The Cost of a Development Team and The Price of a Video Game

[DaClown]

Seemed like a lot of the posts in this thread imply that you'll have a better chance of success and make more money hiring an entire team to make a game than you would as a solo dev. I find that rather unlikely. Most adult game developers are amateurs and most of their projects are going to fail outright. Hiring an entire team just means on top of your project probably failing, you also have to pay an entire team out of pocket for a game that's not making a profit. You don't hear much about all the abandoned projects, just the successful ones.

I know this is somewhat muddled throughout, but I did clarify in no uncertain terms that "hiring a team" is the wrong kind of framing. For any random game dev, there is no reason to generally think that dev is going to be the boss. It is not about being the manager and dictator of some project.

If you start out from the perspective that it has to be your way or the high way and everyone else is just your underlings then you've already failed and you should quit while you're ahead.

I study the failures in the adult game cottage industry specifically. I've been studying them since before 2010.

The model that I see most adult game devs following is to have a full time day job supplying their income initially so they can work on their game as a hobby, part time, by themselves without having to pay people salaries for a project that probably won't pan out. Then if it turns out that they're good at it and they do start making money they can decide whether they think they could actually make a living at it going full time (usually taking a pay cut when they quit their day job).

If their success continues to grow to where they're bringing in $10k+ per month then they start thinking about taking on a partner who they would presumably either pay a salary or give a percentage of their patreon revenue to. This may or may not increase their own profits depending on whether the new guy's contribution increases the appeal of the game enough to fully counteract his pay. Initially that partner is probably going to result in a significant pay cut to the original dev though unless their pay arrangement is contingent on revenue growth beyond the growth trend of the solo dev.

Keep in mind that "most adult game devs" fail at game development from a financial perspective. Almost all game devs produce one game at most and quit; I am certain that this is more intensely true for adult game devs due to the much lower support, higher risks, and high probability that you will be the target of some very toxic people. Many game devs already receive death threats from their fans without getting into fetish game devs.

Most of the games in the database are at a level of quality that I would call "proof of concept" or "prototype". That includes most of the "complete" games. Very few games in the database have what I would consider "finished assets" and the engines are generally suboptimized and basic compression is a noted problem that the community patches around; from any given view point of production, most of the games in the database are not properly finished whether it be incomplete or absent writing, art, design, or programming. Most of the games are actually novels and lack any significant game mechanics such that game design is not an appropriate term to apply to them.

So this model you describe is empirically flawed for a given random person who might be interested in trying to develop adult games. Also, it is very individual centric whereas game development and game play is intensely group based.

I am generally talking about patterns of roughly random assortments of people working on roughly random game/media development projects, and I am talking to people who play games and pay money to either buy games or as patronage to game developers such as artists and writers.

"usually taking a pay cut when they quit their day job"
It is interesting how this keeps popping up. Statistically speaking, most people who could work on a game are going from a McJob to a potentially far more lucrative job in media development; as of today, 45 out of 86 of the respondents report having an income below 20K$/year. Only 29 out of 86 (about 1/3rd) of the respondents report an income above 40K$/year.

That singular statement reveals a particular and peculiar bias of personal view about the nature of adult game development. One in which the majority of people doing it are giving up something better for something worse.

If that is the labor conditions of the adult game development industry and that particular model then that should implode, and we should shed no tears for its loss. Who would want that?

The majority of people on Earth aren't taking a pay cut by getting even 10K$/year developing games. If those people get close to the Indie average of 50K$/year then that is a step up not a step down. It is a minority of the planet's human population that gets paid more than 50K$/year even if people with incomes above 100K$/year are over represented on this site (if we can trust the statistics of a forum poll with people who act maliciously towards the poll taker).

Part of the split on this topic of incomes and teams comes about from several mistaken notions about the dependence or independence of the laborers involved. Repeatedly, people respond to this with boss-assumptions. They assume they run the project. They pay wages. They're an employer. They also assume that the people they are approaching to add to their team have nothing and all the gain of that person comes from their employment by the person making the boss-assumption.

"Get yourself a team" doesn't mean "be a boss and employ people to do your bidding". For those people I tell you simply: quit.
"Get yourself a team" means "find people to work with and projects to work on that achieves the objectives or affirms the values you want for yourself and others."

The default assumption of any person getting into game development is not that they're going to be the boss but that they're going to work with other talented people who might know better than them and might have skills they don't have and might have projects far more interesting or more viable than their own.

