Sounds like you took this personal, however I never said I wasnt going to give them free tiers. As stated in my patreon page ive worked on other Adult VN novels as well as some steam games. What I can say is everyone "wants to help" but in all honestly everyone just wants handouts. Putting a price on something such as play testing a version of my game on a mac is something that is not at the top of my list, as you stated that could at best increase my player base by 10% which is nothing to prioritize. If more people demanded it, sure ill gladly pay someone to help. From my experience to find someone who is trust worthy (already have around 6 people say they want to help but end up going cold/silent after giving them free versions of the new update) Is for them to have some form proof that they are dedicated and trust worthy. Same as I did for the game House Party. (I hate name dropping) I setup the discord server for Bobby, and help people even to this day, even though I am no longer attached to that game. During that time period I also was a 15$ patron and never once complained or asked for something in return. I did it out of my love for the game House Party.
I understand where you are coming from but you also have to understand where the developers also stand. When creating a game most creators have a "baby complex" where they view their game like its their own baby. So to bring someone in paid or unpaid is always a high risk we all take. I wont name drop anymore but their has been tons of VERY high profile games where they bring in artists or programmers and those people end up screwing up everything.
Having a mac version is still a huge iffy cause as you stated I dont see it doing much. I appreciate your feedback and will look into it.
Nah, I didn't take it personally... exactly. I've done QA work for a dozen or so software devs IRL (everything from small .com startups taht no longer exist, and large billion/year corporations) for around 20 years, so the statement: "I require you be at least a 7$ patron, own a mac, and speak English." simply left a really bad taste in my mouth. I love the adult indie gaming community, and I just couldn't hold my tongue.
I get the dev's POV, I really do. You should be getting paid for the work that you are doing to bring great content to the masses. Unfortunatly, from what I've seen, a large majority of indie devs don't appear to aknowledge that they are figurativly, if not literally, basically "offshoring" their software companies entire QA department. Thankfully I haven't seen any indie devs flat out blame their fans/customers for their failings, but I do acknowledge that it may have happend. Eitherway, people still bitch about how established companies treat a game release as beta testing that you have to pay for, but that same emotion doesn't seem to apply to Indie devs allowing them to take advantage of it and (in a great number of cases) ghost the community with a half done project and several thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Or, on some levels, worse: intentionally slowly release their product to milk as many months of subscription fees as possible for as little work as possible. (Just to be clear: both of which I don't see you having done with this release. I haven't looked into any other releases you claim to have been associated with because I don't feel it's important for this discussion.)
That being said I'm also from the FLOSS community/school of thought for software development. Make your application/operating system/game/other piece of software, release the source to the community, let them help you make it better.
While it was something that you posted that sparked my post, it wasn't intended to be aimed at you. I was simply venting about how an entire subsection of the software industry appears to have a (potentially perceived) degree of entitlement that should probably be cause for self-examination. I get that the indie developer is small and shouldn't be expected to be able to afford the staff needed to do proper QA. I also understand that allowing the community to do the QA can help alleviate a potentially very large financial burden.
My comment really boiled to to the beliefe that if you are expecting people to pay you, you shoud not expect them to work (find/report typos, bugs, etc.) for you. If you expect them to work for you, they should (at the very least) not be expected to pay you and you should provide actual useful tools for them to do the job you are expecting them to do. How much time do you* spend sorting through the same bug and typo reports over and over?
Providing a tool to manage bug reports would A) save you* that time, B) improve communication with the community by letting them see what bugs and typos have already been reported, C) show that you* are in fact working on the game that they are consistantly, repeatedly, and during the "long dark tea time of the dev-cycle" and D) help you* stay organized to reduce the amount of time needed to organize all of those reports. ...Or not because, let's be honest, most people wouldn't bother to use an actual ticketing tool because they wouldn't want to learn how to use it... But the ones that did? Now you know who isn't "looking for a handout" as you call it, even though from the other side of the fence that's exactly what a lot of indie devs are expecting.
*=indie software developers in general, not Fantasmagore specifically.
In regards to the baby complex, while I don't know of any specific games that have had issues specifically from brining in outside people... I can say that proper version control, and proper human resource management would probably have helped to mitigate, potentially, most of that. My impression of most indie devs are they tend to be a fly by night type startup that doesn't really have any actual experience with running a business. Not that I'm any better; I've always been one of the guys in the trenches. And while it is potentially possible that in a small group one person may have the ability to completely derail everything... ESPECIALLY if it's the person that is leading the project. I feel that's a lot less likely to happen if the business side of things was clearly defined and well handled.
On the other end of the spectrum, "A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship. - John D. Rockefeller". Friendship has the potential to interfer with a business by keeping the people in charge from making the right business choice for the sake of maintaining the friendship. While this may not be 100% factual, I know many of the startups and mom and pop style companies that i've seen have, while not always failed, had difficult times because of letting friendship guide a business. And they keep happening until either the business fails, or the people making those decisions learn their lesson about what they can and can't as well as should and shouldn't do.
