Sweet Force
Member
- May 18, 2017
- 257
- 1,176
You called me stupid?, You just made an enemy for life!... I'm lying, I'm joking, you're one of the most reasonable people in the thread, I can't take anything you say the wrong way. Maybe I shouldn't have generalized so much, I'm not saying that all developers should have a shark mentality and that those who don't expand their team are egocentric or lazy, I just find it curious how some developers who have the opportunity to hire people and don't do it use the same explanation: "Only I can make it perfect", and that there are exceptions to the rule that VNs are exclusively 1 or 2 person projects.Of course they will always be exceptions. It doesn’t change 99% of everything else.
Anyway, i don't know what to think of your remark about AVNs devs/creators, saying a dev who doesn't expand and/or create a studio/company, is either lazy or arrogant is a bit much if not, excuse me for saying it, a bit dumb. (even if, again, there are exceptions and probably some of them are like that for sure (and i have some in mind too), it should not be generalize to everyone ever imo )
There are hundreds of reasons for it that as nothing to with money or arrogance. But i'm the lazy one here and i'm not gonna list all reasons that i can think of right now. I'm sure you can figure it out alone ^^
I will tell you that I accept what you wrote, but I want to add a fact to the equation, they are from Brazil, the salaries are not the same, I don't know how much the minimum wage is in the US, but what they earn on patreon (not counting steam) exceeds 127 minimum wages in their country. You don't have to think only about how much they earn but add the country of origin of the developers, maybe in the United States if you earn 2000 dollars you don't make ends meet, but if you earn 2000 dollars being a developer from, for example, Argentina, you are already earning more money than 80% of the families in the country, OppaiMan does not hire programmers or artists from the US, they hire people from Brazil, therefore their salary is cheaper. It is better not to talk about the subject anymore because they will delete our comments.I've seen at least a few cases were the original dev has tried to hire help, and off the top of my head, over half of the hired help flakes and vanishes within a few months. If I had decent-level skills, would I take actual studio pay or get by on a meager slice of the money many creators on here are collecting. The typical income in the US for someone with actual graphic artist skills exceeds what many AVN devs are pulling in from working on these games.
Second, as you note yourself, OppaiMan games aren't great. How much of that is because they just hired whatever people not putting in the greatest work. With many of the AVNs I've gotten, they are something of a passion project, and hiring any random half-assed person would seriously downgrade the quality of the game to OppaiMan or worse. I went thru my collection, and I only have one that is made by OppaiMan themselves, and one or two others written by others but available on the OppaiMan store.
Third, it turns out making these games isn't cheap. For many of the solo dev games I follow, the first bottleneck to overcome isn't having a second person working on it, but the length of time rendering takes.
There are some cloud-hosted rent-by-the hour rendering solutions. I priced one out a while ago based on one dev's detailed account of a delay due to having to rework animations for a single scene. The release had the equivalent of 45-60 days of 24/7 rendering on a dedicated 3090, plus using a second machine for writing, posing, and any other non-rendering work. Found an online calculator for one of the cloud-based services, and it would have ranged from $12k-$15k to do the rendering using their service, albeit it would have been much faster. That dev gets about $5k a month from Patreon. They weren't US-based, so maybe they can survive with a roof over their head on that kind of revenue after all the expenditures that come from making a game, but it doesn't sound great.
If I were to suddenly decide I wanted to make it as an AVN dev, maybe I could get away with just sinking thousands of dollars into finding an unobtainium 5090, but to increase render capacity to anything close to a healthy release cadence and be in need of a second person, I'd want a dual RTX 6000 workstation (just priced one out at $22k) for rendering and a second pc for writing, posing, and compiling. A second, full-time writer/dev or maybe just a dedicated scene composer, I'm not sure two of the dual RTX 6000 machines would keep up for a higher image quality game.
So, configuring a pair of pcs to do the work, buying all the assets, giving up a day job to commit to it full time, I'd need minimum $75k in spare change laying around for startup and to hold over until I got a following, with $20k or more in monthly income within the first few months to produce releases at speed with above-average quality. That amount wouldn't even pay back the startup costs over the first year or two, and wouldn't cover the salary of a second person working on it.
Somehow OppaiMan is drawing almost top-15 AVN numbers on Patreon, while also running a marketplace to sell other's games. I guess they have found a niche people are willing to spend money on, so good for them.
I just want to add that we have to be patient, this update will be the best of all, I assure you, Eve's monthly special is similar to Mia's before her sexual content comes to the game, it's horrible to have to wait 200 days (approximately what's left for 0.7), but you have to have faith in God, hallelujah my brothers. And if they're going to include Helen as a possible monthly special, we're all doomed, include Mike too, nothing matters anymore.