- Oct 15, 2016
- 851
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Absolutely none of this addresses the issue that I raised. It feels like boilerplate posting. I'm also scratching my head here on some of that response because its extremely ..I don't want to say naive but perhaps inexperienced would be a better word?
Here's some real world advice for you from another developer.
No, you didn't. You released a product in order to gain financial reward. This is also the biggest cop-out/misunderstanding of people new to this model. Early access isn't people funding you out of the kindness of their hearts; it's a Software As A Service model where they expect reward for the money invested. It's exactly why 99% of devs do a monthly release cycle - because monthly billing cycles creates a clear investment->reward model. And it's also why the biggest complaint of any dev that works on Patreon and doesn't monthly release or have extremely clear time lines for future content is that their Patreons feel like they're throwing money at nothing.
This "WE'RE BUILDING A COMMUNITY HERE" stuff that people try to pull. You understand that we know it's bullshit right? Even the people who are being polite to you know that it's bullshit. You didn't release a game and setup a community, you paywalled a game based on release or features. You're trying to make money. And there's nothing wrong with that but stop being so insufferably pretentious about it.
One further note on this.
Oh yes, a COMMUNITY. That will help with stuff. In the industry we call that "having people work on the game we make money on for free because otherwise it would cost us money to hire people and we don't want to do that". Testing access is NOT a benefit for a consumer, it's literally work. It's a job that people get paid for.
There's a name for this way back on C2 that I can't recall now but it has become known as "The Star Citizen excuse". It's taking more time because our product is more complicated and harder and stuff. Who designed the product? We did. So that's why we need to delay again. Could we have designed it to not take this time? Well yes but we're not doing it.
And here is basically the crux of the matter. Either, you do not understand the funding model that you are attempting to use, or you do understand the funding model and are refusing to implement it properly in the hope of monetising existing subscribers. But the worst thing is that you're ignoring your audience and I don't care if you're building a Pong clone or the next GTA, that's always going to turn out badly in the long run.
You haven't got a game. You might have a game, maybe, at some undefined point in the future. Or you might drop dead or lose motivation or move to Bengal or something, and at that point the people who are giving you money get nothing. The excuse then will be that they got a product every month.
At the moment you have a product which you want people to give you money for every month, in order for you to turn it into a game. The implicit promise of giving you this money is that they (as in the Royal "They") have some sort of ability to influence content or direction. When you get a groundswell of people on your Patreon, Discord, and on literally every page of this thread saying "is there any of X content yet" then you should fulfil that implicit promise even at the cost whatever design document you have come up with. Because as I've been trying to explain, you're selling a service. That service is the monthly release and update of a product and some sort of voice in future direction. The Fallout like "Yes, Yes But Sarcastic", "No (Yes)" poll is not that.
This is why I said in the first post that I was so confused about this as a project. You seem competent. You don't seem like an idiot and, outside of the patronising corporate speak which you have in no way earned, you seem to be able to converse with people like a normal human being. The fact that every time I come into this thread I see the same complaint for however long it has been since the initial release now is extremely confusing. Tons of projects have loud voices but it's rare to see one so consistent on exactly what they want and how they want it and getting back a minigame or something. It's like, if you go into a shop and ask for coffee and somebody brings you tea then you'd understand the mistake. Maybe they'd just picked the wrong one up? Or if they bring you back Bisto Gravy instead then you'd be even more confused but they're both brown bitty things so maybe that's ok for an alien or one of the million RenPy incest harem developers with a Patreon and a 55MB six month old 0.01 version? But your community are asking you for coffee and you're bringing them The History of The Battle of Agincourt by Sir Nicholas Nicolas.
Your game is not your product. Not really, it's just the convenient lie that both developers and Patreons tell each other to have this form of relationship. Your vision for the progression of content is your product. That ongoing development is the service that you'er selling and provide, not the hope of a finished game. So when your customers are asking for coffee, even if you desperately want to tell them about the dangers of cavalry charging at English longbowmen, just give them some coffee. Then when they're not looking sneak in your thesis on the Duke of Anjou together with the coffee and everybody wins.
