Yup pretty much, Wild Life has raked in nearly 1.65 million USD and its basically a tech demo lmao
Not very much money when your goal is to make a game at wildlifes level. If you factor in the cost of the space they rented, equipment, office supplies and software costs you'll be paying a sizable chunk. Then you factor in employee costs (pretty sure they had over a dozen full time employees as of 2019 and have surely added on a handful more since) and I'll assume health insurance for the employees (but I'm unsure of how coverage in Germany works between employer and employee). There will also be other odds and ends costs for various things beyond the main scope.
Back in the 50's a million dollars had roughly the purchasing power of what would be considered 10-11 million today. Thanks to inflation a million dollars in 2021 isn't all that impressive especially if you're running a company and paying peoples wages in the double digits along with every other cost known to man for owning stuff.
The type of games you see at that visual level were never made for less than what they've made so far. It's an extremely high quality looking game for a startup company that is still in its infancy. Take endnight games that made The forest on steam. The forest is a very good looking game and solid for its price point. However, it lacks in overall content once you get the gameplay part down. While it is visually stunning to look at on max graphics, it's still below what wildlife has atm in pure visual quality and overall detail of models. Can't really dig deep into content as one game is done and the other is not. But it took endnight (which is a 5 person team) roughly 4 years to get the game running and out of early access and it costed them roughly 125k in total costs. I don't even know if the employee costs were apart of that number (but I'd guess no). They sold roughly 5.3 million copies at 15-20 bucks each around 2018. So if we cut out all the boring math and valves take, we're looking at roughly 15 million gross rev made from those sales. Then you account for the price differences as not everyone paid 20 so you work with the 15-20 range and you'd net roughly 11ish, Then you can factor in the costs every game company has with continued development during those times so we can subtract another mil for a net revenue around the 10 million mark. They spent roughly 125k during development with an extremely small team of 5 and ended up with roughly 10 million after all the costs and cuts being taken by things like valve.
We know from 2019 that Steve and guii had over a dozen employees at that point, so their employee costs will be significantly higher than that of endnight. They also have significantly more hurdles to jump in terms of development in comparison between the two games. I dunno if people just think employees that specialize in programming and other fields for game development make the same amount of money as someone flipping burgers, but they actually make a decent amount of pay depending on where they live and how good they are. The average game dev yearly salary is roughly 71k in America, now imagine Steve just pays his employees say 40k € a year (I don't know what he pays as I have no insight to his companies inner workings). This is supposedly the average for Germany, so lets go with that. 40k € is roughly 48k and change in usd, so lets round up to 50k. We know for a fact he had 12 employees as of 2019 forsure. So 50,000x12=600,000 usd a year. From my understanding he has more than 12 currently working in his company. Even in this very basic example that is no way accurate to his true expenses, that impressive 1.6 is more like 1 million by the time you cross off employee paychecks all year long not including the other costs I mentioned above using the average pay rates for people in their field.
What they've made in patreon support is a far cry from an actual profit in the handful of years they've actually had a sizable enough team to tackle all the tasks that come with making an adult game with a quality that I can honestly say I've never seen in adult games.
If you need another example, then look no further than studiofow making subverse. They got the game out in what would be considered a reasonable time frame for the content that was listed for it to have. But people still complained that it took too long and the end result is we have a very mediocre chapter and underwhelming sexual interactions that were so rushed that if you use the UUU program you can see they didn't even bother to properly animate what little they actually did and the quality of their models are extremely low if you consider games like wildlife and project helius for a point of comparison.
Or People Can Fly
It took them over 4 years to release Outriders and in that time they went from 40 active devs to 230ish. 4 years and that many people for them to release a steaming pile of crap.
I guess my tldr point is, the 1.6 they've made is hardly anything when you account for all the costs they have as a start up trying to skip the slow grind. They've exploded their company numbers well beyond what a startup would ever risk for the reward of a quicker expansion of their company. Even when they were getting 10k a month they were already hiring people that the monthly income couldn't actually sustain if support were to dwindle for a few months.
I normally wouldn't post a wall of text but I do get tired of seeing jabs being thrown at a game with an extremely normal development cycle that has an above average amount of visuals and models with sexual content variety and no multi million or billion dollar publisher giving them everything they need to get a game out in the time frames impatient people expect. The gameplay might not be there yet, but no great game is ever done this fast with so few people working on it. Most triple A studios have hundreds to start out where Wild life had 2 and a few more in the first year.
Project H is just a glorified sex viewer in 2 conjoining rooms with a planned mode that will probably be on the same level as subverses none adult content. It will be a mediocre game mode that won't bring much more value to the games asking price upon full release of whatever platform will have them. It also kinda looks like they wanna turn Harem mode into a subscription so you're forced to continue monthly support to get access to all the content. I'm subbed for now, but I doubt it will last much longer as I've far exceeded the tier for the free game if that ever happens. At the very least I can say Wild Life has more going for it than Project H as its open world design has all the tools to make it a great game, it's just gonna take more time than your average copy and paste call of dooty game.
