Silver Bard is getting paid monthly to do yearly content updates and a handful of bugfixes, and, as the few years I've been on the Discord shows, only offers status updates when directly questioned. It's not Silver Bard whose time is being undervalued, its the Patreon subscribers and other supporters, which is part of the reason I stopped being one quite some time ago.
- Aug 25, 2017
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So let me get this straight. People are giving him money and support, of their own volition. They can stop anytime, but they don't. And it's somehow his responsibility to do what exactly? Take less money? Hit imaginary quotas?
It doesn't matter how much the dev is making. You are not entitled to what other people are paying the devs. You are not entitled to set expectations based on much other people are paying. If you don't want to support the dev, that's fine, but don't pretend that the people contributing those 800 bucks agree with you or are helpless to keep paying the guy for what you think is unsatisfactory work.
After a brief 5 year hiatus he will release a bugfix update and decide to make the game in another engine again to do it all over again.
I like this cycle of you making up your own version of what's being said, and then responding to that. Best way to win an argument is to be both sides of the argument, I suppose?
The technical term is
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BTW.Gets a LOT of mileage on teh Intertubbies that one.
He is clearly just farming strawmen so he can get another win on his "internet debate" card his mommy gave him.
- Aug 25, 2017
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You want a personalized response? Sure.
Says who?
And yet they still keep paying him. They must not be that bothered, right?
You think I'm the one making shit up? I'm not the one accusing the dude of milking patreon money or pretending that he has unwritten obligations to fulfill.
You can also keep your fantasies to yourself. Don't go projecting them on me.
You cannot *possibly* be unaware of psychological sunk-costs fallacy dynamics and Patreons not paying proper attention to where their money is going.
We have any number of games here that have been patently dead for years yet the soi-disant developers still keep pulling in money thanks to such phenomena.
And while that IS ultimately the personal business of the people parting with their money it certainly does not speak very highly of a dev (or 'dev') to de facto exploit it for their own benefit while providing little to nothing in exchange. There indeed are unwritten obligations inherent to such transactions.
- Aug 25, 2017
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I don't understand the point you're trying to make. Being aware of your own spendings and making informed decisions are all basic skills every adult should have. It's not the dev's responsibility to hold your hand and try to talk you out of giving them money. If you're too lazy to cancel a monthly subscription, that's on you. As for sunk-cost fallacy, there's bound to be at least a few regardless of how transparent a developer may be. Can you even quantify the number of people you think are being "exploited" or do you just rely on the assumption that it's a vaguely large enough amount for it to paint Silver Bard as a bad guy?
"There indeed are unwritten obligations inherent to such transactions." Legally enforceable and/or widely understood and accepted? Because I'd love some citations.
- Mar 28, 2017
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If I could sit on my ass and have 800 dollars a month, I would too.
It is their problem, but Patreon is used irresponsibly.
Eventually they might end up not renewing their debit or credit cards, and he'll be losing money.
If I take people's money purportedly for the purposes of/in exchange for developing Product X, then I have a self-evident implicit obligation to *actually develop it* else I'm a fucking conman. Whether those people are irresponsible idiots with their money or not has no bearing on this elementary moral principle - though it could be argued exploiting the mentally impaired is if anything even more reprehensible.
brb my eyes rolled under the couch over having to explain something this fucking basic to you
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So, you try to state you believe there are widely understood and accepted ideas to try to prove your point, without giving "citations."
And then say that the belief that there are widely understood and accepted ideas without giving citations is not definitive grounds for proof of a point in the same debate 5 seconds later.
I don't think you know how this works.
- Aug 25, 2017
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He is developing it though. Regardless of your perception of what's a good investment of his effort or his patron's money, he has the freedom to choose what he works on and how much work he puts into it in a given time frame. It's the patron's right to choose whether they want to support his decision. Your whole argument relies on the premise that he's somehow taking advantage of, according to you just now, mentally impaired people. Has the thought occurred to you that his patrons are making informed decisions?
I admit I worded that poorly. Allow me to rephrase the question. What are these relevant unwritten obligations? Are they comprehensive and/or practiced by the general population? Is there any written rule or law acknowledging the existence of such expectations?
Because from my point of view, RNDM's just throwing out assorted buzzwords and assuming the worst in both the dev and the patrons. "Patreons not paying proper attention to where their money is going" is a lot of words for "They must not be that bothered". It sounds like a lot of undeserved hate and anger directed at the fact that he's receiving 800+ dolllars monthly and not doing regular reports, which I'm not sure if it was actually promised to/expected by those 200+ patrons. Hence the citation part.
Edit: After looking through his patreon post history, I've come to the conclusion that sporadic updates are the norm. I don't know why anyone would expect him to stray from that.
