That's a matter of how you use the terms. I would use the term 'big' for something twice as good than the other and that isn't the case here. By the way, you are reinforcing my point even more: not necessarily the higher quality games, like this one, get more patrons.
In my opinion, in matter of renders:
DecentMonkey: 7/10
Stoper: 7.7/10
And a 9.8/10 would be
There's actually a significantly higher difference between the best renders out there and Stoper, than Stoper and Decent Monkey. My point is that if you use the term 'big' between Stoper and Decent Monkey, then you should use the term 'enormous' between the best and Stoper. And I think that would not be pleasant, I love Stoper's work.
Obviously, there are better artists then Stoper out there. I'm not sure if the example you posted in that last picture is a Daz3d work, but even if it isn't we can take
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as an example. Some of his works can be quite photolike. The point I was trying to make on that quote was more concerned regarding developers in this type of games/VN's. Amoung those you can't get much better then Stoper and the ones I mentioned, but there are more obviously. For instance I didn't mention Lesson of Passion, NLT Media, LewdLab or Dr. PinkCake, just to name a few more, but I wasn't also trying to list all developers who have great visual renders.
Also, I wasn't trying to argue against your point of developers with higher quality getting more patrons. If it did come across like that I apologize. I'm also not trying to shame DecentMonkey's work or saying that he's a poor artist, because he's not. He's way above avarage in terms of image quality from most of 3d games we can find on this site, but I still stand by my statement when I said there's still a big difference between his work and Stoper, or most of the other names I mentioned.
You actually found an excellent example of one good render in most aspects from DecentMonkey's, but if I go through Fashion Business I can find hundreds of examples of renders with weird poses and weird expressions. In JOHN and in most of the games of the developers I mentioned I actually struggle to find one render that has these issues. Also, I used to play Fashion Business since it's very beggining, even in the old engine he had, before he switched to Renpy, but eventually I just got bored with the plot. I'll be honest, I think in terms of storytelling it's extremely poor, but that is just my single opinion. Others can beg to differ, but has someone who has some experience in writing I can say for sure that for me that kind of script it's not very hard to write. On the other hand I have to give credit to Stoper, because his script is actually pretty good. I'll reckon it has a few flaws in terms of flow and pacing, but I don't expect him to achieve a Pablo Neruda level of writing. For an adult VN I however think it's high quality. If I were to give him any kind of advise would be to maybe drop the whole detailing of each and every interaction Jessica has on any given day, because in the end it's the thing that I feel that's making it harder for him and in the long run can also be one of the reasons the story can get a bit more unrealistic. I'd go for an approach more like EvaKiss latest game, Our Red String, where the story also goes day-by-day, but it only focuses on the important interactions that each of the two main characters has any given day and the rest of the day just gets skipped. But then again, that's just my opinion and he might feel that taking that approach can go against the story he's trying to tell.
Anyway, I feel like I rambled now for a bit and kind of went on a tangent, but with my overall previous post I just wanted to kind of make a point that quality usually comes at the cost of time. It can be quite frustrating, but I appreciate that and the end result for me is a lot more satisfying. Most people usually prefer quantity over quality and that's fine, I can accept and respect that. But there are also people like me who actually prefer quality over quantity and do understand that in this particular case it's nearly impossible to achive the same results in the same timeframe of other developers. And I think it's important that people do realize that difference and understand why it is unfair to be demanding the same results from Stoper when comparing to someone like DecentMonkey.
