Game Commissions and financial return (poll)

[daedilus]

I'm currently in talks with a game maker / artist to commission a game.

They currently have 3 products in progress, so will be about 6 months before they start on mine, once we get to that point... First, some background:

I'm a member of an under-represented class of gamers who likes natural breasts, and transformation. Both anthro and non-anthro, and will feature breast-growth during transformation, so don't worry big-tit fans, i'm not leaving you out like you've left us small tit fans out for decades, lol.

To that end, i have decided to create, for the world, an expandable, long duration, high re-playability game.

To maximize character art and value, i have structured the concept of the game around a group of 4 late-teen friends at a slumber party.

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I expect Book 1 to cost me around $5000 cash out of pocket, because all the art must be created originally. Future books will cost less, because all the base art of the house / characters will already exist, and i will only have to pay for themed story art and transformations.

Here's the question to you:

I'm not rich, i can't just give a $5000 gift to the world. How do i pay for this?

Do you prefer an upfront Patreon charge for the game? A set price for sale like e-junkie? A donation scheme, where you can 'donate' a base amount (say $5)to acquire the game, and donate over that amount to support future book creation?

 

[stoper]

It's hard to answer without seeing what you mean by this game you want to commission. The links you've given seems to point at a subscription site, I can't understand much from there.
How big of a game each "book" will be?
I find it interesting that someone would develop it for you for merely 5k. When they could milk an RPG Maker game on Patreon for 10 times that amount.

 

[daedilus]

Each book has 4 minigames that tell a short story.

The characters will be wavy fade-out transported into the story when they begin to read it, and just appear in the tale.

Each tale will vary, but the gist of it is, they show up, begin following the path of the story, discover 1 or 2 enemies, and are chased around, captured, corrupted, and assist in capturing the rest of the girls and corrupting them.

Yeaka has a very long track record of turning out these games for Vampyou and Thaylialus. Dozens of them.

They average around $1500 - $2000 per game, and most are shorter than a typical RGP, though there have been some sizable ones as well, "The Vampire Game Re-Vamped", being an example of a larger one. My initial game and book 1 will be about double the length of a typical game for either of those outlets, thus i'm expecting it to cost double the amount, (possibly a little more, as my initial release will also have double to triple the transformation art of the previously mentioned games)

I'm waiting for Yeaka to have time to review the concept and calculate the art, to get any final pricing.

Also, i do not believe you need a subscription to read the forums on Vampyou.com... Though you may have to register a forum account.

You must be registered to see the links

 

[Onysko]

I prefer Pay-Per-Update. This is the most reliable method for patrons that don't wanna get utterly fucked over by creators who up and leave during developments or prolong it. And it shows how serious the creator really is.

(BTW they have this method in Patreon, but I have seen very few creators actually utilize it.)

 

[daedilus]

I prefer Pay-Per-Update. This is the most reliable method for patrons that don't wanna get utterly fucked over by creators who up and leave during developments or prolong it. And it shows how serious the creator really is.

(BTW they have this method in Patreon, but I have seen very few creators actually utilize it.)

How could pay-per-update possibly be less risky than pay-per-full-game-release?

 

[Ungawa]

How could pay-per-update possibly be less risky than pay-per-full-game-release?

To be fair, that's actually the difference of games as a product and games as a service. If you use games that pay per update, you're more likely to have the creators (big or small) maintain that game for continual revenue.

If it's on the full game release, once the game's done, the relationship ends and the devs work on something new.

Think about any game on Steam that is F2P versus EA Games and Madden football. That's the difference.

 

[daedilus]

Think about any game on Steam that is F2P versus EA Games and Madden football. That's the difference.

This would be both... I just have a problem with the concept of creating a patreon for funding with no original game to release.

ergo, i'm going to front the $5000 out of my pocket, pay for the game up front, and release it with the one off payment system in some select locations, so some preferred folks will have access first.

After say a 3 month window, i will make the one off payment site available to some secondary sites more widely known.

Then, lastly, after about 6 months, i will create a patreon and offer it for 'direct sale' there via a one time up-front pledge, and the understanding that if anyone wants to maintain a pledge, they will be directly funding future releases.

After another 3 months or so, It should be (at least hopefully) paid for, and then i'll make the game available to general monthly patreons, which will be tantamount to a name your own price scheme, because you can donate, 1, 5, 10... whatever you want. and my payment system will be up front, so you can immediately cnacle pledge if your intent is a one-off payment.

It will just take about a year after initial release to get it for 1$... which i don't think is baad, considering ai want my money back, lol.

 

[Ungawa]

It will just take about a year after initial release to get it for 1$... which i don't think is baad, considering ai want my money back, lol.

This is getting into economics, but those pay windows can be viewed through the lenses of Hollywood movies, actually.

What you're doing with this is create artificial pay windows. Most people won't notice the sunk cost (the $5000) that you put into the movie. What you really want to do is have those release dates closer together. No one's going to wait for your game after 6 months. Not unless you have the resources of EA or Blizzard.

To really try to counter people spreading your game, you want to make it as legally accessible as possible. In the context of games here, DC with Summertime Saga seems to put the Patreon as more of a tip jar.

But notice the difference of that game with others like Night City Productions with Superpowered. That gets unencrypted and people spread that like wildfire.

I'm not saying your approach is negative, merely pointing you to how the approach can have its own downsides.

 

[daedilus]

I'm not saying your approach is negative, merely pointing you to how the approach can have its own downsides.

Yeah, encryption / DCR stuff doesn't work.

That's what led me to the stepped release approach. There are some closed communities out there, where stuff doesn't get released to the public. I know of a site that has dozens of games, and I've never seen any of them talked about or available anywhere else. That's why i'll do first release there. Has a closed community where i can sell the game to 77971 members there for a period before taking it public.

At the initial asking price of $15, (which is $2 less than the dozens of other similar games with much less content previously sold by third party commissioners on the site), i need to sell around 250 copies to make my money back (creators initial estimate came in lower than the $5000 expectation)... That said, it's still an initial estimation.

That said, I think i may well be able to reclaim my initial costs within the closed community and be able to take it public afterwards to finance additional chapters / games.

If that's successful, i'll sink the money from that patreon directly back into game creation and finance additional 'books' for this game publicly, as well as private, patreon games only for members.

Being patreon, and publicly visible, i'm sure those 'private' games will also get back to the public, but patrons will get them first, and until a patron decides to release them, exclusively.

 

[Ungawa]

Being patreon, and publicly visible, i'm sure those 'private' games will also get back to the public, but patrons will get them first, and until a patron decides to release them, exclusively.

That's certainly a viable approach. Timed exclusives just like comics or movies does help. So long as you have ultimate control on the content's release, people come back to you and you gain their trust.

I do wish you well on whatever you decide. I don't make games, but I love the economic side of it just like in AAA games.

 

[DaScoot]

Paying $5k up front before taking it to Patreon or anywhere else is probably an unusual way of doing it. It's a lot of risk, since not only are you spending a lot of time, effort and money without any public interaction, but if something fails at that point (such as the artist dropping out and leaving you short of cash and art) you have nothing to show for it. If you start earlier on Patreon, not only do you have at least a little income coming in at the start, but also user feedback. If player reception isn't what you were hoping, you can adjust your design, and build excitement for the game rather than having it be a mystery until it's released.

You do want to have something playable for people of course before taking it live there, but you could probably have a demo done with a few hundred bucks of content or less.