTX1070's and I can crank out a high res image in under an hour. Currently all the patron income is going into assets and building two more computers for rendering and parallel story work. I have a full time a job that pays the mortgage and feeds the family. All my patreon income right now is going into game assets and expanding my capacity.
The two computers I'm working on build now are built around an i7 9700k with four RTX2070's between them. I'm serious about this being a business in the long term so I have qualms with reinvesting everything from patreon into the business.
I have a business degree, so I'm comfortable talking about gross/net, ROI, etc, etc, etc, but I have little idea where the time sinks are for creators, so I can't really speak to it. I've downloaded Honey Select/DAZ and found that Daz has a significantly harsher learning curve and creation time would be much greater if I could manage even getting it running right. I gave up pretty quickly on that, while I was able to get through HS1 pretty quickly without any guides or manuals.
Some devs keep it simple and churn out content. Others spend lots of time cleaning up rendered pics in Photoshop and update less often. Some add in animations, some stick with pics. Some have branching stories, some keep a VN on one storyline. Some spend 20 hours a month on the project and some spend 60 (pulling numbers out of my ass). Sandbox and VN and on and on. There are likely plenty of time inputs and required skill sets I haven't even heard about.
Paetron is voluntary support of the dev and not a pay for product model. All I ask for when I'm supporting someone is transparency and communication. I also tend to spend my money on projects that aren't bringing in as much as others and I pull the support if the dev stops communicating regularly. Other than that, I don't spend much time worrying about how other people spend their money.
When a Dev is pulling six figures, presents the game as a consumer product and sets deadlines, I'd expect those deadlines met if I was a funder (Mr. Dots/ICSTOR), but otherwise it's tossing some bucks to someone who's working on a small project to try to help them offset costs and maybe make it worth their time.
Someone with some knowledge on how long it takes to make a scene with various inputs around engine/render quality/etc might be able to give more information about how much labor (in hours) goes into it. I just don't have any idea.
This week I'd like to get back to doing live streams. It gives people a chance to see how much work actually goes into making the art. It's the most time consuming part for me at this point, but that's because I've stressed automating the rest of the coding process.
I used to be very anal about the artwork. The posing, dynamic camera angles, etc. I've had to force myself to simplify to achieve faster development. But simplifying the art hasn't reduced the quality any. I'm actually taking the time to render longer to increase clarity in each image. Hence the immediate need for more hardware to keep pace with what I'm producing.
I have a news post that'll go up tomorrow with some more of the test renders I've churned out for Emily. Stay tuned.
An initial scene can take some hours to set up...pose correctly, camera, light correctly etc etc. Then however long it takes to render (hardware sufficing). The saving grace is that once a scene is set, it can be saved complete....so should require that scene again (say a bedroom) it can be fully loaded within seconds, then all you need to do is change camera and lighting angles etc...repose figures. Figures can also be saved fully clothed etc to save doing every single time. There are lots of time-saving tricks.
It is however even with knowledge, not a quick process (pre bought figure poses are much quicker and easier than posing yourself, that's another artform) but the main bulk of the time is in the rendering. I'd love to create my own but time and my own current hardware specs would maybe allow up to 5 renders a day of say this games quality. People would either moan at me for small regular updates or whine at me for an update every few months. Seems dev's can't win around here at times lol.
I'm trying to save myself some time by running multiple images from a single environment set up. Before I would do all those things you talk about, and it was very time consuming. Now I'm working with setting up an initial pose, setting the lighting, environment and cameras, and then between images just changing up the posing. This has gone a long way to reducing over all production time by alleviating the need to get into the nitty gritty of lighting every single frame.
We'll see what the feedback is in the long term. But I think people will still be very satisfied with the artwork.
Thanks for the Insight on making these games....Life can be a bitch, I got four PC`s at my home office with newest hardware, but don`t have the knowledge in making games....
I'm curious as hell what you do with all that hardware then?
No to offend, but new hardware means little. I run 2 1080GTX's but I suffer with not enough ram and have a CPU bottleneck. Rendering in Daz if using Iray requires incredibly good cards if you wish to make use of it adequately. Can you run it on anything? pretty much sure as TheDevian stated his times for just opening a scene.
You want to run it well and have fast quality renders/animations? Then you some need very good hardware specifically for the job. Ideally, 2 or 3 machines as such so as with the likes of say DPC, you can be contantly rendering queued up jobs.
And Daz is the un-optimized piece of software I've used in awhile. She's a laggy bitch even with the best cards. But it has certain advantages that keep me using it. Not the least of which is the easy of costume swapping and not needing to adjust rigs. There's always a trade off.
Nanami is the best, a women with power, but also obient, because of her background. She need a strong man and i think when you can earn her trust she will also be loyal. That is was i think from her behevior
But let's not kid ourselves...she's still a bitch!
I think by "unrealistic", they meant "boobs are smoller than head, me not like"
That reminds me, I was supposed to go through all the character presets and pump the asses up by 200%. Thanks for the reminder!
