You are taking monthly payments though? Wouldn't it be fair to have them set as payments on release?
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I already paid for it... years ago. Quoting my self from three years back:
Would've been another $360 by now.They've done a good job of trickling expectations, but after five years... subscription supported development is a gold mine, and they're still charging $20 for it. Ballsy, but who can argue with 12K a month for bug fixes
I still think the original fire demo is pretty good, but ~$50 was enough. if i'd stayed subscribed, I'd've paid closer to $600.
- Oct 4, 2021
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If you join the Discord, you can see the latest post in #announcements that shows the poll.
Screencapping the entire post would be a pain, so here's the poll results;
And I understand that, but there's a difference between "hesitation, caution, and suspicion", which makes sense, and "outright misinformation and just complaining with no critique".
Also much appreciated, it means a lot.
Yes, because people do want to support us, which is their choice; they're adults, we're not mind controlling them or anything. Despite it not being enough to keep us afloat, it does make the debt increase slower, which should allow us enough time (combined with selling my car, etc.) to get to release with everything 99% done at worst.
Additionally, they also want to get rewards before release; things like the soundtrack, audio pack, level editor, as well as access to the demos.
Up until recently as well, there were things like the $10 name in background, $15/$30 databank/cutscene character implementation (nearly every NPC is a backer requested one), and $5 name in credits rewards, all of which would have needed to be (and were) finished off before release, for obvious reasons.
If you were unhappy with how we were doing things back then even, why didn't you ask for a refund?
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Are you reminding people of their subscriptions? If not - you can't be sure that all these people still want to support you. People are known to forget. And there are devs who are known to prey on that trait. Like 'forgetting' to return a debt to your friend. Or taking a wallet someone forgot in a cafe. You might not be mind controlling supporters but there are techniques for altering opinions and directing thoughts. And you do seem to be an educated person running a tight operation.
Additionally, even if all these people are supporting you - it seems you have no problem taking payment for product not provided (unless you count walls of progress reports as product. Many people don't. But again, your supporters might think otherwise.) From an ethical standpoint this is not theft obviously but neither is it a fair market practice no? Like selling 'magical spirit bracelets' to unknowing tourists. It is very hard to judge the financial value of the finished product because it doesn't yet exist. The resources gathered towards the creation of that product are much easier to calculate. Additionally you are mentioning
which further increase the void between the funds gathered and product provided.
With the amount of funding your project seems to have it seems even more suspicious that you are mentioning selling your car (this sounds more like redirecting attention, trying to get others to feel pity for you and think that you are actually barely making ends meet).
And extending the lifetime of the project by what will seem like a quarter of a year (which should be another $30000 in your pocket) also raises a lot of suspicion for a project of this scale and type (and lifetime).
Now I do realise I most likely won't be changing much with this post in terms of your and many others' opinions here. And you will definitely write an overly long (look whos talking) and detailed reply as you usually do and I will definitely not have any motivation and, most importantly, time to try and keep proving my point.
With a growing number of crowdfunded projects, that abuse their support to a greater or lesser degree, what I am hoping for is that at some distant point in future we will live in a world free of deception and manipulation. Where people will not be looking to squeeze every single penny out of every single source they can think of and do as little work as they can get away with (not saying this is you). But, instead, people will present their work and/or products at face value and ask a fair price for them right there and then.
Yep. Every time we make a post, they get alerted in both their Patreon inbox and their email connected to their Patreon account, so that's 4 times a month, minimum.
Additionally, I maintain a separate email database of Patreon backers since Patreon likes to delete Patreon messages after a few weeks, and I need to keep track of who wanted what rewards.
With those emails, I directly email people their rewards, as well as directly email them alerts for things like updates to rewards and so on.
Finally, again, as a failsafe, people are good to request refunds, in full, any time, for any reason.
The crowdfunding product isn't just the full game. It's multiple things;
It's the rewards, which have been implemented into the game, with a great deal of them visible in demos (for databanks and names in the background), as well as the soundtrack, audio packs, and level editor, all of which have been delivered multiple times over.
Additionally, of course, it's also the over 50 demos we've sent people over the years, many of which had polls directly after to get player feedback, another perk of being a backer, and in most cases we've directly implemented that feedback which changed the game as a result.
