- Sep 7, 2022
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The issue with daz games is rendering represents such a disproportionate creative effect and physical time spent; it's nearly impossible to divvy it up in a way amicable to two or more artists. I know if it was me; if I was taking on 50% of the art render workload of a project, I'd expect at least 30-40% cut of gross. (for those who think that's unreasonable, you havent done enough rendering - I'd gladly take 20% to just be a writer).I think it's the rendering time that matters the most. I used to support a developer who could only render three images a day because he was using a laptop. When he got a new machine, he started rendering more than 15 per day, but his renderings were much simpler.
But the economics don't work out, given that few games break ~4000ish plus a month; they hover in this middle ground where they're profitable with a single artist, but not profitable enough to risk handing over the bulk of the IP to a second party. Consider that - you not only need to fork over a large amount of your gross, but short of incorporating and having fancy NDAs you're taking on a huge risk of bringing others onboard.
Having said all that, I DO think there are improvements many Daz devs don't leverage to speed up production time for cash. Things like renting Iray server farms; so while I understand the reticence to expanding one's operation, I'm still critical of devs who use the same workflow when they have 4k coming in a month vs $300.