- Feb 19, 2021
- 150
- 375
You can dislocate Helen all you want, but you can't dislocate my nuts from your mouth.
- Dec 23, 2018
- 5,024
- 19,275
Why imagine thus this is the reality of this game in the last two years
It feels like that's all or most of these VNs at this point. It's more like we're lucky if an update comes out at least once a year. It almost feels some are slowly starting to stretch that "year" out to longer and longer.
- Apr 10, 2022
- 1,039
- 1,185
That was sarcasm.
And we were telling you about Helen, but nobody realizes yet that she's the best waifu in the game !
this is actually a big mistake compared to those who pay all year round and get 1 update for their money per year
why can't you tell people to pay attention, there will be 1 update a year and share it, I seriously don't understand who pays for this
very unfair but this is my opinion
why can't you tell people to pay attention, there will be 1 update a year and share it, I seriously don't understand who pays for this
very unfair but this is my opinion
- Sep 2, 2020
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honestly if you want some background info, adults VN's from like 8-10 years ago weren't the most quality things out there, in fact rather terrible and the only decent ones were japanese made and even then most explicit version of things that you like such as cartoons and what not existed within Rule 34's umbrella of just plain bad pornographic material.
Fast forward today there's massive adult VNs like Badik, City of Broken dreamers etc and the more famous ones before them were stuff like milfy city. The bar has been pushed so high up as to what makes a good VN now that 60% of the games here are bottom tier trash. The cons of that being creators like DPC basically becoming bloated with ego with the amount of support these creators get when their game explodes in popularity, so much so that doing a annual update cycle is seen as a norm now. Updates are bigger and to justify that most creators opt for more time to do things.
I think there are a few reasons for that:
- The market is oversaturated, so the average slice of the pie is getting smaller.
- The donations are "sticky", so the established creators like DarkCookie are earning too much while producing too little.
- The production quality floor is constantly raising. People used to think that fully-rendered non-sex scenes were high production quality, but now we've grown accustomed to engaging writing, good lighting, good camera angles, PBR, non-default poses and facial expressions, hair, fabric, water and soft tissue physics simulation, animated sex scenes that aren't just mannequins pistoning in and out.
So the authors are at a crossroads:
- hire a whole team to improve the production quality while maintaining a quick release schedule (but this requires either becoming a viral success or a very good marketing team that can tell what niche is underexploited (gay furries, NTR, incest etc)
- make the game you want at a sustainable pace (if you earn $500 from Patreon and $3000 at work, you probably won't scale your Patreon to $2000 if you switch to working part-time for $1500)
- scale down the production quality in a way that doesn't hurt your game's popularity (write a basic plot that only serves to stitch the sex scenes together and reuse assets liberally for non-sex scenes is the usual route)
- Mar 8, 2017
- 94
- 174
You can dislocate Helen all you want, but you can't dislocate my nuts from your mouth.
Dude stop trying to put on your big hat and do the analyst game, you absolutely don't know anything about economics. There has never been more money thrown by people at adult games than ever and it has been exponentially increasing for the past ten years. Go back to school nerd
- Jun 4, 2017
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- Aug 29, 2016
- 459
- 452
Really!!!
Dates are posted two posts above yours.
- Jul 25, 2020
- 196
- 288
Some people just want to watch the world burn instead of taking the time to read lol
I'd wager the overall pie is also shrinking somewhat. I have nothing to back this up but I feel like for a while now that the VN scene had peaked a few years ago. While there may still be many people interested in it, there may not be as many willing to pay for it. Or at the very least, there's a more static rate of people discovering something on sites like to then donating to the creator.
Yea, I've said it before but Patreon as a business model is really weird. On one hand, it gives creators artistic freedom without time constraints and on the other there is ZERO need for accountability on their part. It's both a "product" being sold and "simple donations" to a creator. But the genie's out of the bottle, no going back now.
This one. I don't know. While I do admit I absolutely love the attention to detail Summer Heat has in its renders, I've only seen a few other VNs like that to really say that this constant increase in the standard is really all that substantial. For most other VN's efforts it just reminds me of the law of diminishing marginal returns. Meaning at some point they're just wasting more resources (time, in this case) with less and less of a return on the overall output (noticeable quality improvement).
I think Summer Heat is a different story. While I've kind of lost some faith, I think they really are still just trying to figure out that "point of maximum" yield on that diminishing returns curve. Which is to say, they're still trying to find that balance. Also Summer Heat really does deliver on those things you mentioned. So I honestly can't complain, my frustration is more with the overall trend rather than Summer Heat specifically.
