That's the bottom line that we can both agree on, if people want to spend their money on it then so be it. All I'm giving is forewarning for anyone who comes here and thinks about it, because boy did I fucking regret it when I subbed just once thinking "ok, they have two games they're working on and supposedly a ton of WIPs, maybe this is a fair price". The whiplash when I found out I had spent 15 dollars for a 10 minute shitshow (literally in its own way...) of ONE demo that was last updated THREE MONTHS AGO was crazy; the realization that they had separate patreons and discords for the other demo was just icing on the fart sundae.
Most people on pirating sites are probably there because they're broke bitches, as is 90% of the population currently: 15 dollars is not a "forgettable" amount for most people right now, especially not a recurring price, so people deserve to know what they're paying for. If anything, that's another strike against SquashedFlat: that you don't even get to preview what you're paying for, yet another staple of the furry smut dev community. Imo WIPs should be a public thing, and in an ironic twist to most Western devs who seem to have this idea stuck in their heads that "if I preview things as I work on them, no one will ever pay because they'll just jerk it to the previews", most Eastern devs preview pretty much their entire games in gif/image format. Despite that, their games tend to sell much better and they have wider audiences.
If there is evidence of anything, it's that good faith and trust between artist and consumer tends to benefit both parties greatly in the long run; greed and distrust only ever push people away rather than attract them. I don't want SquashedFlat to fail, I just want them to consider that just maybe having such a comparatively high bar for entry (most devs I've seen offer previews and WIPs at 1-5 dollars max, and a lot just offer them for free) isn't doing them any favors. Then again, I don't know how much of a priority these projects are for them in terms of their life's workload, so if they're content with 15 bucks a month from 40-50 people, then so be it.
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