There's two parts of this I don't understand. First: Steam can't force your game to be on-sale. They will send publishers and developers notices of impending sales which they (the devs) may opt in or out of. They can't ransom your game in any respect, least of all forcing it to be X price or discounted by X amount. "Delaying to avoid sales" is completely nonsense.
Yes, I never implied otherwise.
However, you do realize that if there is a Steam-wide sale going on, that both logically and statistically, people will overwhelmingly spend their money
on games on sale, and not the games that are not on sale, right?
When you first launch your game, you get 5 weeks of "visibility period" algorithmic pushing by Steam.
This means that those first 5 weeks are
crucial to whether or not the Steam algorithm decides
after it if you're worth continuing to be pushed up on feature lists and get more attention.
If you launch your game and it's right in the middle of multiple big sales, that means that Steam will, per their own words, literally not feature your game while this sale is going on. This means you're effectively setting your visibility period on fire...
...which means you're crippling your profits, both in the immediate term, and long-term per the algorithm.
Second: there's no profits to cripple because your game isn't being sold anywhere except on Patreon. I don't refer to the monthly donations but the one-time payment of $20 you offered a year(?) or so ago. Related to this, did the people who paid that $20 receive a guaranteed release date as to when they'll receive their product? Is it even legal to just charge people for a product there's no obvious sign they'll ever be receiving?
I don't even get the logic here, because yes, the game isn't being sold anywhere but Patreon yet, but we have 45,000+ wishlists on Steam. Steam will be easily 95% of our profits for the game.
And yes, it is legal to charge people for this. It's literally in the Patreon ToS.
Additionally, we've offered full refunds at any time, and have paid out over $20,000 in said refunds.
I really hope that comment about sales was just a mistake on your part and not a lie.
It wasn't a mistake, and it wasn't a lie. Please don't imply either.
I'm sorry your project has gone on so long that you're in a financially-bad position but what does this have to do with anything?
It's saying that the Patreon money is not sustaining us, and that we're not holding off release because of the Patreon money. Made that pretty clear in the last post, so I'm not sure what else I could say here.
"just release the game early, we'll patch it later" was ever an option, why is that somehow more of an option now than it was, say, half a year ago? What part of the development process are we missing here?
Also made this pretty clear in the last post; if we don't release it in November, I go homeless. It's not an option we want to do, and it means the game will have some stuff unfinished at release which we really, REALLY do not want to do, but we literally have no other option.
Half a year ago, we weren't in that state. Pretty simple to understand.
Was it not possible to simply release the initial "Future Fragments" with some kind of cliffhanger that would give you some funds to survive on and then - later, - release a "Future Fragments: Part 2" with the WIP content? This isn't uncommon, I can think of three well-known game series who faced your dilemma and solved it that way.
Yes, it's common, and it's atrocious. It's a terrible business practice and I would rather go broke and homeless than do it. I absolutely refuse to cash grab by splitting an existing game up into multiple parts.
I can't help but see this as needlessly insulting. Scott Cawthon was a single guy using a very rudimentary game engine to produce games and continued to do that even after he discovered his niche in the industry. He made five Clickteam Fusion games by himself, from 2014 to 2016. You have an entire team and haven't published one game since your Patreon began in January 2015.
Again, I'm not saying he's bad, but objectively, his games are extremely simple to program, design, and execute. That's all there is to it. Mario 1 on the NES is a simple game to program and execute. That doesn't make it bad, but it is a simple game. Is it an insult to say that Mario 1 is a simple game? I think most people would agree it's not.
You're comparing two vastly different games in genre, content density, and a million other factors. You can't honestly see that as a fair comparison.
I'm going to be painfully honest: if given the choice between one hyper-polished game (let's say Final Fantasy 7 HD Remake to keep with your metaphor) that took almost 8 years to develop versus a point-and-click Boo! Haunted House: Peep the Horror that released once per year, most people would pick the latter.
That's great, and I'm sure there's a lot of people who would agree.
But I'm going to refer you to what I said in the last post;
[We're making this game] because we wanted to.
It's that simple.
I don't care if the game would sell 2 copies and take 50 years, if that's what we wanted to make, that's what we wanted to make. Again, we're not in this to min/max effort/money. We're in this to make games we want to make, all other things and costs be damned.
This is why we have our Patreon setup as we do where;
- you only have to back us once to get rewards for life
- you can ask for a full refund at any time, for any reason
So that backers can only back as much as they want, and if they want it back, they can get it back in full.
We're not going to be held hostage by anyone or anything when it comes to what games we want to make. Market appeal, what's popular, what's not, doesn't matter.
People don't want to sit on their hands for eight years with nothing.
If you think the playable demos and content we've put out so far is "nothing", then I don't know what to tell you.
I'm not going to get too deep into your comments about "art demands" or level design when compared to the Freddy games. Apples and oranges aside, sprite animations and constructing/animating 3D models are both challenging in equal measure.
Challenging, sure. Time consuming, no, there is no comparison. There's a reason why almost every animated show on the market is switching to full 3D or pseudo 3D, or if they're 2D, they're using skeletons/rigs/spine/live2D etc.
Pure hand-animated 2D is extremely time-consuming, period.
This is where the problem lies if I was forced to guess, this pursuit of perfection.
As noted in a post juuuuust a few posts above yours, we're not even close to aiming for perfection.
https://f95zone.to/threads/future-fragments-v0-27ex-march-2022-demo-hentaiwriter.1550/post-9118274
This covers the tons of things we've removed from the game solely to get it out faster. We're not aiming for perfection, especially since that's a terrible thing to aim for because it means you would have hit your peak, we're aiming to get all the core content out at a minimum.
