Patreon and "milker" devs

[KrystofDayne]

Part 0: Preamble

I wanted to muse a bit about my thoughts on Patreon and other similar sites like Subscribestar and how everybody seems to have a different opinion on how they work, how they should work or how they're supposed to work. I will focus on Patreon specifically because I have the most experience there but a lot of these other websites are clones of Patreon anyway, so it probably applies to them as well. I will bring it back to F95zone and the discussion being had on a lot of game forums about their "milker" developers in the end, though I won't mention any specific developers (even if I do have some in mind). And this obviously should be an open discussion with differing opinions on the matter.

Part 1: What Patreon thinks it is

It's actually very difficult to really suss out what Patreon thinks its own purpose is.

If you open the main website, the first slide boldly proclaims "For your real fans". This makes it sound like Patreon exists for established and recognized artists/creators who already have their own fanbase but Patreon is where the real fans go, maybe to exchange community or get exclusive bonus perks.

However, they quickly change focus on the following slides. From "Your wildest creative reality" and "Make it making art" all the way to "Creator is now a career". This is obviously a very different idea of Patreon's main focus; as a creator, Patreon claims, Patreon should be where you actually make your art, get paid doing it and build up your career.

In yet another, more hidden way, Patreon itself is a subscription-based website in the same way that streaming sites are. Depending on when you joined Patreon as a creator and your plan, Patreon takes between 5 and 12% of your income as a cut. This is reasonable enough in my opinion since Patreon needs a way to make money itself; but that model means it's just as dependent on Patreon subscribers as it is on its creators and incentivizes manipulative tactics like making it actually kind of difficult to cancel memberships (and therefore subscriptions).

This confusion about their own website has led to a lot of confusion in the people actually using the site, both the creators and the patrons.
This leads me to the following model of different Patreon creators.

Part 2: The different kinds of Patreon creators

As I see it, there are 3 different types of creators on Patreon that use the website for slightly different purposes. I will note that I actually think these 3 different models overlap and a lot of the time, a creator embraces more than one aspect which can lead to even more differing opinions on what the creator's responsibility to their subscribers is.

1. The "buy-me-a-coffee" creator: This a fairly rare kind of creator that uses Patreon just as a means for people who are fans of their (existing) work, to donate a bit of money to their cause. They don't promise any perks or extra content on Patreon and have an extremely limited output on the site. Generally, these creators are upfront about this situation before people sign up and since they don't promise anything, can never disappoint.
   
   
2. The "bonus content" creator: This is probably the most common type of Patreon account, seen especially often in YouTubers or podcasters. They probably started out without a Patreon account, just building their audience on their free content, and as their channel grew, became more professional and as they transitioned to making their content creation a full career, needed a more steady income stream. As such, they are often similar to type-1 creators, but to incentivize more people to actually sign up to their Patreon account, they offer often low-effort extra perks, like unedited behind-the-scenes footage, updates and previews on upcoming work and possibly, on higher levels, direct interaction with them as well as credits in their media output. They often make clear that their actual main output will remain freely available but, to keep Patrons loyal, they might occasionally upload special "Patreon-exclusive" content that is often content that is not good enough or monetizable enough to upload on their main accounts.
   
   
3. The career creator: This type of creator has either their main content or a substantial amount of it on Patreon and by subscribing to their account, you essentially buy a product, similar to video streaming services. As such, subscribers of this type of account more often feel entitled to a regular output of content since their subscription doesn't feel like a donation but like a purchase. Examples of this kind include reaction-style YouTubers who post full-length reactions on their Patreon account while posting edited (often for copyright reasons) versions on YouTube. Good creators of this sort have a regular schedule and a lot of output, good communication with their subscribers and incorporate their Patreon's wishes in what sort of content they produce.

As I said, while in my opinion fairly exhaustive, these categories do overlap. A type-1 creator might still put out the occasional perk or bonus content. A type-2 creator might, over time, develop a more regular schedule of bonus content, creating an expectation in their subscribers similar to type-3 accounts, or conversely, might over time revert to a type-1 creator as they feel the extra output on Patreon is becoming too much work and not in keeping with why they made an account in the first place.

