>removing hypnosis content because it contradicts the arbitrary lore you yourself wrote
lol amazing, Western devs
Given that the lore is a pretty significant part of the game and a large reason (statistically, from public and backer polls both) why a lot of people have backed the game, as well as (most importantly) our own desire to have consistent lore, having something in there that heavily contradicts it doesn't really work.
The lore for games does change over time, especially early on; many early concepts and content on games gets drastically changed by the end of development, and this was just one of those things. Very few, if any games have the entire plot, lore, continuity, and so on planned out from the getgo with zero changes during development.
To be clear, it was a single animation across the entire game; hypnosis was never a large focus or even
a focus within the game, and we removed it years ago.
Dev is convinced that depicting hypnosis counts as depicting rape and patreon apparently is against this. I'm aware of several artists and game devs on patreon that make both rape and hypnosis content but whatever I guess the dev is afraid that the ppl at Patreon are going to find out about him including it (somehow?).
I mean you never know lul maybe they have employees dedicated to playing each and every h-game hosted on the platform.
There have been multiple reports of games being hit for hypnosis; if you want a large example, check out Snow Daze. There's even articles on it you can read with a quick google search;
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The tl;dr is that Visa/Mastercard considers fantasy hypnosis as "total removal of consent", hence it gets hit fairly hard. In real life, of course this isn't the case, and it is a pretty silly policy, but it is what it is.
As far as "several artists and game devs on Patreon that don't get hit", as with any service, there are always going to be people who don't get hit because there's tens of thousands of creators and only a staff of probably 20-30 checking these games by hand
(and yes, they do check them by hand; multiple devs I talk to have been hit for stuff deep, deep in their games that they've never posted or shown on social media or anywhere else, very specific things.)
However, as noted before, we would have removed it regardless. There's other content in the game that as we went on, we found didn't really fit the game that well and so we ended up altering it or removing it for gameplay reasons, or plot reasons, or aesthetic reasons, even though none of it was a risk ban-wise. Many other games you play and enjoy have done the same, you just don't know about it because the development process isn't really transparent in those AAA projects.
After several years of delays, it should be obvious what game the dev team is playing. Future Fragments has been pushed back over 10 times because the developer realized any potential Steam sales will be paltry compared to the...
$12,343
... per month they are making off this thing via Patreon, again over the course of several years. Of course they are going to play by Patreon's rules. It's paying the equivalent of three peoples' monthly salary for level adjustments and an occasional sex sprite animation. We will be lucky to ever see it release considering how much money this backer system is generating.
It's been a lot more times than that, but that's what happens with a small, 3 person dev team trying to make something with this density of content while building thier own engine effectively; sometimes things take longer than expected. AAA games suffer the same issues with 200+ person teams, so to have a 3 person team have this isn't really surprising.
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Regarding "milking" the game for financial reasons:
- Steam sales will definitely not "be paltry" especially given the amount of wishlists we have already; the average adult game on Steam makes upwards of $100,000-$200,000 in the first year alone. I don't know anyone who's put an adult game on the platform who's made less than $50,000 in the first year.
- Games with prominent marketing and exposure like ours do make more than that on average as well, all within the first year.
- At the same time, we'll still have the Patreon running while we work on the sequel; if we were really in this solely for the money, we would just rush it out to Steam incomplete and rake in the money.
- This isn't even taking into consideration the money we'll be making on the other 10+ platforms that already agreed to sell the game, from Nutaku to FAKKU to Denpasoft to JAST to Mikandi and so on.
- There's also some physical sales places that want to sell the game too, and given the amount of eroge already on Nintendo but censored, we'll be looking into that as well.
And I mean, you do realize we give out refunds for any reason, in full, at any time, right? All anyone has to do is ask and we'd be happy to do so. Why would people in it solely for the money even have this option available?
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Regarding how much money we make:
- Before we get that money, we pay our voice actress (roughly $1200 a month), our sound effects guy (roughly $200-500 a month depending on work), and our musician (roughly $500-1000 a month). We've also been paying for advertising on a few places which drops it down about another $300 a month, but this is only a very recent thing.
- That drops that number down to about between $8000-10000 a month.
- After that, we split the income 3 ways, so between $2600-ish to $3333-ish a month.
- After rent, bills, utilities, food, etc. I'm left with about $200 in profits personally.
Now, I don't know about you, but I don't want to continue sitting on a project forever that's getting me $200 left over after all is said and done per month to invest in future projects. I'd much rather complete it and move onto new projects and get collective residuals so I can afford to even start new projects up.
But hold on; there's one thing that's missing from this equation though, isn't there?
The voice acting from the other 250+ characters in the game. Yes, there's that many between databanks and cutscenes.
We're going to need roughly another
$30,000 to pay for all that upcoming voicework at $2 per line.
Given the current amount of money on Patreon, that's just simply not going to be enough to pay for all of it, so we're going to have to take out a loan to afford it.
Meaning, we
have to get this game out ASAP and get it up on Steam ASAP so we can not get hammered with loan interest and debt after taking on this loan.
So the
last thing we would do is just sit around and "milk" the game so to speak, but we also don't want to release something half-assed and half finished given all the support we've gotten over the years, hence the pushbacks.
Plus, honestly, we've been working on this game for almost 6 years now; while we love the game, we REALLY REALLY REALLY want to work on new projects!
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Also, I have to say, "the occasional sprite sex animation" kinda shows you haven't played the game in a long while or much at all tbh; almost every demo up until only very recently (since most of the sex content is finished) has had new sprite sex animations, new CGs, and heck, even the latest demo that came out last month just had two new animations, one of which was a long, multi-stage animation.
It's fine to dislike the game, just don't state false information about it, because that helps no one, and it makes your own stance look weaker and not able to be taken as seriously.
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TL;DR;
- If we were in this for the money specifically, we'd be idiots to just "milk it" on Patreon when releasing it ASAP to Steam sales + Patreon + sales on 10+ other platforms = exponentially more money.
- If we were in this to never release it and milk it forever, that'd be assuming we have no desire to make other games, and given that I've already personally attempted multiple other games that are posted on this very board and have shown game design documents and talked about all our games being in the same universe and affecting one another, I think that's proven we want to do many more games after this.
- Loans hammer you with fees, and we have to get one to have enough money to commission the remainder of voicework. The only way possible we're going to be able to pay all that off is with Steam etc. sales.
- Believe it or not, we're not in this to scam people. We're in this to make games we feel are deserving of people's money. If you don't feel we deserve your money and you've given it to us in the past, ask for a refund and we'll do 100% of it, no questions asked.