VN Ren'Py Jessica O'Neil's Hard News [v0.65] [stoperArt]

[cxx]

It's not the cash cow people think it is:

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that's nearly pocket change compared to scamstor.

 

[palmtrees89]

It's not the cash cow people think it is:

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I'd argue that ~$24.000 per year while only delivering a single update is quite the cash cow considering how little time of that year is actually spend working on this project. This graph clearly shows how he's started delivering less content the more support he's received. Slowly but surely. Like I said, it's a solid side hustle.

Between August+January 2020/21, everything went to shit. Which is quite ironic as that was also the update that made his Patreon numbers skyrocket. After that came a 6 month devcycle, then 7 months, and the most recent one with over 9 months. The current cycle is already 7 months deep, and there's no sign of a release coming anytime soon. I'm fairly certain he'll break his previous record once more.

That said, the graph doesn't look all that great in recent months, and will surely continue to drop further with each passing month without a release. Makes me wonder what stoper's gonna do after the next release? He's already pushed the limit of his supporters patience, that much the graph can tell. But ay, he said many times that he'd continue doing what he's doing, right? We'll see..

 

[Obranyi]

I'd argue that ~$24.000 per year while only delivering a single update is quite the cash cow considering how little time of that year is actually spend working on this project. This graph clearly shows how he's started delivering less content the more support he's received. Slowly but surely. Like I said, it's a solid side hustle.

Between August+January 2020/21, everything went to shit. Which is quite ironic as that was also the update that made his Patreon numbers skyrocket. After that came a 6 month devcycle, then 7 months, and the most recent one with over 9 months. The current cycle is already 7 months deep, and there's no sign of a release coming anytime soon. I'm fairly certain he'll break his previous record once more.

That said, the graph doesn't look all that great in recent months, and will surely continue to drop further with each passing month without a release. Makes me wonder what stoper's gonna do after the next release? He's already pushed the limit of his supporters patience, that much the graph can tell. But ay, he said many times that he'd continue doing what he's doing, right? We'll see..

Where he pushed the limit of supporters patience if this zombies continue support him and even more new zombies come, what is the logic to support? Once per year content with nice renders and shit sex with boyfriend, WOW, that I call a content worth to support every month, so stupid.

 

[palmtrees89]

Where he pushed the limit of supporters patience if this zombies continue support him and even more new zombies come, what is the logic to support? Once per year content with nice renders and shit sex with boyfriend, WOW, that I call a content worth to support every month, so stupid.

Well, look at the graph. Sure, there's hundreds of supporters who will continue spending their money for years probably, no matter what. Same with guys like ICSTOR or Gumdrop. That's why I said what I said in one of my previous posts from earlier today. Fact is though, he is currently at a point where his support is back to 2020 levels. That's why I'm questioning what is going to happen after this release IF the numbers continue to drop.

And I'm afraid many people don't see the main issue when they talk about the content. It's not so much that you get an update with characters you're not a fan of, it is more the massive gap in time between updates which makes it seem like the game only revolves around those characters. If stoper were to release an update every couple months like he used to, you'd probably see all the content you want.

I don't want to dive too deep into the character discussion here, but I'm certainly not a big fan of content involving Connor, Parker or the Mayor for that matter. I'm here because the quality of art is great, and 2+ years ago the premise was there. A bunch of characters I'd want to see content with, but there's simply not much to look forward to now that everything has turned into snail-speed. Other games have similar problems, stoper certainly isn't the only one.

But if I only came here to express my discontent about the characters or what's happening inside the game in general, well, why would I even come here anymore? My key issues lie with the development time, not because I dislike the game itself.

 

[leg28]

Need abandoned status here

i would prefer some new tag for this. maybe "no content but milking in progress"?

 

[Oliver Wendell Homely]

How do you explain that for the couple first years he made updates in ~3 months and now 1 a year, with as much or even lower content per update? Except for being sick in february, he didn't give excuses for the increased dev cycle.

DPC is the exception. He makes ~$50k a month from patreon alone. He also has Steam and maybe other avenues. But with $2k a month, let's say $1.5k after taxes and patreon's cut, you can live in Europe. Sure it's not much but it's more than the minimum wage in my country.

How do I explain it? How would I know? As I said, I'm trying to see if I can glean any insights by being on the Patreon for a time. At any rate, a lot of developers start of strong and then run out of steam. Have you never had a hobby you lost interest in? The sad thing is that his hobby/side hustle/whatever it is is something that a lot of perverts here want to fap to and so if he's lost interest then it affects us.

$1.5k after taxes etc. you can live in Europe, maybe, depending on where. Rural Portugal or Czechia, easy, but Paris or Amsterdam? No way. At any rate, I appreciate the "concern" by Obranyi and others, but it's really not a big deal for me. And if I may express a little concern of my own, why are you guys still hanging out here on the thread and spending time and emotional energy on this if it pisses you off so much? Go find another game or something!

