Why don't you try to make a game, dedicate all your free time, stop doing other things, and see your work being leaked at launch, maybe that way, you can reflect a little.
I know this is a pirate site, but have you ever thought that if every developer, seeing their work being leaked, gave up on making the game? What would you download from there?
Man, it's not because of the leak, one hour or another it will leak. The problem is the time is too short, and many people stop supporting it if they can download it for free on launch day.
Last month I really wanted to play a game, I supported the developer, I barely finished downloading it, and it appeared here, so I ask you, why support? If I can get it for free on launch day?
And seeing the number of supporters decreasing, do you think it will encourage the developer? Have you ever taken a look at the "abandoned" tag on this site? You've never wondered why that plethora of abandoned games.
I also know that this is no reason to stop supporting, if you really like a game, and you can support it, do it. But many do not think so.
Actually, I am making a game and it is on this site. This is my "free" alt, so I can browse and post without it influencing my "business".
The hypocrisy happens when a member of over 5 years - ON A PIRATE SITE - complains about one specific leak for one specific game. It's not a fucking secret what happens here and my post above was just to highlight the hypocrisy and idiocy of making such a comment on this particular forum.
The devs of these games know exactly what happens here, and on dozens of other similar sites, that aggressively compete to be the first to leak a new game. As devs, we can either expend a lot of effort trying to control such leaks or we can accept that it will happen and use this site to our advantage. Did you even know that F95 buys games and subs to some Patreons just to get new releases and then post them here? Wanna talk about incest? The developer/pirate site symbiosis is a great example of an incestuous relationship, lol.
Do you have any concept of how much exposure a game can get on this forum? There's over 4 million registered members, and while I am sure a large percentage of those are not active, there's still several hundred thousand that are. When I released my demo, I did no advertising whatsoever. No development threads, no talking about it at all on here. It's just a project of mine so I can learn DAZ and Renpy and to kill some of my free time - and yet - the first day it was posted here, my simple demo was downloaded over 10,000 times and I got my first few patrons. That is the power of this place. And it's FREE.
My patrons are supporting me because they want to see me improve and succeed and therefore the product they get will be that much better. They don't support me (yet) because they can get the game a week early.
No dev in the world can 100% control piracy. Even multi-million dollar AAA titles get cracked and leaked eventually. And contrary to what many believe here, there are ways to ensure you control releases. They just take a lot of extra effort and time, which is seldom worth it, TBH. Devs can watermark releases to identify where the leak happened. They can serialize them for each patron. Lots of other techniques.
My point is, most patrons support the artist, not the product. And they won't just change their minds because the game got released on here. If they do, then they probably would have canceled their subs anyhow, as soon as they got the goods and then do it again on the next release.
The "Holy grail" for most devs here, is to get on a more mainstream platform, such as Steam. Then access is more controlled and revenues can skyrocket. Plus, purchasing games from those type of platforms, come with all sorts of extras and perks that you can't get from just downloading a pirated copy here.
As for the abandoned games .... I can say almost unequivocally, based on my experiences so far, as a dev, that probably not a single one of those games was abandoned because of any leaks on this, or any other game site. These sites GENERATE interest and revenue, not decrease it! 99% of those abandoned games, from what I have seen, were abandoned because of several other, more common reasons. The number one reason being that most of those start up devs thought they could just get DAZ and Renpy and whip up some simple VN in a week, than milk patrons for beer money every month. When they find out it actually takes hundreds (thousands!) of man-hours of work, to make a decent VN, they bail. There's also a ton of fly-by-night devs who whip up some simple, but desired niche fetish demo, get a few hundred patrons, then milk them for all it's worth until their tower of cards collapse and they ditch and run to their next scam.
Last month I really wanted to play a game, I supported the developer, I barely finished downloading it, and it appeared here, so I ask you, why support? If I can get it for free on launch day?
You contradict yourself here. One one hand, you are flaming me for calling BS on that guys complaint about the leak and than you throw this hypothetical out, saying why support a dev when you can get the game here free?
You support the dev because you want to support the dev. Period. People do what they want with their money. Some have surplus and they are fine with a small monthly amount supporting a dev for years. Others are no so free with their hard earned dollars. Supporters come and go all the time. You have noticed a pandemic recently, haven't you? And the skyrocketing inflation that rode along with it? Well, that trickles down to here.
I've spent hundreds of hours on my project, with almost no return yet on the effort. I have a few patrons giving me a small monthly amount (which I really appreciate considering all I have released is a demo so far) and I won't even touch their donations until I have enough to roll back into the project as something useful, like a hardware upgrade. Wanna know why I do it? First, because I wanted to learn how to do this thing... and I am progressing nicely there. Second, just because it feels nice to make something that people enjoy. My best donation so far was some random one time $25 dollar one where the person sent me a note saying "Thanks for making a game with a nice thicc LI (paraphrased)" - That stuff just feels good.
Anyhow, that's all have to say.. apologies to Royal Candy for the derail. I like this game and I haven't played it for a few updates so I am going to try and make time to play it this weekend.