The issue with a lot of developers comes, in my opinion, of trying to be type-2 or even type-3 while actually being closer to type-1.

Part 3: VN/Game developers and "milkers" on Patreon

I will limit this discussion specifically to the type of erotic VN/game developers whose works you might find pirated here on F95zone. I don't have enough experience with other small, indie game devs to speak with authority about the difference there.

When I look at the best kinds of good-faith small-time game developers and their Patreon accounts, I see mostly type-1 to type-2 creators but kind of in a different way than YouTubers. The difference often comes from the fact that these creators don't have an established audience or career and need to make their money almost exclusively through Patreon. Still, they tend not have a lot of content on Patreon that you wouldn't find elsewhere, most prominently of course on this very site. And these creators know that. They know that "early access" or just having access to the game in general on their accounts is not why most people sign up, they don't come for the content itself. People sign up to their accounts because they want to financially support game devs they like or possibly for a bit of bonus content, like special renders or just progress reports.

The issue around "milkers" arises in my opinion when there isn't a clear understanding between creator and subscriber about which kind of account is being promoted or if the developer slowly changes their type of account without making this clear or even admitting it to themselves.

I think milkers, such as they exist (up for debate), are game developers that probably started out not as type-1, but a kind of type-2 that is closer to type-3; while people didn't really sign up for the game itself, since they can find that elsewhere, they did sign up with an expectation in mind reminiscent of type-3 accounts, often with good reason when looking at the creator's output. The content being signed up for might not be the game, but it was the updates, the special perks, the subscriber input to the game, the extra renders, all of that stuff. And creators often incentivize subscriptions by promising this kind of content in a regular fashion similar to type-3 creators.

The worst kinds of devs are those that promise to be or brand themselves as type-3 creators, with the advertised content as described above. But they feel they are type-1 creators, those that don't have an obligation to post content and can view their subscribers as merely generous donors, rather than customers.

Part 4: Conclusion and Do milkers even exist?

Whenever milker devs are discussed on this website, there are always some comments saying that any patron could cancel their subscription whenever they like, nobody is forced to continue giving unreliable devs their money. And that is obviously true. But as I see it, this is true of a lot of scams.

The issue is not with the people (mabye naively) believing creators' deceptive lies and promises, it's with that same creator using those deceptive lies and promises as manipulation. The problem is not the con artist's victim, it's the con artist. All of us are susceptible to manipulation and lies, whether we fall for this particular scam or not doesn't change the fact that it often is a scam.

In this post, I tried to delineate different types of creators on Patreon, all of whom can operate in good faith with satisfied subscribers. I think Patreon itself is partly responsible for making it unclear what kind of service they actually do or try to provide. But manipulative scammers will always find a way to game the system and in this instance, this involves lying about which kind of creator they are.

 

[tanstaafl]

I mean, I'm sure at least one exists. Do I think that devs that have been accused of it are actually guilty of it? Possible, but who knows. Example: Do I think that ICSTOR actually made the conscious decision to drag his feet to get more money from his Patreon? Probably not, honestly, but the chance that he actually did is higher than zero at this point. But, the chance is also higher than zero that it could be any number of situations that occurred instead. Burnout, bored of current project no matter how popular, RL issues, etc. etc. People can be unreasonable so no matter what is true, a dev in that situation is going to take flack.

 

[FleshSac]

Is it Thursday already?

 

[Girm Ork]

I don't have a Patreon page or any other kind of crowdfunding support. But I know some developers who fund their games that way. So I'll answer based on my knowledge of their Patreon careers.

In my opinion, "milking" does exist. But in most cases, the devs deserve their milk. They have worked hard to earn their subscribers. They spend years making free games with no guarantees of financial return. Too many of them fail and do not even get paid, unlike Steam/DLsite devs (like me) who can always sell a few hundred copies of the game and make some money.

So the milking devs just get their initial investment back.

 

[desmosome]

I don't have a Patreon page or any other kind of crowdfunding support. But I know some developers who fund their games that way. So I'll answer based on my knowledge of their Patreon careers.