Feedback on things like powerups, game mechanics, aesthetics, audio, you name it; it's all been influenced by backers.
The cutscenes themselves, also a majority from backers, affect the game storyline drastically, of course.
We also have posted many h-animations, songs, and so on in regards to upcoming content on the Patreon over the years.
Finally, during this hiatus without posting demos (although everything else listed above still got posted), we did make it very clear to people that we would not be posting anymore demos, on multiple fronts (emails, discord, patreon, twitter, etc.).
I would say in terms of content, for $5 getting you access to practically every animation in the game, all five levels, multiple demos, and your name in the credits, and you can still get a refund, that's a pretty solid amount of product provided for payment.
No, it's pretty easy to do this; we're selling it for $20, and if you back us for $20 you get the game at launch. You never have to back again to still get the game.
I'm still not sure why people think we're going for pity; I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I don't want pity.
I'm mentioning the car being sold because I'm trying to be as transparent as possible about how we're getting funding and how those funds are used, instead of just going "yeah ok so we just mysteriously got enough money to keep going".
The scale of this project, as noted before, is pretty massive. We're making a game with content that rivals a good deal of AAA games in regards to replayability and overall density of art/audio/music/gameplay/story, and that's despite those AAA games having teams between 10x to 100x our size and with 100x our funding.
We're doing a game with 1,000+ cutscene variations, 100+ hand-animated sex scenes, 25 hours of voicework, nearly 5 hours of music, 40+ endings if you count the secret ones, and 350+ NPCs with a good amount having their stories intertwine with each other, not to mention all the gameplay aspects, mechanics, and so on.
I can't think of many non-MMORPG AAA games that have a single one of these aspects I just named, let alone all of them.
That's all going to cost money, and it's going to cost time as well.
Also, it's not "$30,000 in my pocket";
- audio alone will immediately eat up roughly $10,000 of this money through the hypothetical three months of time, between voicework, sound effects/mastering, and music (the music is done, but the musician still gets paid per their backer tier, as does the lead voice actress. the rest is paying the remaining voicework needed; note that in both cases, we are losing money because people are getting the game for free effectively since the money for those tiers goes to the respective people, not to us, even with no work done, as sort of a royalties system to them)
- the remaining $20,000 for those hypothetical three months would be split between Frouge, Triangulate and myself evenly, which means $6,666 for three months.
- that's $2,222 a month at the end of it that's "in my pocket", and considering my rent, electricity, and other utilities alone are over $2,000, it's coming back out of my pocket real quick. It's certainly not enough to keep going on solely when that leaves me barely anything for food and other expenses (medical insurance, taxes, etc.)
Again, this is NOT for pity; this is being transparent about funding.
I don't think I can make that any clearer.
No one who isn't already indepedently wealthy is going to be able to conjure up a game demo to present people (let alone a full game) with art, audio, gameplay, writing, and so on out of thin air, besides people who are ridiculously skilled that are 1 in a million that can do it all, and even then, they still need money and time to keep them going while they make said content.
The entire point of crowdfunding and things like Patreon is that it allows for so many games and other creations to be made that would otherwise be impossible. If people have free will to back said projects, and ESPECIALLY if people can get refunds on their backing, why is that a bad thing?
Personally, I don't want to return to the era of AAA developers being responsible for 99.9% of games, with them putting out cookie cutter, barely altered games, with zero inspiration, zero player feedback involved, and in a total black box where you have no idea how, why, when, or what they're making, with them likely filled with pay2win or gacha elements.
I'd rather give the power to the players; if they like how a project is going, how it plays, how it looks, how it's being handled, then they give it money. If not, they don't.
That process puts more power and control in your hands, as an individual, to curate and make real the games you'd like to see (and to snub the ones you don't think are worth your time and money), which is far more power than you'd ever get doing things the traditional way with AAA companies.
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- Sep 25, 2017
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I personally think it's refreshing getting a full game all at once. Could've easily ended up as one of those devs who trickle out 2 scenes and a new room to an area a month and rake in a shit ton of cash like 80% of games on this site. Most of which aren't even on the same planet in terms of quality as FF. Luckily a lot of the hyped people are lurkers, I have no doubt the release will go great and excited to see what the devs have planned next, if anything.
Thanks a lot for the faith in us; we're gonna do our best to deliver.
