Is Patreon dead for new adult game creators in 2021?

[drguyo]

inspired by this thread Are games oversaturated? and

Anyone else notice that the quailty of games decreasing?



Hi im a noobie to the adult game scene. been working on my project for about 8 months now. not a VN

two part question:

1) how to market your game in 2021 to best get visibility

2) Is Patreon dead for new adult game creators in 2021?

but along the way I've been also taking a look at the financials of the scene and whether it is economically viable obviously. and how to build good hype. i'm building my MVP so people can look at the quality and scope of the project. from this initial feedback, i will make a decision whether to continue.

seems like most of the creators $1000+ a month actually started years ago . i see some absolute quality creators getting below $1k but creators who havent updated anything substantial in years getting $20k a month


would you go with Kickstarter over Patreon in this case?

 

[DaScoot]

This question kind of sounds like the old joke "no one goes to that fancy restaurant anymore, it's too crowded".

Kickstarter and Patreon are very different models. With Kickstarter you need to be able to collect enough money for years of work all at once, and that's basically impossible if you're an unknown and haven't already done significant work to show off.

Personally my Patreon's been a money-loser, but I'm hoping to balance that out with a steam/etc release. Obviously parody games and extreme kinks don't have that option though.

 

[Alcahest]

https://f95zone.to/latest/#/cat=games/page=1/sort=rating
What a Legend! is the top rated game here and makes $6500+ on Patreon. It was released less than a year ago. You can make money, Patreon is not dead for you, but the competition is heavy these days.

 

[m00nsh1ne]

if you are going into this just to make money then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. I'd say 1 out of 8 these types of games make money at best. Do it because you want to or have a passion. If you just want to make money then go work with a game dev company and start programming or writing or creating based on your skills. If you are passionate enough about something then eventually other people will recognize it and your stock will grow. If your only motivator is money then I just think there are better options out there.

 

[DS23G]

Is it harder these days to make 1000+ dollarinos on patreon than a couple years ago, due to a much larger competition pool and generally higher expectations? Probably, but there are a couple of new games that managed it over the last year, so it's certainly possible, if you hit the right marks.
One thing that most likely makes things a little bit harder for devs currently is the fact that the worldwide economic situation hasn't been the greatest since, well, that whole pandemic thing started. This is purely anecdotal of course, but 60-70% of my exit surveys gave the reason as "my financial situation changed", so there's that.

 

[apatheticcreative]

I think between Patreon and Steam opening their doors to pornographic content we're seeing an explosion of adult games out there, but you're right. Most of them are low-quality, unfinished, "early access" cash grabs. There's no shortage of developers who see the demand, but they're trying to meet it in the lowest effort way possible. Other developers who are capable of making higher-quality games have no interest in making any games with pornographic content.

For me the closest I think any developer has come to making a high-quality pornographic game (Visual novels aside, as there's no shortage of great visual novels.) is Illusion, particularly AI Shoujo. As a concept, it's great! Open world survival sim with building and "The Sims" like life simulator elements. It had all the ingredients to be an amazing game. As far as the execution goes, it seems to me like they never went past the "concept" stage. There are 5-6 "find the object" missions. There's little incentive to build anything. Then suddenly the game just ends, and for this they're charging $70 on Steam. Their follow-up title, Honey Select 2, is basically AI Shoujo with all the stuff that made AI Shoujo a game stripped away. It's equivalent to dressing up anatomically correct dolls and mashing them together to simulate sex.

The adult game dev scene is full of a lot of cheap crap, a lot of promises and a lot of potential. Most of which goes unfulfilled.

 

[Virtutis Umbra]

Is SubscribeStar the new hotness? I have seen that logo appear in more and more games. It seems to be Patreon for adult games, or am I wrong?

 

[ChaosCircle]

Is SubscribeStar the new hotness? I have seen that logo appear in more and more games. It seems to be Patreon for adult games, or am I wrong?

Its a more flexible version of Patreon but all the subscriber numbers I see for people with both Patreon and SubscribeStar are alot lower on SubscribeStar. Not sure if that is because people distrust a newer platform or what.

 

[DS23G]

Its a more flexible version of Patreon but all the subscriber numbers I see for people with both Patreon and SubscribeStar are alot lower on SubscribeStar. Not sure if that is because people distrust a newer platform or what.

It doesn't have paypal integration. There are alot of people who are either not comfortable with giving their bank data out to a slightly sketchy seeming site like SS or don't have a credit card, paypal is usually the go-to payment option for those folks. So without that, you lose alot of potential subscribers.

 

[Virtutis Umbra]

It doesn't have paypal integration.

Oh thats seems like a massive oversight these days. Ok it seems that having a presence on both is the way to go.

 

[Alcahest]

Oh thats seems like a massive oversight these days. Ok it seems that having a presence on both is the way to go.

They had Paypal but because SS allows things that Paypal won't accept, SS couldn't keep it.