In my opinion, "milking" does exist. But in most cases, the devs deserve their milk. They have worked hard to earn their subscribers. They spend years making free games with no guarantees of financial return. Too many of them fail and do not even get paid, unlike Steam/DLsite devs (like me) who can always sell a few hundred copies of the game and make some money.

So the milking devs just get their initial investment back.

That's honestly a terrible way to look at it lol.

Milkers generally get labled as such because of shit communication. If a dev made it clear that they don't have a lot of free time and this is a hobby and they appreviate any support coming their way, then they can be as slow as their life circumstances dictates. Hell, they could even start out as incredibly prolific devs then later on, they get married, change jobs, or whatever which limits their free time. If they communicate this, they are absolved because patreons are mot held at gunpoint. Anyone can decide for themselves if they wish to continue supporting.

But there are devs promising a ton, failing to deliver, making excuses, setting dealines and routinely missing them, going silent randomly, and just generally coming off as milkers. And the worst offenders are generally devs that build up a large following with decent work just to turn around and turn into a ICSTOR or whatever other prime milkers there are. No one "deserves" to mislead their patreons. Fuck that noise. Simply communicate your situation honestly. That's literally all that is needed. Even saying you got burn out and need to chill out is better than lying about comuputer blowing up or something.

 

[c3p0]

Is it Thursday already?

Yes, do you want popcorn?

 

[moskyx]

That's honestly a terrible way to look at it lol.

Milkers generally get labled as such because of shit communication. If a dev made it clear that they don't have a lot of free time and this is a hobby and they appreviate any support coming their way, then they can be as slow as their life circumstances dictates. Hell, they could even start out as incredibly prolific devs then later on, they get married, change jobs, or whatever which limits their free time. If they communicate this, they are absolved because patreons are mot held at gunpoint. Anyone can decide for themselves if they wish to continue supporting.

But there are devs promising a ton, failing to deliver, making excuses, setting dealines and routinely missing them, going silent randomly, and just generally coming off as milkers. And the worst offenders are generally devs that build up a large following with decent work just to turn around and turn into a ICSTOR or whatever other prime milkers there are. No one "deserves" to mislead their patreons. Fuck that noise. Simply communicate your situation honestly. That's literally all that is needed. Even saying you got burn out and need to chill out is better than lying about comuputer blowing up or something.

See, this is where the problem lies. I agree that failing to communicate what's going on with their project on a regular basis is a clear red flag. Even if they aren't scammers, this shows very little respect for their supporters, as if they were taking their money for granted, and that's not how you should conduct any business. But assuming we are talking about communicative devs, no patron can know for sure if a certain dev is lying or being honest. We can see trends, we can recognize past behaviors from other devs that ended badly, but we can't watch a 24/7 stream of their life to be absolutely sure about what's actually going on.

So what actually happens is that, at some point, we just lose our faith on the dev/project because we get tired of waiting (or of reading their excuses), or we feel the output doesn't match our expectations (sometimes because the dev hyped it too much, sometimes because we were misled by our own minds). At that critical point, we just won't believe dev's word anymore even if they are being totally honest. Maybe it's true their computer blew up but we just don't care anymore. And from that point on, some of 'us' can't help but label this dev as a scammer. It's up to everyone of us to set this bar, and some people are more patient or lenient than others, the same way some people are more willing to support starting projects or shady devs, and it's still their choice even if we don't agree with it. It should also be our obligation as adult people to realize that we can't be the judge of someone else's honesty with so little proof, and the wisest and most cautious thing to do once the doubt creeps in is to publicly explain why we don't trust the dev anymore and then just walk away from that game. There's no point on dwelling on that, once we've decided this dev is not worthy of our money.

Also, and especially in this forum, it can't be ignored that some people just shout scam as soon as possible because it gets you brownie points from other fellas who like to pose as the tough guys who know better and would never be tricked by those bad, bad devs. That's only noise, but it undoubtedly affects everyone's perception of what a scammer dev is.

 

[TheMagicalGurl]