The assumption should be that each member of a team brings something to that project and that each member of the team gets something from that project; if the assumption is that each member brings something to the project but gains nothing from the project then it is parasitical and destructive of the team members and project generally; if the assumption is that each member takes from the project but gives nothing then you have no team and you have no project in short order. There's a lot of ways that it could be organized, but one way is to have as an end goal that the Patreon of each team member approaches 50K$/year as the game is developed. This means mutual support, aid, and promotion. This means taking advantage of the velocity of money and paying each other for your work. This means raising money from the community to pay into the common pot and make sure each other has enough to live and take care of each other. The goal is independence not co-dependence. Especially not co-dependence on some cult of personality centered around the narcissistic fetishes of some dudebro who thinks his mediocrity is God's gift to the world.

Getting yourself a team doesn't mean you get to own the project. The principle failure in the Breeding Season project was that the art assets of the game were wholly owned by the contributing artist such that the whole project could be vetoed arbitrarily by the artist at any time, and the artist did in fact excercise the veto. That same artist then went on to try to take up the community resources that had been vacated and did so with somewhat limited success compared to the Breeding Season project as a whole. Standard game industry practice involves the use of IP contracts that ensure that no individual member of the dev team can torpedo the whole thing unilaterally by retaining absolute ownership of the IP involved.

It is not generally the case for instance that game designers get to own the IP of the game. It is not generally the case that the programmers get to own the code or the engine or the patents of the developed game. There are many bad reasons for this and bad implementations which serve corporate interests and shareholder consumption of assets. But there are a lot of good reasons and best practices implementations which serve to protect the collective interests against predations by individuals or shareholders.

This translates in practice to accepting that game development is a collaborative and generally intensely cooperative practice. It means that you don't retain creative control over the game in general and the direction of the game, its mechanics, narrative, genre might all be subject to fundamental change by team decision. This is more true for indie game development than it is for corporate/AAA game development; in AAA game development, there is invariably executive producers or similar credits where they are paying millions of dollars to have the game they want made to their specifications. I can understand on that basis why some loud people rail against being told to find a team because they have a concept they want made and won't be dissuaded from it. They should hope to have millions of dollars to burn, and they should expect to pay closer to 80K$ or 90K$/year for the privilege of creative dictation.

 

[khumak]

"usually taking a pay cut when they quit their day job"
It is interesting how this keeps popping up. Statistically speaking, most people who could work on a game are going from a McJob to a potentially far more lucrative job in media development; as of today, 45 out of 86 of the respondents report having an income below 20K$/year. Only 29 out of 86 (about 1/3rd) of the respondents report an income above 40K$/year.

That singular statement reveals a particular and peculiar bias of personal view about the nature of adult game development. One in which the majority of people doing it are giving up something better for something worse.

If that is the labor conditions of the adult game development industry and that particular model then that should implode, and we should shed no tears for its loss. Who would want that?

The majority of people on Earth aren't taking a pay cut by getting even 10K$/year developing games. If those people get close to the Indie average of 50K$/year then that is a step up not a step down. It is a minority of the planet's human population that gets paid more than 50K$/year even if people with incomes above 100K$/year are over represented on this site (if we can trust the statistics of a forum poll with people who act maliciously towards the poll taker).

I haven't seen statistics on it but I find it hard to believe that the best day job that someone with the skills to create a game could come up with is a job making minimum wage flipping burgers. Someone with the tech skills to make a game could easily get a job making 50-100k per year or more. In my case I make quite a bit more than 100k so I would definitely be taking a massive pay cut moving to full time as a game dev, at least initially. There are some devs making more than that but it's a fairly elite club and I'm not under any delusions that I would necessarily make it to that level. Maybe I would decide it's too hard and give up. Maybe not enough people would like my game.

The draw isn't the money. The draw is giving up a boring job that I'm only doing for the money to do something I love that pays at least enough to cover my bills, even if it's a big pay cut. That's how I'd look at it anyway. I would fully expect to never reach my current income level purely from game dev income. Maybe I'd get lucky and become the next Dark Cookie but you certainly can't count on that level of success.

Now if you're talking about low cost of living countries then I could see the numbers being closer to what you're quoting. Someone based in say Bangalore is probably only making 20% of what I do for the same job so the bar for a successful game dev project is lower for him than it is for me but I would argue that even for someone in India $10k per year is less than what they could make with a regular job.

 

[DaClown]

I find it hard to believe that the best day job that someone with the skills to create a game could come up with is a job making minimum wage flipping burgers. Someone with the tech skills to make a game could easily get a job making 50-100k per year or more.