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Oh he's certainly far from the worst, given he at least *does* release updates and whatnot. But his whole release pattern screams "absolute minimum investement of effort required to meet the nominal criteria of doing something" and we the observers certainly duly have the freedom to view him as yet another Patreon milker for it.
Please don't try to pretend the phenomenom was in any way uncommon, or that the platform's whole operating concept didn't create a strong incentive for it.
*wheeze* *gasp* Goofy pls. I sincerely doubt your blatantly selective optimism about people pissing away their money online convinces even yourself. The Internet is full of absolute idiots who probably shouldn't even be allowed in there without supervision for their own sakes, not in the least because it also has no shortage of unscrupulous people willing to exploit their shortcomings one way or another.
- Aug 25, 2017
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And I have the freedom to see you as another salty entitled dude, what's your point?Oh he's certainly far from the worst, given he at least *does* release updates and whatnot. But his whole release pattern screams "absolute minimum investement of effort required to meet the nominal criteria of doing something" and we the observers certainly duly have the freedom to view him as yet another Patreon milker for it.
Please don't try to pretend the phenomenom was in any way uncommon, or that the platform's whole operating concept didn't create a strong incentive for it.
*wheeze* *gasp* Goofy pls. I sincerely doubt your blatantly selective optimism about people pissing away their money online convinces even yourself. The Internet is full of absolute idiots who probably shouldn't even be allowed in there without supervision for their own sakes, not in the least because it also has no shortage of unscrupulous people willing to exploit their shortcomings one way or another.
Personally, I'm not surprised at how many people are supporting Silver Bard. Night Games is fun and has decent writing. The mechanics are somewhat novel and there's a decent amount of content and customization. A dollar is hardly a dent in my monthly expenses and if for whatever reasons I feel like he doesn't deserve my money, I'm still only losing at most 12 bucks in a year. What does it matter what other people are giving him?
I don't understand why the thought of someone getting "free money" seems to anguish you. You have absolutely no stake in what's being done with the money.
- May 7, 2019
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I'll just say your arguments are correct - for whomever takes the time reading them.
I personally blame Silverbard for never, ever releasing a full game, when he barely had any work left to do so. On Steam, itch.io or whatever. Several years ago, posts in this thread as proofs. What could have been a lucrative and encouraging business, has now turned into the usual (by breeding seasons' standards) scheme.
This is an offense and an outrage against one of my first loves in terms of Hentai games. I would gladly hand out $20-30 purchasing the game. But spending 1$ a month for 48 months? I'd feel like I'm being conned. That's just the genuine way I see it. Poor example of morals, show of poor integrity. A shame. He wasn't like this before, if that's any excuse.
- Aug 25, 2017
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From my point of view, it could be a number of reasons. I can understand not wanting to disclose the reasons or specifics because it generally turns into a shit show. Like I remember following Innoxia's blogspot for some time but stopped because half the comments were straight up toxic.
I don't understand how people are gauging whether a dev is working hard enough or not. Like if you were to hire a game developer and are not absolutely lowballing the shit out of them, how much money would you have to pay them? Because taking a look at graphtreon, the highest he's ever gotten was like 1600 dollars, which isn't exactly lucrative.
Or like consider this: How many work hours do you think he's putting in at his peak performance? Does that consider the amount of work hours that goes into work other than coding? Is the monthly earnings from Patreon adequately compensating the amount of work put in? Is that amount of work sustainable in the long term? Does that consider whether he has a day job and how that affects work-life balance? Is he even doing all this work for the money? Should he base his work on how much money he's getting? Should he only work as hard as he's getting paid? So what do we do with all the work hours he spent before his monthly earnings even took off? You can't just decide that his perceived work-to-pay ratio suddenly matters when he wasn't being adequately compensated for a while. Patreon's not a substitute for a work contract.
tl;dr: It's always been a relationship of people paying whatever they want and him doing whatever he want. You can't just decide for other people that it's no longer the case.
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Dunno if it is the case with Night Games currently, but one thing to also consider is that not every progress in the game is the kind of progress players care about.
E.g. it might take quite a while to develop / code a new framework that can handle all the content added over time, and makes it easier to add new content, but for the average player the new framework is boring.
E.g. it might take quite a while to develop / code a new framework that can handle all the content added over time, and makes it easier to add new content, but for the average player the new framework is boring.
- May 7, 2019
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Yeah, that's the thing. Patreon devs would be expected a $10-30/hour pay.
Do the maths, see how many work hours were effective, how much each was tariffed; after deducing the artwork commissions, of course. See Monster Girls Dreams for a comparison (unless Threshold also gets to that point, ultimately.)
Getting paid over $100/hour is frankly out of the question. Or you're a genius showing outstanding results