Non-erotic games can raise capital to lay for early assets. It's enormously difficult for a first time H-dev to draw investment or starting funds. Thus, the wave of low polish version 0.01s. You get capital by impressing players.
If you talk about the economics and challenges of developing a weg without discussing the capital problem, you don't know what you're talking about.
The strongest Patreon games are ones that either keep the scope large enough to make consistent development possible without "stalling". However, the very best tend to use episodic style formats, where they break the game into chunks of beginning-middle-end narratives that are small enough to release fast, but build together to make for a larger expierience.
Thank you for commenting.
Maybe was not good enough getting my point through in my post. My apologies. English is not my native tongue and one single comment was maybe not enough.
My point was - you don't
need to pour a ton of capital into your first game. Your first forray into the gaming world does not have to be Citizen Kane. Spend some time to create a solid experience and show people what you are capeable of. If you really need funds - you could start a kickstarter or whatever. This is not an insurmountable problem. The 0.01s look overwhelmingly like cashgrabs and only a fraction ever gets finished.
I don't know how you define "strongest". Are these the games that brings in the most money or offer the best gaming experience? I'm not saying the episodes approach never work - but it takes a lot of management skill to pull of. Another thing sorely lacking in wegs. The vast amount of games a solo-projects from people with close to zero development experience. Some of them are talented writers or artists but it takes so much more to pull of a successful development cycle with constant updates without loosing the overarching perspective.
What you end up with is the current state of affairs. Never ending projects with frequent but miniscule updates taking the overall experience nowhere. It feels like many devs are hampered as they constantly have to satisfy the cravings of the patreons. There is never time to optimize the GUI or fix broken code because people want content. That is after all what you promised them. And thus you can't deliver an update without exactly that. That is why we see rushed sex and broken mechanics. Oh and my favourite pet peeve - new characters. If you ever run out of ideas just throw in some new piece of meat. That should buy you some time.
You are a developer yourself - how do you tackle these obstacles? What would be the ultimate environment for you to work in?