A couple of things. I don't assume that a person has to be a seasoned professional game developer to make a game or to make a game that is financially successful. Seasoned devs make financial failures; the main difference between seasoned devs and new devs is persistence; the devs that stay in it to retirement generally do so by making many games with most being failures or marginal successes but a few being moderately good to wild successes. In traditional game dev, most of the devs that make it to retirement started with parents that inherited wealth and passed some portion of it to them in the form of material support.

People who engage in the practice of making a game are actively developing the skills that will make them valuable enough to get a 50K$/year to 100K$/year job with a corporate AAA mill or a Hollywood-like media production corporation. Doesn't mean they start out that way.

Finally, are you familiar with the Ph.D. rates of taxi drivers or bar tenders? Or the educational demographics of models, strippers, and porn stars? There are a lot of people in the US who are homeless and jobless that have quite impressive technical qualifications. One of my neighbors was a painter, and he did these amazing renaissance paintings in the front room of his single-wide trailer and lived on disability (less than 20K$/year). These economic inequalities are more extreme for women, LGBT people especially trans people, black people, people of color, young people, disabled people, and native people.

 

[khumak]

Finally, are you familiar with the Ph.D. rates of taxi drivers or bar tenders? Or the educational demographics of models, strippers, and porn stars? There are a lot of people in the US who are homeless and jobless that have quite impressive technical qualifications. One of my neighbors was a painter, and he did these amazing renaissance paintings in the front room of his single-wide trailer and lived on disability (less than 20K$/year). These economic inequalities are more extreme for women, LGBT people especially trans people, black people, people of color, young people, disabled people, and native people.

I haven't seen any statistics on it but education is a lot less important than the industry you work in when determining pay. I know people with PhDs who have trouble holding a job or are working on a low paid field. I know people with no formal education who make great money either because they started a business or started off at the bottom of the corporate ladder and worked their way up. That second option is what I did. I'm a college dropout but that didn't stop me from working my way up to a job that "requires" a degree that I don't have. I didn't lie about it I just proved through previous jobs that I know what I'm doing.

Most of the degree requirements that almost any job might have are bogus. Unless it's something like Doctor or Lawyer that really does make direct use out of what you studied in college, most degrees are purely fluff. This coming from an engineer who does not have an engineering degree, something that most guidance counselors would tell you shouldn't happen.

The sex related worker examples you used are the most clear cut case where education really does mean absolutely nothing. I don't care if my stripper has a PhD. I just care that she's got a pretty face and a rockin bod. She can be as dumb as a box of rocks and it doesn't matter, in fact she probably makes more than I do. I know how easy it is from a customer perspective to drop over a hundred dollars on a stripper in 20 mins or so. Multiply that out across a whole shift and the best strippers are pulling down thousands of dollars a day easily. Some of them make 200k+ per year. That's more than some doctors make.

No clue about what porn stars make. I hear stories about stars like Mia Khalifa only making $12,000 during her whole career but that doesn't jive with other stars who are millionaires. I would bet Mia is lying for the pity.

 

[Joshua Tree]

I haven't seen statistics on it but I find it hard to believe that the best day job that someone with the skills to create a game could come up with is a job making minimum wage flipping burgers. Someone with the tech skills to make a game could easily get a job making 50-100k per year or more. In my case I make quite a bit more than 100k so I would definitely be taking a massive pay cut moving to full time as a game dev, at least initially. There are some devs making more than that but it's a fairly elite club and I'm not under any delusions that I would necessarily make it to that level. Maybe I would decide it's too hard and give up. Maybe not enough people would like my game.

As someone pointed out earlier in the thread. The skills to make adult games in renpy, RPGM etc, do posing with daz3d models and so forth. Wouldn't bring you far in the the "professional" world of creating games. If you a highly skilled graphic designer, 3d modeler and so forth, or a skilled coder who can master several languages (examples; C++, Java, HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, SQL etc) the chance is creating adult games wouldn't be your goal, it would be something you did on leisure time as a hobby.

I was into the "Amiga Scene" for lack of better word when I was younger. Creating demos, take part in competitions and so forth. People getting self taught learning to code in Assembler (SEKA, Devpac, AsmOne etc). Many of these who got good at it got recruited into the gaming industry, but those days is far gone now. You would need to have some impressive portfolio to show to if you want to get into professional gaming industry today if all you got is "self taught skills".

