in a way i understand this dev's thought process, you got a guy like oppai man who just started & he's already making 4,400 per month, he sees himself in that category, it's not as if the quality of this game ain't above average.
Oppai Man, or some other new developer coming on the scene making a first release getting good support never discourages any developer ever. That's "New Money". Nobody really hates on "New Money". They worked for it, and got lucky with that support good on them.
I didn't know about that dev Oppai Man and I was surprised by what you said about his impressive growth, so I did a little research:
- Actually, Freshwomen isn't his first game, It's his third one: Ahegal-Ahegal Seasons and Oppai Muse are the others and those are already completed.
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- He started selling his games in steam in 2018. SilkandMilk started in 2019 here.
- He opened a patreon this year, but he could grow a fan base from steam and other sites in the previous years. He has more than 3000 members in his discord.
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- He had an impressive growth especially in june. My hypothesis is that he paid for publicity in some relevant sites. For example, one single post of Inceton promoting your game in his patron can give you around of 100 patrons in just 6 days, that's what happened with Vigor Games, although Inceton did it for free (he does that for new games he likes).
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Silk&MilkProductions seems to do almost none promotion, he seems to post his games only here or in a few more sites. For example, the dev of False Hero got only 40 patrons in a year and a half posting his game only in this site. When he decided to promote it all over the web, he got 330 patrons more in 4 months.
https://f95zone.to/threads/false-hero-v0-35-enyo-eerie.14204/post-5007268
- Primal Instinct thread has 1 million views, Freshwomen has 350k views. Obviously, the most of Oppai Man's patrons don't come from this site.
In conclusion, Oppai Man's case wasn't just lucky as you said and he isn't a new dev neither.