The more I think about the development of this game the more I think episodic releases would have solved a lot of your mentioned development issues. Obviously I'm not a developer and will never know the entire situation, but if I had to ask myself whether I'd have bought "Future Fragments: Lava Zone" (which let's say took two-and-a-half years to make) and then waited a year-and-a-half to purchase "Future Fragments: Ice Zone", etc., the answer is... yes. I would have.
We did do "episodic releases" through the demos.
We can't do true episodic releases though because all the levels are linked to one another, as well as your choices in that given level. We would have needed to have the entire engine, all the voice actors assembled, all the artwork, programming, sound effects, etc. to do something like that.
If we didn't, then as we went along, we would have had to update previous levels to match in quality and content, which would have been a nightmare (which is specifically why we did the demo levels separate in the first place).
That would also be more games a website like this one would have to go find and "showcase", rather than the single Future Fragments we may or may not ever be receiving... just saying!
Yes, and it would be scummy to do so. We promised the full game experience. We're not going to split the game up into parts just to get more attention or more money. I don't know how much clearer I can make this.
We have countless other games planned, and now with our complete engine, future games should take much less time to make, but we will never,
ever split up games into pieces like that, nor charge for DLC, nor release something mostly incomplete and "patch it later".
Ever.
I don't know. Why aren't you putting the game on Steam?
Because it's not ready yet. It's that simple.
So we've got until sometime in November to get it as ready as possible, before we're forced to release it.
Why are you releasing free demos and openly, frequently communicating with a website specializing in the P-word?
Because player enjoyment and making the game we want to make simultaneously are the most important things to us. We literally have a line
in the demos themselves that outright says if you can't afford the game, you should pirate it until you can afford it down the line.
We have regional pricing planned for Steam, which will allow people to get the game for far cheaper than $20 USD as well.
For the 1,000th time; we are not in this to milk people out of money at all costs and scam people with partial stuff. I would think that our repeated actions that can be observed just by seeing how our Patreon is setup, our actions regarding Steam, the demos, the take on piracy, etc. would have shown that a million times over.
If finances are this dire then why hasn't a new plan been drawn up?
Do you think money just comes out of thin air? Do you think we can go on Shark Tank and ask for more money? Or that our family members are loaded or something? What "new plan" would be drawn up to magically make $50,000 in credit card debt vanish?
Did you sign your sound engineer and voice actors to a lengthy contract?
We're paying them per piece of work; it's not a salary-based thing.
If you're confident in a million dollars in sales why haven't you approached somebody (a bank, a publisher, etc.) for financing?
Because we don't want to give up publishing rights, let alone 30% of our profits to a publisher, when I've been the one busting my ass marketing the game. It would make no sense. No one is going to know our game better than us, which means no one's going to be able to market it as best as we can. (Plus, many publishers want to alter games in ways to fit things better according to them, and that's the last thing we want.)
Hell, every publisher I've spoken to anyways in the past has said that we
shouldn't publish with anyone else because we're strong enough with self-publishing.
There's a lot of questions that have me scratching my head surrounding this game. I can't figure out if the biggest problem is scope creep
Answered this before, we've had a game design document from 2017 that lists out everything I wrote in my earlier post. Hasn't changed. Zero scope creep. We've cut out numerous things, as also noted in this post. We wanted to make a big game for the last few years, hasn't changed.
It's not anything else you listed, either.
It's literally what I wrote in my last post.
AAA-level content, divided by a team of 5 people. You could be the best manager in the world with the most skilled people in the world and you wouldn't get the game done much faster than we had with the amount of content we've had planned, with one exception.
And that is, experience in knowing that something does or doesn't work with the gameplay, which is only testable once it's actually in the game. Many times we added in a new element to the game we'd had planned for months or years, only to realize that in actual gameplay, it wasn't good enough for us, so we scrapped it, but we'd spent that time integrating it.
And yes, you can do models and so on to get a rough idea of things, but that's just not good enough. Doing that stuff doesn't give a good enough idea of if it's
truly something good.
I'm glad you're learning from this experience. I'll withhold my cynical suspicions regarding this game's success when (if) it releases.
I still find it funny people will say "if it releases" as if we'd do all this work and then just not release it and stay in debt.
All I ask is: please, please, please consider limiting work to 1 or 2 years (maybe a bit more) with the engine, etc., you've already developed. Do episodic stuff. People will pay $10 or $12 for Faye's adventures through Casino Night Zone (or whatever). I don't have to tell you that you can accomplish a lot with just level design, some plot and a decent enough showing of h-animations. Resident Evil 2/3/Veronica is like 70% recycled assets and people ate it up.
Future games will take around 2-3 years tops thanks to having a solid engine of ours now, but will not skimp on content. Absolutely no way for episodic stuff, and absolutely no way for just skirting by with bare minimum effort.
Future games won't be platformers, to note; each new game will be in a new genre, new aesthetic, etc. but with all the games interlinked with an overarching storyline.
I mean it's up to you. Being the PR guy for this project seems like a nightmare so I won't blame you for getting frustrated. What I will say is if this game's development continues to see delays and the finances continue to take an (alleged) downturn, refusing to talk to backers or waiting fans isn't going to help.
I'm totally fine talking to backers and people with questions or critiques; I think I've proven that through all the replies here.
But when people keep bringing up the exact same things that I've literally answered a few posts above their post, that's just a waste of time to type out.