My thoughts:
As for other VNs, I think most of those devs are just going hog wild. They have no self-constraint, huge egos, and no self-accountability. Constantly putting in shit no one asked for, taking a year or longer to crap out writing you'd find in a shitty Netflix show no one ends up watching, and all while producing a very marginal improvement on the overall quality compared to the additional time taken. An example being spending a lot of time on rendering animations only for them to just end up still looking weird/clunky.
There are some things that have definitely increased the threshold of what's considered top-quality for VNs but as for the rest like facial expressions, real world physics, non-clunky sex animations, and good writing. I haven't seen much of an improvement in them to say that 1 year and longer makes sense when it feels like the quality is pretty much the same as when updates used to take less time. Which is why I really don't feel like I'm asking for the moon when asking for 6 to 8 months between updates. 6 months for something short, 8 months for something long.
A lot of the popular devs aren't making the necessary concessions to not prolong a dev cycle and are just going balls to the wall due to advantage of getting a tidy sum each month regardless of an update. Some opt to just cut some content and save it for later, some only focus on a few of the LIs each update, some don't choose to put in random non-sex animations no cares about. It's a lack of self-management. They can do whatever they want but it just feels pretty ridiculous when you take a step back and look at it. A lot of people are just going to be sticking around for the characters they like and not really for the writing or overall impact of the VN itself. It doesn't have to be that good because I frankly don't think VNs are ever going to be that good. A lot of them simply don't have the writing chops to say it's not just a porn game when it seems like they're desparately trying to say "It's not just a porn game, GOD DAMN IT!" Except when it reads like something a large tv/movie production company just sharts out occasionally then ... yea, it kinda is just a porn game. No matter how many cool bells and whistles or shiny pyrotechnics you put in to distract people from the subpar writing.
That all being said, I really can't complain about Summer Heat. Everything's top notch and it's one of the few if not only one that can take a year and actually deliver something that makes me think it was worth the wait. Again, just frustrated with this overall trend. Still, one thing that does concern me is what kind of update we'll being getting this around since I remember the Naughty Fox team saying they'd essentially be putting out updates in parts moving forward as a way to just cut some content and save it for the next one as a way cut down on time spent on just one update. I'm not sure whether things just kind of snowballed or something else went on. I don't know. I haven't really been following along on the thread. I just kind of pop in from time to time.
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- Jun 18, 2022
- 3
- 86
Not yet but it has been mentioned previously on Patreon so it's to be expected one day.
Hello, everyone!
This week consisted mostly of coding, SFX and creating new renders. There are a couple of scenes in this update that we're especially happy with how they turned out. Visually, they feel like a big change from the previous day and the early game content in general.
This comes with the unfortunate downside of longer loading times for us since the scenes have been pretty heavy and slow to work with... but luckily that won't be a problem for long. We'll be upgrading the ancient parts causing the choke. The CPU, for example, probably belongs in a museum.
In the coding department, we added SFX to a couple hundred lines of code and worked through some tasks from our backlog.
One of our bigger tasks was finding out how translations work, so this week we made a partial test translation and coded it in. Our language of choice was Swedish, which felt truly cursed for some reason, but we learned a lot. Now we know what to do in the future when it comes time to translate for Steam.
Next week, we'll be working on a little group scene and possibly putting the girls in some compromising positions... And of course the special render with Ms. Hill is coming up!
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Hello, everyone!
This week consisted mostly of coding, SFX and creating new renders. There are a couple of scenes in this update that we're especially happy with how they turned out. Visually, they feel like a big change from the previous day and the early game content in general.
This comes with the unfortunate downside of longer loading times for us since the scenes have been pretty heavy and slow to work with... but luckily that won't be a problem for long. We'll be upgrading the ancient parts causing the choke. The CPU, for example, probably belongs in a museum.
In the coding department, we added SFX to a couple hundred lines of code and worked through some tasks from our backlog.
One of our bigger tasks was finding out how translations work, so this week we made a partial test translation and coded it in. Our language of choice was Swedish, which felt truly cursed for some reason, but we learned a lot. Now we know what to do in the future when it comes time to translate for Steam.
Next week, we'll be working on a little group scene and possibly putting the girls in some compromising positions... And of course the special render with Ms. Hill is coming up!
- Sep 30, 2022
- 2,484
- 2,913
There are several newer VNs that have excellent writing--better than almost everything that existed 3-4 years ago. In my opinion, the writing quality of new entries that stick around has improved dramatically. I generally agree with everything else you said.
- Nov 13, 2023
- 99
- 121
Which ones would those be? Because I can think of a few, but they were started 3-4 years ago.
I'd like to share, but don't want to mention other games here. I keep thinking I'll get around to writing a list of my favorite VNs with brief summary reviews, but I never seem to get that done.