Well, I certainly respect your opinion, Aristos, and I mostly agree with you. It is definitely enough for a part time job, depending on Az's other responsibilities. I have no idea, but he is likely working another full time job, and maybe has family responsibilities, so maybe he can only devote 15-20 hours a week to development. I know with my full time job, I don't have that kind of time to devote to making a VN, week after week, for years, even if I am creative enough to try it, which I am not.
I try not to pay attention to the monthly income and exact time of the output of developers here. I know that it takes a lot more time, effort, and cost to make games than it looks like as a player, and most of us are getting them for free, except those of us who choose to support a few of our favorite developers. Plus, unless you are right out of high school, living on your own in an apartment with nothing to do other than program your VN, most developers have full lives outside of making their games. I am sure that they start out as a hobby and labor of love, and if eventually they get popular enough, and get enough support to make a substantial improvement in their personal income, all power to them.
There are a few developers, which those of us who have been here awhile know exactly who they are, that abuse their fans with continual promises of updates, lack of communication, and no decent output for years, but Az is not one of them, by a long shot. Sure, I wish he posted here more, but he does show up from time to time which is great, since he doesn't have to do that, and gives regular updates on his Patreon, so I think he is one of the good guys, really. There are quite a few developers I really like, who I won't mention here, that have even slower updates.
I do disagree with you about his update lengths, however. Looking at the games in your signature, most of which I have played, most have similar or shorter updates than Halfway House. I didn't count renders in each HH update, but Betrayed has pretty short and not very frequent updates (though amazing animations, which I love), and Big City's Pleasures seems practically abandoned as far as I can tell, with nothing much happening for the last year. Deliverance has extremely short updates, that I can play in about 10 minutes max reading carefully, though I do enjoy the story so I am not complaining. Sure, Being a Dik is much longer and more complex by far, but DPC has a whole team to work on it, and is making the income to match. City of Broken Dreamers is in a class all its own, with very lengthy updates, incredible quality, and a great in-depth story. It blows all other games out of the water in technical quality, honestly, so you are right there, but I assume that Philly must have a team of developers helping him also, or he is a true prodigy among game developers.
But other than a small handful of top-tier examples, Halfway House, while the updates are a little slower than average around here, in my opinion are pretty long, at least compared to the majority of my other top 20 favorite games here, and while not at the technical level of a few key exceptions, are better than almost all other games here, and for me is solidly in my top five. I have way more emotional connection to the characters in Halfway House, than I do with other popular games like WVM or Sunshine Love for example. Sometimes smaller is better, at least story-wise.
Anyway, I hope that Halfway House continues to make a good income, so that Az continues to work on it, and keep it going for as long as the story supports the development, which hopefully will be quite a while. I personally would love to see another 10 episodes, since there are a lot of characters we don't know well yet, that I would like to see more of, Dr. Kunieda most of all.
