I love the opening of this post, and clearly you are an intelligent and articulate person. Where I object is the use of the term "milking". On BeanieGuy's Patreon his earnings are posted (he doesn't hide the info from Patreon as to how much support he gets). As of today, it's $500 per month. That is not enough to live on in a first-world country, and in fact after Patreon takes their cut it's barely anything at all. It can't be their full time job. So pace of development of this game is dictated by how much time and energy they can muster outside of their regular work and personal life. Maybe I'm assuming I understand too much, but I'm a developer too, who works on games in my spare time, and I know how hard it is to squeeze it in. I also know that it's even harder to squeeze it in for small amounts of monetary reward. The crux of the matter is, we want devs to work faster and to produce quality work, but we don't want to pay them. I'm guilty too, though I do support multiple devs in single payments to patreon here and there. I definitely don't support an amount consistent with how much time I've spent playing and enjoying these games.
This produces a psychological phenomenon called "cognitive dissonance", which is an uncomfortable mental state in which someone finds themselves when they realize their attitudes do not align with their behavior. I like many of the games on this site, I believe I should pay for work I value, but I'm not currently paying for every single one I like. So, the discomfort of cognitive dissonance motivates me to either change my attitude or change my behavior. For some of us, it means we start putting out support more often. For others is means we decide the games aren't worth our money. It explains how often you read posts on here that angrily and aggressively trash games that the poster never paid for. Why so angry? (Not you Aristos, you seem very measured in your thoughts on this. I'm talking about those troll-like kinds of posters we all see here). The anger comes from the cognitive dissonance. "Milking" is a common insult thrown at devs, and in my opinion it mostly comes from someone wanting to justify their lack of support, as in "I'm not stealing your work, you are trying to take advantage of me." (I understand that Beanieguy is making his game available for free, so no one here is stealing from him, but it still describes the attitude, i.e. "I'm not refusing to support a hard-working dev, I'm refusing to be taken advantage of by a lazy dev").
It's not beyond reason to think that some devs draw out games to try and make more money, but it's just as likely, if not more, that they find it hard to motivate themselves to work steadily for so little monetary reward, and develop slowly because of it. The pace of this game is great to me. It's a great build-up in terms of in-story time, it's just taking lots of real-life time to get the story to the point where the sex is happening. The "FOR YEARS" problem is not a story-telling problem, it's a pace of development problem, and I would suggest that for those of us here that want it to move faster, supporting is the best way to try to make that happen.
Thank you for your measured post too.
I understand your cognitive dissonance argument, but in my case I'm currently supporting 5 adult game devs on Patreon, and I'm not supporting more because I can't afford it. I mean, I could switch to their lowest Patreon tiers so that I could contribute to more people's games at the same time, but the way I see it, that's not going to make any difference for any of them so I'd rather focus on just a few devs at a time and pay a bit more to each of them.
I've supported other devs in the past, and for various reasons at some point I just decided it wasn't worth, so I moved to others. That is, I've been supporting 5 devs for quite some time now, but they've not always been the same.
I make no internal excuses for not supporting a specific dev; I simply support those whose work I appreciate the most and that I consider to be under-appreciated. When this excitement and trust on my part dies out, I just leave them without any remorse or hard feelings.
Now, before dealing with the reasons for my hatred of milkers, I'd like to make a clarification.
I wrote that any adult game dev who fails to provide sex scenes after years of development fell into either of those two categories that I said; after reading your post, it's clear to me that it was too simplistic and that characterization did not reflect the diversity of circumstances and personalities of every dev. I never thought Beanie Guy was milking or fooling himself about the relevance of the game he's making, but I do believe he could have planned the story development much more efficiently, focusing on what was central to the game's premise and modifying the way in which in-game time is presented in order to make the most out of the little time he presumably has to work on this project.
In that regard, I must disagree with you about the story's pace being great. Again, the dev has released numerous updates during the past 31 months, which for me would be more than enough to provide something, anything, with the sister-in-law if the approach had been different.
Finally, I admit I hate milkers, and I have voiced my contempt a few times in the threads of their respective games.
However, my motivation for slamming them doesn't lie in my alleged frustration because I'm not receiving some product they'd theoretically be supposed to give me; in fact, more often than not I criticize devs whose game I don't like or even play.
For me, it's much simpler: I really enjoy this hobby; I love how adult games have increasingly better art and stories since I discovered this site, and how some devs are always improving themselves in order to create more impressive projects. However, many of the devs that I personally consider to be among the very best in this industry, who are working hard to take these games to the next level, only get a ridiculous fraction of the support and money that a bunch of others dev get on a monthly basis without lifting a finger.
That makes me sick, on the one hand, because I feel genuinely bad for those reliable, hard-working, imaginative devs; and on the other hand (and very importantly), because I believe that rewarding this kind of dishonest behaviour will end up discouraging those devs who are struggling, and perhaps it will convince them that they should just put out the next brainless harem incest game instead of a well thought-out story coupled with gorgeous renders and (maybe) even pretty animations. Milkers are toxic for this kind of entertainment, or any other industry for that matter.
