Mookys
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- Dec 19, 2022
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Insane how many Ren'Py games get abandoned
- Thread starter Vitklim
- Start date
These projects are mostly made by one developer, so no wonder many are abandoned. Burnout isn't joke and some developers don't want admit it, so they rather slow down updates and make less content. Naturally on the other hand some people are just lazy milking assholes, what make excuses and people believe them.
- Jun 10, 2017
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One do not prevent the second, but if it was really such a shift regarding mods, nexusMods would be dead.
As for games, they need a wider range of skills than 95% mods. You need to be a writer, an artist and a coder. Being only one, or two, of them will only works if you've a team, but then it will add more possible reasons for the game to be abandoned, because some guy on the team will slack off or just disappear.
The thing is that most people drastically underestimate how difficult it is to make a game. And like Ren'Py is the easiest game engine, it's also the one where you'll find the more of those people. "Oh, look, I did 3 renders, wrote 10 lines, and I have the starts of an adult game... It's easy as fuck"... Except that it isn't.
Soon or later they hit a black hole. Either they have no fucking idea how to continue their story. Or it's how to render that scene they have in mind, or how to code that part that they want in their game. Then, they look at their bank account, see how much they spent of this, and how few they earned thanks to it, and come to the obvious realization: They have neither the skills, nor the money, to continue.
Jaike
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The newest in that list is actually Talothral's latest VN, Tribulations of a Mage, from December 2023, and Terminus Reach: Sentinel 2 is newer than Parasite Black btw. And if you meant Caribdis's debut Once in a Lifetime, his latest VN Eternum is an obvious 1 to try (I recommend 0.8.5 for the music before the rights holder pulled the rug out by changing the terms).
That AI stuff dominates the latest updates because a few "big" titles are updated pretty often. That means it takes more effort to find good stuff in other genres that often have longer update cycles. It isn't really crowded out, but it gets pushed off the first page pretty fast.
I'm sure you'll be able to find new stuff, newer than the VNs I linked, if you go here and open a seeking request for recommendations. Just take a moment to write out your preferences and hell no's and titles you already played.
You're still getting on the list though...
- Jun 19, 2019
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- 'Confessions of a Futanari Samurai Warrior' (c) Insomnimaniac-San 2025.
It do be true. I see it happening all the time, and I'm sure you do as well. In the beginning new devs are really hype. They answer all the questions, it's obvious how much effort they're putting in. A year later, they go radio silence, updates are either slower or have less in them. They seem fed up with their own audience.
Except Futa devs. All of us are based.
Vitklim
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- Feb 22, 2018
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You are right on the details, I didn't count Tribulations, because it isn't far along enough yet imo, but obvously it's quality as well. Eternum is on the list too.
Like I said, there are new VNs with potential still being made, but the survival rate of the ones from years ago, and the numbers of new ones being made seem to be quite low, which is the sad part. I check the latest updates page daily, so I've kind of learnt to gauge this stuff over the years.
Vitklim
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This would actually be very interesting to do a deep dive on, since I can think of a few ways to narrow down the scope. Most low effort games could be filtered out by AI cg or HTML tags (I know not all, but I'm speaking trends). Then, there are a lot of minor rpgms which inflate the "completed" statistic.
Even the stats you do have seem to show more games being abandoned over the years, and less being in development. Which doesn't tell us much without the narrowed scope, but broadly fits with what I've been seeing too.
- Jun 19, 2019
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You know you say that and there might be something to it, I mean other than the balls vs vagina debate that sometimes occurs, I've found futa devs don't really become infamously controversial, tend to be friendly and helpful even to other genres and newbies, and ultimately I think that affects people's perception of it. I mean i see you being helpful to people asking for dev advice, I post supposedly funny memes and comments and people see that and probably think 'Huh...I was benign or not even thinking about futa, but these guys seem chill and cool let's see what it's about...' and before you know it they're playing futa handholding games.
MissCougar
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- Feb 20, 2025
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yayaya.
yayaya!Abandon games happen because people rely on motivation instead of discipline. Long-running games slow down on updates not because the dev is intentionally milking people, they've burnt out and haven't realized it yet. (Well, most of the time anyway. Some devs are genuine lazy assholes).
As for games being worse. It could just be that you, yourself, are a little burnt out. It could be that the games are actually worse. It's too subjective to say. And, I mean, we're still making Big Brother clones to this day, so have we really evolved at all?
This is why when people always start off some project with "what do you like to see" are probably gonna fail. Not only is the work massively more involved, if they are 110% liking what they themselves make they will burn out.
People also want that sweet Patreon money too and at the end of the day it's probably not going to replace your day job. So you have a day job, then you have another hard job behind that... good luck!
Not that hard though, because you get to do it in the comfort of your home while sipping on coffee (or whatever you may prefer beverage wise).
Not physically hard, but it can be mentally taxing at times.
MissCougar
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I mean, it could be viewed as hard if the dev doesn't like doing such work (writing, drawing, coding, etc) as a hobby anyways. Then they have to ask themselves: why am I doing this? There's just not that much money to be earned from the very niche adult gaming world.Try making and complete a game, then say whether it's really "Not that hard"
You can definitely earn a lot of money and make it a job, it's not impossible. Some people simply give it a shot, the majority fails, but some do succeed.
- Jun 19, 2019
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- Jun 19, 2019
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wicked-green-eyes
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I made some more plots with your data. Before doing so I removed all In Development and On Hold games, mostly because Completed/Abandoned games is a permanent status (usually), whereas onhold/wip games will change to the other categories eventually. So, these plots should ignore WIP stuff and only track games getting fully finished or dropped.
Percentage of abandoned or completed games:
When there were 3803 abandoned/completed games, 70.5% were completed, 29.45% were abandoned.
When there were 16806 abandoned/completed games, 63.7% were completed, 36.3% were abandoned.
I also plotted the same thing but using incremental numbers (i.e. where the numbers - of abandoned/completed games - used to calculate the percentages at each point along the X-axis only considers the difference between the current count and the previous count). This way old data wouldn't interfere with the stats, since I suppose we're interested in seeing how the active rate of games getting the abandoned/completed tag has changed.
It's a little messy near the first 3000 games added, where I imagine you were collecting data points more frequently (I imagine the frequency of game releases has increased, but I can't imagine it is enough that these are roughly equally spaced measurements). I deleted the first 8 data points just to average them out so that the amount of games at each point is roughly the same, and plotted it again:
The percentage of abandoned games goes from 30.2% to 43.2% to 38.2%.
To put a number to it: from the first to last data point, the ratio of abandoned games to completed games increased by ~6.9%.