Sorry, I didn't mean for this to be sad. I'm doing fine. I have a very frugal lifestyle so I don't need much in the first place, but I just want to save up enough to completely overhaul my pixel art graphics for the next game(s) while still remaining financially sound. I just wanted to provide a counter-weight to the usual "take everything, it doesn't harm anyone, and if it does, who cares?" argument some profess here. Thank you btw : )That's really sad to hear, you're one of the best (and nicest!) devs out there and I really enjoy your work. I'm happily already supporting you on patreon and I would gladly spend money for a "full" release version of your games as well. Please keep up the good work!
I'm definitely in a better position than you regarding revenue, as I can live off it. I've always been impressed at the variety of game you make all with very different gameplay and artstyle. Quite frankly, if anyone deserves to make it big, it's you.Apparently I'm getting notifications from this thread because I replied to N_taii on it, so I'll provide some info to clear up the discourse here. Who am I to make any comments? I'm also a game developer who makes a fair amount of revenue on Patreon and have a good amount of experience publishing games on Steam.
1) Steam charges $100 to put your game up.
This is true. But you get it back if you have $1,000 in revenue. Regardless, a $100 fee is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Steam takes 30% of your post-tax and fess revenue anyway. The $100 is just to stop people vomiting endless shovel-ware they expect to sell sub $1,000 up as a business strategy.
2) Look at all this money people make on Patreon!
Patreon as a platform takes about 11-12% of that money after various fees. And that's only if you have a legacy account, new signups have a worse rate. Besides that, game development is an incredibly time-intensive and expensive business to run. You're basically programming a software project, writing a book, illustrating a comic, and composing an album at the same time. And either you do all those things yourself or you pay other people to do them for you. Either way that's a lot of time/money. Personally I make negative money on games, meaning the expenses of creating them are more than the revenue they bring in. So all the labor I actually do is essentially free.
3) So how much money is N_taii making?
I don't know, more than me since his base Patreon revenue is higher and his expenses are lower (this isn't speculation I talk to N_taii developer to developer fairly often). But almost certainly the time to money ratio is much lower than they could get working a normal job. So if you're "stealing" from them, you're not sticking it to a big rich corporation, but someone doing a passion project.
4) Wait, so these games aren't making the developers millionaires?
No, they're not. Even if you see someone with 1,000s of subscribers, almost all games here are more art pieces than business propositions. Even something wildly successful like Karryn's Prison basically just ends up being a normal software job money worth of take home money after paying all the people needed to create it.
Edit: This is just a statement of facts about how the NSFW games business operates. You can interpret the information however you wish.
I could make more working most 9-5 in my country, especially considering there's a good part of my revenue that end up in commissions for art or sound design, especially since I've started to add custom animations in basically every single sex scenes. I could, but I won't if I don't have to, because damn, developing games and interacting with (most) of the community here is fun! As you said, despite its ups and lows, it's a passion project through and through.
Thank you for your input ; )
Thanks!Well, as a 5$ Grunt, i was a little bit surprised to find the Update 10 here as fast as on patreon. Btw, for me it is easier to download it from here now, because Megaupload is so discusting
I personally think, that your allready have this amount of patreons because of your high quality and your very entertaining job with your proof of life content. That is why i don't think, that this leak will have negativ effects so much.
And after all, i had only found you BECAUSE of this forum. Love your work, keep going like that.
I know a lot of people found me through this site. I don't think F95 is a bad website, quite the contrary. Piracy websites can be two things: parasitic, or symbiotic in nature. The parasitic kind just lives by the motto "take everything, give nothing back". They'll live off whatever they latch onto until it dies and they find another host. I know some people on here wish F95 was exactly like that. Thing is, it's not. It promotes developers at the top of their page, give them their own sub-forum, good moderation for both users and devs, and even organizes events where they can win money prizes. A parasitic website wouldn't bother with that.
Quite frankly, I think F95 has done a lot more for piracy than other more shameless websites which are obnoxiously loud about their pirate nature. I decided to release my game on here for free because I knew of F95 before, and I knew it would provide a space I could not only promote the game through free updates, but also wish to stick around and interact with the community. I'm pretty sure it's because of this site that the vast majority of devs decide to have a free release at some point. Heck, I even encourage fellow devs I support on Patreon who have no public release to actually make one and publish it on here.
It's just that some people decided that free stuff if you wait a bit isn't enough. They want everything, as soon as possible, at no cost whatsoever, without a care in the world about the possible consequences as long as they get their way. Frankly, that irks me a bit. Once again, apologies for the long rant.