 

[recreation]

Most adult game devs (I know) had no prior experience in game developement. A lot of adult game devs (I know) have or had a good paying job and the money they make from their game/s is far less than what they make/made in their day jobs.

There are two types of adult game devs, the poor "dreamer" who thinks it's an easy job and quickly gained money, and the "realist" who does it as a hobby and doesn't expect much income (but might still hope so). The dreamer is usually the one that fails hard, not always, but more often than not. The realist usually makes the better games that might get him or her into a position where he or she can make the hobby into a job.
In the end both usually prefer developing their own games instead of doing their day job simply because it means freedom (kind of) and not being dependant on others.

There are of course also some devs who actually have experience in game developement, they are the minority and usually they make adult games for themselves, to get away from the mainstream game development, to do something different and again: to do their own thing! and I suspect that money doesn't really matter for them.

 

[khumak]

As someone pointed out earlier in the thread. The skills to make adult games in renpy, RPGM etc, do posing with daz3d models and so forth. Wouldn't bring you far in the the "professional" world of creating games. If you a highly skilled graphic designer, 3d modeler and so forth, or a skilled coder who can master several languages (examples; C++, Java, HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, SQL etc) the chance is creating adult games wouldn't be your goal, it would be something you did on leisure time as a hobby.

I was into the "Amiga Scene" for lack of better word when I was younger. Creating demos, take part in competitions and so forth. People getting self taught learning to code in Assembler (SEKA, Devpac, AsmOne etc). Many of these who got good at it got recruited into the gaming industry, but those days is far gone now. You would need to have some impressive portfolio to show to if you want to get into professional gaming industry today if all you got is "self taught skills".

I didn't mean to imply that someone making an adult game as a solo project could just go get a job at Epic or Bethesda or whatever as a game dev. I meant that someone with the drive and aptitude to become good enough at coding, rendering, and writing (probably all self taught) to create a game could apply that same drive and skill building to get a good job. It could be in a related field or something completely different.

Maybe they take a welding class or something but it would more likely be something tech related if they're into game creation as a hobby. They certainly would only have themselves to blame if they settled for a job flipping burgers. I suppose graphics or writing could also be options but I get the feeling that those fields are both extremely low pay unless you're really top notch at it. Tech is a field where pretty much everyone makes good money.

It really just comes down to picking an industry that generally pays well that you have an aptitude for and get yourself enough training to get your foot in the door. I started off answering phones working tech support and worked my way up to engineer within 3 years without a degree. A lot of places don't enforce that degree requirement for internal promotions.

 

[recreation]

Maybe they take a welding class or something...

Hey I did take a welding class after I quit my prior job, that's nothing bad xD
Welding is actually a well payed job btw.

 

[khumak]

Hey I did take a welding class after I quit my prior job, that's nothing bad xD
Welding is actually a well payed job btw.

I know, that's why I mentioned it. I've actually taken a welding class as well, although in my case it was in college as part of a metallurgy program that I didn't finish. I enjoyed the welding though.

 

[Joshua Tree]

I didn't mean to imply that someone making an adult game as a solo project could just go get a job at Epic or Bethesda or whatever as a game dev. I meant that someone with the drive and aptitude to become good enough at coding, rendering, and writing (probably all self taught) to create a game could apply that same drive and skill building to get a good job. It could be in a related field or something completely different.

Maybe they take a welding class or something but it would more likely be something tech related if they're into game creation as a hobby. They certainly would only have themselves to blame if they settled for a job flipping burgers. I suppose graphics or writing could also be options but I get the feeling that those fields are both extremely low pay unless you're really top notch at it. Tech is a field where pretty much everyone makes good money.

It really just comes down to picking an industry that generally pays well that you have an aptitude for and get yourself enough training to get your foot in the door. I started off answering phones working tech support and worked my way up to engineer within 3 years without a degree. A lot of places don't enforce that degree requirement for internal promotions.

Yeah, but when we talk about the "paygrade" DaClown is talking about. Your average creator of adult games won't get close to any of that trying to get into the "professional" gaming industry lacking those skills.

 

[Quonix]

This thread is interesting, I'd like to add that from my own experience playing hundreds of these games and working on a few of them, whether as a gig or continuously. I noticed that the point at which a dev reaches success is generally when their work is above minimum effort.

If you strive for "as good as possible" in all areas of the game, whether it be coding, UI, writing, or art, you will generally have success because you looked into what would be best, and even though some areas may not be exceptional, there will still be significant effort put into them, which generally shows and will help people look past the shortcomings, your art doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to show that effort was put into it.

