you know patreon subs datas are free to find right? someone even posted his ones above, his making in the worst case scenario 9k a month if people will have the cheapest tier, scroll a few pages pack there is a link
Per Graphtreon, he's making anywhere between $20k and $54k per month. Which is quite a lot more than most of us earn, but also not exactly making him a millionaire.
He makes much more than 20k a year for sure. Much smaller AVNS are easily over that.
There are some services like graphtreon which can show
That's without counting taxes, in Spain at least 46% of what you make goes to the government with the direct taxes, Obviously patreon and crowdfunding platforms also have commisions. It's not really like he gets all that money clean, he must pay first.
Plus he still has to pay his animator (like we joke on Discord that Cari has him locked in a basement and being fed rats for his work but realtalk he prolly gets paid a lot for it) and the people who make assets for him (and some of those have their own Patreon accounts and only receive commission work if you're subbed at the highest tiers), so...yeah, those basically add up as well.
lets put it 50%, i lived in barcelona for 2 years, with a income of around 7500 euros, and lived like a prince, rent in the most expensives zones (i stayd in sarria sant gervasi), 3 rooms brand new apartment the rent alone was 2500 euros, and after all my bills, food etc, i still had at the end of the month around 3k to spend how i please or save, so yea, making 10 can arange you to live prety nicely anywhere in the world
Also im not counting the 23% tax that he has to pay for the crowdfunding...
Even if we assume the lowest estimate of 20k, and that he pays the 46% taxes and that Patreon takes 50% of what's left, he would still earn 4.6k per month. Which is estimated at a little under $29/hour. I don't know enough about expenses for animations and asset commissions and all that jazz to give an estimate on how much he's shelling out for those, but that's still a pretty solid wage. Again, he's not building a Scrooge McDuck money pool any time soon, but he's certainly doing alright.
Just to be clear: I’m not trying to accuse Cari of anything. I’m more interested in understanding the reasoning behind the process. He has close to 8,000 subs and a large community. Wouldn’t you normally work with classic beta testers in that situation, without putting such a massive price tag on it? Or what exactly is the idea behind it?
He has beta testers that test the game before the DL release, or at least I think so based on everything that I've read on his discord. DL buyers get the final release, not the beta
Art doesn't pay the bills, and the one that does is not worthy of being called art
Those beta testers only have access to the DL release for a day or two before it releases for that sub. Not exactly what you would call enough to get most of the bugs out but prolly enough to get the critical ones (i.e. CTD) out.
I mean it's the same principle as "Early Access," I guess. You pay for beta, dev gets a more limited pool of bug testers, you get to fix the bugs they report so by the time the next tiered subs roll in you give them a version of the update with the bugs reported by the upper tiers ironed out. And then rinse and repeat since obviously not every bug or typo gets caught by the upper tiers, repeating and polishing up until the free public release (which ideally would have little to no bugs or typos once that version gets out).
I find it hard to discern right from wrong here.
Nobody is asking you to pay $100, the game is free. Stupid you who doesn't want to support the creator and have all the priviligies of the one who is willing to pay for the game. If you don't have money then play the free version or wait for someone to leak it,that's the only scenario I can understand for piracy. But being the one who leaks it is the thing I don't really understand. It's literally paying for hurting Caribdis.