As far as what we've got planned next, we've actually already got game design documents for a number of games ready, as well as Eroding Ego having a good chunk of its art and most of its audio already done, so that shouldn't take too long to do, and while we're working on that small/medium-sized game, we'll be planning out our next big game.
All the games we're working on are linked together loosely in the same universe as well, so the outcome of one game can affect the story for another game (not through save files, just in general; if you want an idea of how loosely they might be connected, think something like the overarching plot points of first four Phantasy Star games, where you don't NEED to have played the others to get what's going on in any given game, but if you did, you'll catch small references/easter egg type stuff).
Why do you feel a need to insist on refunding your critics? I don't want a refund, since I'm sure you'll ship something eventually.
It's not about "refunding my critics", and I'm pretty sure you know that.
It's about the fact that your entire basis for almost all of your posts in this thread has been that you're upset about the amount of money you'd spent on backing us, and that had you stayed pledged, you would have used even more.
Why would I not push for you to get refunded when that's the core of your complaints regarding the game, consistently? We want people to be happy with both how their money has been used as well as how much they've spent supporting us, so if they aren't, we want to remedy that.
It has nothing to do with "refunding the critics", as I've pushed just as hard to refund people who were die-hard supporters of the game but felt they'd spent too much or needed the money back for IRL reasons.
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I'm one of those lurky types, but gotta say, you've been incredibly communicative about the progress and setbacks in finishing the game for a while. I don't envy you having to engage with the NSFW dev community, but applaud that you've been doing it so consistently for so long. I hope you'll eventually consider further projects once FF is behind you, I'd love to see more quality work like this.
Means a lot, but yeah, while we're not perfect, I'd like to think we've tried our best in that area.
Check this post out for more about that; https://f95zone.to/threads/future-fragments-v0-27ex-march-2022-demo-hentaiwriter.1550/post-9476312
- Aug 14, 2017
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HW please leave this site. Making multiple paragraph responses to people can't be good for your mental health or the development of the game. I and many others here follow your twitter and we're fine getting updates there. It just feels like you're unnecessarily putting stress on yourself when you respond to every one of these. I wish you all the best and am still impressed by the quality of FF. I look forward to buying it on itch when it comes out there.
I'm generally only replying to people who have actual critique/concerns, but I promise it's not impacting my mental health (or derailing development of the game); actually, I like answering questions and such.
I appreciate the concern though
Actual release-dates feel like a trap.
You still want transparency but you can have that without a deadline.
"Yeah, the first level is done" or "We're touching up the final level now." is fine as a ballpark for where production is, but "It's definitely going to be out by X date" is a mistake to say. Because you have no guarentee that it's actually true.
I hope this project works out for you guys, it really sounds like you've poured everything you have into it.
But you've also overran your 'final deadline' like... a dozen times.
What even happened with the latest one? Did steam reject it again?
You still want transparency but you can have that without a deadline.
"Yeah, the first level is done" or "We're touching up the final level now." is fine as a ballpark for where production is, but "It's definitely going to be out by X date" is a mistake to say. Because you have no guarentee that it's actually true.
I hope this project works out for you guys, it really sounds like you've poured everything you have into it.
But you've also overran your 'final deadline' like... a dozen times.
What even happened with the latest one? Did steam reject it again?
Absolutely, I can promise future games will never ever have release dates (until it's ready to go).
They'll still have progress reports, but yeah.
That, and then some. Pretty much lived and breathed this game for the last 7-some years.
They did the 2nd time around per not being complete enough in general (not just endings) to qualify for full release (and not early access). We were going to submit it a 3rd time, but then we ran that poll + fears of getting banned, so we set the release date to "when it's done".
- Feb 3, 2019
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i feel release dates are only really good when you are either finished or extremely confident about finishing it in short time window. i dont think its necessary. frankly i like the surprise of waking up one day and seeing a game i follow being completed
How "heavy" is the game going to be though? more than 1 GB? Just asking because of all the things we should be getting like the cutscenes depending on moral alignment and other variables plus the voiced dialogues.
Right now, the game is at 1.3GB, at completion, we're estimating around 2GB.
Note that the audio is compressed with .ogg which doesnt hurt the quality (in a way humans can really hear, at least) but it makes something like 2 minutes of audio be under 1MB of file size.