I think it is more about control. She would have to give up control of her game if she shares writing or art. What happens if 6 months down the line her colorist decides to jump ship? She would have to frantically find another one whos work looks somewhat like the old one or try to do it herself. If you have to churn out a chapter every month it is a bit terrifying to depend on other people. People you just know over the internet.
Running a team also has its own set of problems. Tasks can't easily be divided. If you divide writing, characters might feel different in scenes written by different people. They would have to read each other scenes and correct them which costs extra time. If you divide art, characters will look different which feels off (for an example look at
Seeds of Chaos).
You have to explain to people what you want. Then you have to check if they got it right and if not you have to tell them what to change.
Finally there are finances. EvaKiss makes 6-9k a month which is a nice income for one person. Not so much for a team of 5.
Some decisions made by the dev are definitely tied to her financial situation and the patreon income. Back in the early GGGB days she mentioned she was supposed to have a person help her out with the coding, but since she was able to handle it, she opted out of sharing the cash. Her decision to stretch out GGGB's story was also somewhat money related. Most players know there wasn't much substance in the late updates compared to earlier ones. Eva Kiss axed the last announced dlc update for GGGB, and forced ORS' release because she was bleeding patrons after 1.0 to the point she lost about almost 1/3 of her supporters.
ORS appears to be a more ambitious project and I expect for her either to shell out for some additional help or move to bi-monthly update cycle down the line.
Yeah both of you are right. What I am going to say is quite obvious but it remains the reality:
EvaKiss is good but she's not a robot. For this kind of game, you need people to achieve all the tasks (drawning, coloring, development, writing, music...) and most importantly to manage all of them. You can have an idea of what it really takes by reading her previous post. I think the greatest "skill" of EK is that at a time she became aware that she wanted to do adult VN for a living and since that she has known where she wants to go and how. She also knows how to plan, how to develop a story and characters, how to tease and how to communicate about the game.
With ORS she has also managed to find talented people to work with. But to get skilled people you need money and I would almost say you need contracts if you want to make this a living. I know some of you here would be ready (and glad) to contribute almost for free (I know some of you are already doing it on other games) but you can work with the most passionate people, have the most dedicated team, it's almost impossible to claim you can rely on them for like two years or so (I think it was the time needed to complete GGGB?). This is particularly the case when you have another job and you do that on your free time.
Then, well if you have not enough money, everything is not lost but you will need more time to manage all the tasks. And working too long on the same project (either alone or in a team) is risky because at a time you can feel "stuck" on it due to repetitive tasks. That combined to the pressure to achieve it can make you lose motivation and stop the game or rush it in a bad way. And it also means a risk to lose subscribers on Patreon as time goes by...
So time and money are the issues and there is one more EK and all the creators here have to face to monetize their games: they're doing porn games. I saw some people here saying ORS is more like an erotic game and I'm close to think the same because the story takes a huge part on it but well, there are explicit sex scenes, even if it's drawn, it remains explicit...
So porn game means: not mainstream, underaged people are totally out of this (at least legally
) and you can only purchase it on very specific platforms. (Yeah I know those games could be on huge platforms like Steam, but I'm curious to know what are the real profits made by adult games on Steam). Worse still, people who like porn don't necessarily like that kind of games. So monetization is really hard and even if I'm not a fan of Patreon System (I prefer paying one time for a full game rather than small amounts each months) it has its benefits for this kind of games but it also means you have to deliver regular content...
Let's hope that one day (and it's funny because I thought of this a few times ago) adult studios could support this kind of sex content instead of "shitty" porn movies (with that you can take part of the discussion of what
Olivia_V said haha). At least once to try it (and I think ORS or BaDIK could be great examples)...