When your renders have one light source in them and the skin of the characters looks like paper, that means you probably spent very little time researching proper lighting techniques and working on your render quality, it looks low effort and everyone will know it is just a cash grab.

And the same thing applies to writing, when the story just makes no sense and things happen out of nowhere with no prior set-up, it shows you didn't plan ahead, the story is just something you're coming up with on the spot, this can also be seen in projects that keep introducing characters that weren't part of the plan. Therefore expanding the scope of the project and basically guaranteeing that it never gets finished.

Having good grammar also plays a huge part, which makes things difficult for devs that don't have a native command of the English language, that is a huge part of devs since for most of them, reaching 500$ on patreon means a good paying job with no boss, and so, they try their hand at it only to fall apart when people close the game on the spot because they can't stand the engrish.

UI is one of the easiest ones, you just have to do some basic color research and not use the default Ren'Py UI, make something basic in GIMP as long as it looks halfway decent.

Coding shouldn't even be an issue when making a VN in Ren'Py, although you see many games where the dev didn't even do a quick skipping playthrough to check that all images are showing correctly. Bad coding is usually a by-product of the dev aiming too high, going for an open-world game straight off the bat with no knowledge of python or Ren'Py, while bad coding skills aren't that big an issue in VNs, they are a huge issue if you aim for anything slightly more complicated and don't spend a lot of time in learning. See Summertime Saga when it just started, they delayed a lot of updates because the code had to be redone several times.

In conclusion, not all these things have to be perfect for your game to be successful, as long as most of them are above average, you will generally see some success, if either art or writing is great, that chance increases, despite below average coding or bad UI. There are some outliers of course, as in all things, but from what I've seen, this is generally correct.

I'd also like to mention that I haven't really hit all the points that makes or breaks a game, but this post is getting long enough and I gotta get back to the rendering mines.

 

[Obscure]

For skills...

I am a terrible programmer, a subpar writer, middling dungeon master, laughable animator and a failed artist. These *skills* are not complete skills. They are the odds and ends of skills. Each one insufficient to make anything on it's own.

In this field, my roster of failures adds up to a Full House.

 

[anne O'nymous]

They aren't designed for marketing success. I have games which are intended for market in pre-production, but they will take some years to reach a playable state, and I may not pursue their development or may not pursue their publication; many of my designs are halted by the fact that I need to raise significant funds for their development and can not do that unless or until I have produced adequate fundamentals for starting and running a game development business. Most of my developments are for the state of the art and my education not as a means of income for myself.

There's a really interesting paradox here.

You started many threads to explain adult game devs that they don't understand economic, and that they are doing it all wrong. Yet, they are doing the exact same thing than you : games that aren't designed for marketing success, and that will perhaps only interest them, while learning how to make games, and it's not meant to be an effective income source for them.
The only difference is that, unlike you, they are earning money for this...

Perhaps you should learn a thing or two from them. It would surely help you raise the "significant funds" you need to make your ideas come true.

But well, I'm saying it like that. It's you who teach us about how economic works and what adult game devs should do in order to succeed and make their dreams come true.

 

[Joshua Tree]

There are of course also some devs who actually have experience in game developement, they are the minority and usually they make adult games for themselves, to get away from the mainstream game development, to do something different and again: to do their own thing! and I suspect that money doesn't really matter for them.

I saw a video from GDC where a creator stated one of the most important things to not "burn out" working on a project, was to start a side project. Seeing the nature of adult games, I suppose making such on the side as a way to "wind down" could be a thing. That particular video was aimed at indie devs, single creators and such though. Not so much those that work in big studios.

 

[recreation]

I saw a video from GDC where a creator stated one of the most important things to not "burn out" working on a project, was to start a side project. Seeing the nature of adult games, I suppose making such on the side as a way to "wind down" could be a thing. That particular video was aimed at indie devs, single creators and such though. Not so much those that work in big studios.

Yeah, doing the same all the time can be tiresome and even frustrating. Sometimes you just need to distract yourself with something else and a small scale side project can help a lot. It's also important to take the time you need, sometimes even if you think you don't have the time, or can't afford it. It's better than to be stressed all the time.

 

[Joshua Tree]

There's a really interesting paradox here.

You started many threads to explain adult game devs that they don't understand economic, and that they are doing it all wrong. Yet, they are doing the exact same thing than you : games that aren't designed for marketing success, and that will perhaps only interest them, while learning how to make games, and it's not meant to be an effective income source for them.
The only difference is that, unlike you, they are earning money for this...

