I disagree quite strongly, to be honest. Everybody who starts for example as solo selfemployed or owns a small business will have to make the decision how far he wants to expand in case business goes well. Do you feel comfortable sharing certain aspects for your core work or not? Would you share it with anybody or just members of your family? Do you want to open and manage branches or not? Those are key questions for many small/family businesses and both directions are viable to any degree. If he doesn't want to expand his team/business beyond the current scale, he does indeed have to live the consquences, which mean less growth and revenue than he could have had. Even though the numbers look good, the game basically plateaued quite some time ago, unlike other games who continue to expand. Wild Life is probably the most prominent example, currently.
I think we both agree that the game would very likely be more successful if he'd manage to hire another artist and to increase the update schedule and amount of content he releases. I mean, there are many who stopped being patreons after he changed his schedule, who likely would have stayed otherwise.
But that still doesn't mean that he's milking, which, at least in my eyes, requires a strong missmatch of the time it takes and the promised content (quantity and quality) released, which I just don't see in this case. Sure, there was some confusion when those changes happened, but I can't see any possible missunderstanding or ill will since.
There are multiple sites to hire talent from. You tell them what to do, they do it, you pay them. You don't have to give them your life story. This is about whether or not he can find someone help him finish art faster. The fact that every other company that does drawn art, from Miyazaki on down, can manage to do it, but this one person on the planet with income to do so, can't, points the issue squarely back at it being a DC problem. I don't care what the excuses are, even hiring someone strictly to do backgrounds, would speed the process up, and it won't cost him an arm and a leg to do it.
I got chewed out for being accepting of A Town Remembered being slow, having shitty art, and routinely being of poor release quality. I expect, and accept that, from one guy, working on this in whatever spare time he has. He's barely shown any growth in what he does over the 2 years or however long he's been at it. It is what it is. He's clearly just putzing along.
Here, DC hired a team, grew the team, and kept making more money. He claims he worked in gaming before this. He clearly knows what he is doing. This whole aw shucks got lucky act is garbage. Now, despite all that work and growth, magically, he's only managed to get to version .2 after 3 years, and over half a million dollars in his pocket. People make feature length independent films with smaller budgets in less time. Actual competently made video games by indie developers take about 5 to 6 years, and they don't look as low budget as SS.
The progress of this game stands at its pace, despite everything, for one simple reason - he's creating a bottleneck on purpose. He knows how this shit is done and he keeps saying how he can't find someone to match his style. People make careers off of mimicking other artist style. There are websites devoted to hiring people who can draw. No one else on the planet making 50k a month seems to have an issue finding someone simply to make background art to speed up a job. Last time I check, DC remains, not a unicorn. Hence, I feel this is a being done on milk an audience. Did anyone ask for a near complete overhaul of the art he spent months doing?
It's funny how he talks about future games....3 years into this one and he's at .2. If this slowness isn't being done on purpose I'm sure he'll start when he's had kid #15.
Yes when you consistently lose your temper at your coworkers you get fired.
He also directly interacted with an impossible to please group of people. No one should be surprised he developed anger issues. I saw a post on reddit saying this game needs more gay content....nothing pleases game players, ever.