 

[dolfe67]

At any rate, a lot of developers start of strong and then run out of steam. Have you never had a hobby you lost interest in? The sad thing is that his hobby/side hustle/whatever it is is something that a lot of perverts here want to fap to and so if he's lost interest then it affects us.

Sure but I don't get paid for my hobby, on the contrary I have to pay. And a few months of his amount of support is enough to build a top tier rendering PC and DAZ assets, so no excuse of "it's an expensive hobby".

He even bought a new PC to render faster, but it's only the rendering which is faster, still has to work for the posing and the writing.

$1.5k after taxes etc. you can live in Europe, maybe, depending on where. Rural Portugal or Czechia, easy, but Paris or Amsterdam?

Yes in big cities it's not enough. But when you do online work, you don't need to live there, be smart and live in a cheap town. Then you can move when you have enough support if you want.

 

[GingerSweetGirl]

Regardless of how you feel about Stoper, I think we can all agree that a lot of the problems with this game are related to his (lack of) transparancy. Some of us are fed up, and some of us still have patience, but I think we can all agree that his communication has been really lacking. It's one thing to go radio-silent on F95, this can be a pretty harsh forum, and the majority of posters never have and never will pay for the product. But what really hurts is his lack of transparency with his patrons. The excuses have become tired and predictable. I said, a year ago (god, it may have been longer), that Stoper needed to issue a mea culpa, lay all your cards on the table, admit the mistakes, and communicate a realistic plan for the future. At the time he was still active here, and he utterly refused to acknowledge any problems. Now, here we are, with a development pattern that has only gotten worse and a complete communication breakdown. Maybe we'll get an update this year, but I think we need to begin asking ourselves if we'll even get that. Regardless if this is a hobby or a business for Stoper, he owes it to his patrons to be far more candid. At one time he was very well respected, partially because of his transparency. If he could get back to that, I think it would improve this thread, and his reputation as a dev.

 

[lkjhgfdfghjkl]

i would prefer some new tag for this. maybe "no content but milking in progress"?

Findom tag

 

[GokutheG]

How do you explain that for the couple first years he made updates in ~3 months and now 1 a year, with as much or even lower content per update? Except for being sick in february, he didn't give excuses for the increased dev cycle.

DPC is the exception. He makes ~$50k a month from patreon alone. He also has Steam and maybe other avenues. But with $2k a month, let's say $1.5k after taxes and patreon's cut, you can live in Europe. Sure it's not much but it's more than the minimum wage in my country.

After playing the game and checking out the walk-through I'd say a main factor to the development slowing down is due to increasing difficulties in keeping the branching paths each relationship can go down under control and this is especially difficult if it's a developer's first game.

 

[PietruccioTheHilander]

After playing the game and checking out the walk-through I'd say a main factor to the development slowing down is due to increasing difficulties in keeping the branching paths each relationship can go down under control and this is especially difficult if it's a developer's first game.

let's say it's one of the causes

 

[Deleted member 5986070]

Sorry if this has been clarified already, but has there been any form of communication from stoper recently?

 

[homejorz]

Sorry if this has been clarified already, but has there been any form of communication from stoper recently?

Fairly certain Stoper has burnout pretty bad, and therefore updates are slow and he barely communicates on patreon. He is active in the JOHN discord though

 

[cxx]

Fairly certain Stoper has burnout pretty bad, and therefore updates are slow and he barely communicates on patreon. He is active in the JOHN discord though

and he posted something here a while ago.

 

[palmtrees89]

Fairly certain Stoper has burnout pretty bad, and therefore updates are slow and he barely communicates on patreon. He is active in the JOHN discord though

I said it before, and I'll say it again. Someone who KEEPS mentioning HOW MUCH FUN he has creating his scenes is NOT burned out. Someone who is telling his patrons in his various devblogs that he's making good progress isn't burned out either. Yes, that's what he's saying during every single development cycle, and yet it's only getting slower. The reasons for that are certainly not burnout.

He's made a blogpost roughly 2 years ago about being burned out and having a hard time finding inspiration for the scene he was working on at the time. He said that, took some time off, came back, apparently revitalized from checking out other smut, told his patrons that he's making "good progress" again, and a month later came up with yet another excuse as to why the update back then got delayed. And that went on for several more months.

He's always coming up with new excuses. That's how I see it.

 

[Oliver Wendell Homely]

I joined Stoper's Patreon recently and got a nice response to a message I posted. I see other patron posts also had responses. There are a few updates from the last several weeks, plus some art showing work on JOHN. He mentioned recuperating from a bad illness that continues to cause him some problems. Nonetheless, there seems to be progress on the game. I mean, I joined his Patreon, I didn't hire him to babysit my kids or something. It's not like he's obliged to tell me all about his real self and hearing some of you here complain that you don't know his real name or where he lives is pretty rich given that we're all using pseudonyms. To me it looks like the guy's had a rough year but is getting back into the swing of things. I hope that's true, but if it ultimately isn't true, I'll find something else to fap to and I'll be out a few bucks. I'm not going to make myself miserable being angry at an anonymous stranger for deciding he no longer wants to pose pixels in a way that makes my dick hard.

