The market is oversaturated, so the average slice of the pie is getting smaller.
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.
The donations are "sticky", so the established creators like DarkCookie are earning too much while producing too little.
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.
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.
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).
The authors of Summer Heat are (wisely) not willing to risk hiring additional writers, coders, modelers and posers, and they don't want a game where you simply bang everyone like a champion stud, so we are stuck waiting for the next release.
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.