 

[GingerSweetGirl]

I joined Stoper's Patreon recently and got a nice response to a message I posted. I see other patron posts also had responses. There are a few updates from the last several weeks, plus some art showing work on JOHN. He mentioned recuperating from a bad illness that continues to cause him some problems. Nonetheless, there seems to be progress on the game. I mean, I joined his Patreon, I didn't hire him to babysit my kids or something. It's not like he's obliged to tell me all about his real self and hearing some of you here complain that you don't know his real name or where he lives is pretty rich given that we're all using pseudonyms. To me it looks like the guy's had a rough year but is getting back into the swing of things. I hope that's true, but if it ultimately isn't true, I'll find something else to fap to and I'll be out a few bucks. I'm not going to make myself miserable being angry at an anonymous stranger for deciding he no longer wants to pose pixels in a way that makes my dick hard.

I think it's useful to keep the totality of the AVG marketplace in mind. JOHN's issues are bad enough when looked at in a vacuum, but we see the same issues with other devs. The illnesses, moving, hardware difficulties, vacations, etc; none of these are "bad" excuses, and all of them are defensible...but a pattern begins to emerge. It doesn't matter if it's Stoper or L&P or Icstor (or countless other devs), if you pay enough attention you begin to see the same red flags. For each individual case it's impossible to definitively prove that someone is lying or exaggerating, but taken collectively their reasons for delays all become cliches. Overly ambitious games, with slow-burn pacing, have a bad reputation for devs that come down with mysterious illnesses, or move constantly, or travel the world, or have hardware problems. So I kinda view the frustration in this thread as broadly aimed beyond just Stoper. Yes, this thread is for his game, so he catches the brunt of the frustration, but if people didn't feel like they were seeing this same song and dance in other games I don't think the frustration would be so visceral.

And palmtrees89 makes an excellent point. Too many of the dev blogs tell us about how great the progress is, only for it to be undermined later when he delays the product. And then, when the update is released, it doesn't jive with the months of "good progress" that we've heard about. For a time I think we all assumed he just worked in fits and starts, so progress was made in bursts and then there was a prolonged downtime. But for the last 2 years development has been so slow, and enough inconsistencies have emerged, that many of us suspect that months go by without any work being done; only for a fit of work to be accomplished in the last 30 days before release. It's just the sort of inconsistency that really grinds people's gears.

I'm not angry about any of this. To me the game is simply dying and won't make it through 2024. That's ok, there's plenty of other things to do. But I do think the meta discussion surrounding the development is interesting and enlightening. The game itself is good and interesting enough to grab your attention, but you really have to stick around for the meta conversation. I personally just find it really fascinating to watch the development progression of games like this because it all seems so mysterious.

 

[OllisNews]

I used to be a patron at Stoper. There were also regular "updates". I don't care if the developer has now taken an artistic break or simply doesn't want to develop the game anymore, then write, the game is over! But to do nothing is wrong!

 

[Omiru0094]

I joined Stoper's Patreon recently and got a nice response to a message I posted. I see other patron posts also had responses. There are a few updates from the last several weeks, plus some art showing work on JOHN. He mentioned recuperating from a bad illness that continues to cause him some problems. Nonetheless, there seems to be progress on the game. I mean, I joined his Patreon, I didn't hire him to babysit my kids or something. It's not like he's obliged to tell me all about his real self and hearing some of you here complain that you don't know his real name or where he lives is pretty rich given that we're all using pseudonyms. To me it looks like the guy's had a rough year but is getting back into the swing of things. I hope that's true, but if it ultimately isn't true, I'll find something else to fap to and I'll be out a few bucks. I'm not going to make myself miserable being angry at an anonymous stranger for deciding he no longer wants to pose pixels in a way that makes my dick hard.

Excelent!! Agree 100% !!

 

[dolfe67]

I joined Stoper's Patreon recently and got a nice response to a message I posted. I see other patron posts also had responses. There are a few updates from the last several weeks, plus some art showing work on JOHN. He mentioned recuperating from a bad illness that continues to cause him some problems. Nonetheless, there seems to be progress on the game. I mean, I joined his Patreon, I didn't hire him to babysit my kids or something. It's not like he's obliged to tell me all about his real self and hearing some of you here complain that you don't know his real name or where he lives is pretty rich given that we're all using pseudonyms. To me it looks like the guy's had a rough year but is getting back into the swing of things. I hope that's true, but if it ultimately isn't true, I'll find something else to fap to and I'll be out a few bucks. I'm not going to make myself miserable being angry at an anonymous stranger for deciding he no longer wants to pose pixels in a way that makes my dick hard.

If he's still recuperating from his illness back in february, I don't see him getting back into the swing of things. And it's been at least a couple of rough years.

Also I don't think there is a lot of "angry" people, but I believe it's nice to be informed about the game's state before becoming a patron. But if people like you don't care, it's ok even though many think it's not deserved at the moment.