Perhaps you should learn a thing or two from them. It would surely help you raise the "significant funds" you need to make your ideas come true.

But well, I'm saying it like that. It's you who teach us about how economic works and what adult game devs should do in order to succeed and make their dreams come true.

Wouldn't the "Do as I say, not as I do" come a bit cross as being a bit hypocrite in that regard?

One thing is to have good intentions, but when those been refuted by the very people you preach at, then we back to double down again rather than self reflect. It's like watching a dog chase its own tail...

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[Joshua Tree]

Yeah, doing the same all the time can be tiresome and even frustrating. Sometimes you just need to distract yourself with something else and a small scale side project can help a lot. It's also important to take the time you need, sometimes even if you think you don't have the time, or can't afford it. It's better than to be stressed all the time.

I wonder. We seen creators of adult games around here start multiple games and then you have people get upset about them working on multiple projects rather than focus on the one they want/like. Maybe we should just regard that as a cooping mechanism to avoid get burnt out and grow sick of what they work on, rather than double down on them and board the "hate" train. Although there is those that keep abandon and start new games over and over which doesn't fit that mold though.

 

[recreation]

I wonder. We seen creators of adult games around here start multiple games and then you have people get upset about them working on multiple projects rather than focus on the one they want/like. Maybe we should just regard that as a cooping mechanism to avoid get burnt out and grow sick of what they work on, rather than double down on them and board the "hate" train. Although there is those that keep abandon and start new games over and over which doesn't fit that mold though.

Well, I'd say there is a different between devs who do one or two side projects and the devs that do 5 and more projects at the same time.
If a dev has several abandoned projects it's usually a sign that the dev didn't plan any of his projects out, or got overwhelmed by too many projects at the same time. Anyway, I would probably not expect a dev with several abandoned projects to ever finish one.

 

[anne O'nymous]

I wonder. We seen creators of adult games around here start multiple games and then you have people get upset about them working on multiple projects rather than focus on the one they want/like. Maybe we should just regard that as a cooping mechanism to avoid get burnt out and grow sick of what they work on, rather than double down on them and board the "hate" train. Although there is those that keep abandon and start new games over and over which doesn't fit that mold though.

As your last sentence imply, it's all about the context.

When someone like recreation start a second project, then a third, they are all so different, both in the story, CG and ambition, that you can easily guess that it's to avoid a burn out. While being serious in its own way, Weird Shit Is Going to Happen is clearly at a different level than Bad Memories. And it's not a bad idea ; you can more easily focus on the seriousness of your story, when on the side you've another story where you can let you craziness go as wild as you want.
But when it's someone like Brightsun Studios, that started 6 games and only finished one, there's clearly something else behind ; the games are too identical. Even High School Crush Simulator or Bright Sun's Card Adventure, despite being more games and less Visual novel, have a lot in common with the 4 other titles.
The irony is that, by focusing on one game only, it could have worked. We all said it, adult gaming is a small market, therefore doing identical games in parallel while not give you more support. Those who like your style and are ready to support you are already doing it. Especially when you're essentially making female protagonist lesbian games ; a niche in a market that is already a niche.

And, well, there's Slonique... But I don't think that one can classify him.

 

[Joshua Tree]

As your last sentence imply, it's all about the context.

When someone like recreation start a second project, then a third, they are all so different, both in the story, CG and ambition, that you can easily guess that it's to avoid a burn out. While being serious in its own way, Weird Shit Is Going to Happen is clearly at a different level than Bad Memories. And it's not a bad idea ; you can more easily focus on the seriousness of your story, when on the side you've another story where you can let you craziness go as wild as you want.
But when it's someone like Brightsun Studios, that started 6 games and only finished one, there's clearly something else behind ; the games are too identical. Even High School Crush Simulator or Bright Sun's Card Adventure, despite being more games and less Visual novel, have a lot in common with the 4 other titles.
The irony is that, by focusing on one game only, it could have worked. We all said it, adult gaming is a small market, therefore doing identical games in parallel while not give you more support. Those who like your style and are ready to support you are already doing it. Especially when you're essentially making female protagonist lesbian games ; a niche in a market that is already a niche.

And, well, there's Slonique... But I don't think that one can classify him.

Slonique is kinda unique. You can't really accuse him of being lazy. It's a bit like go to a restaurant. Order from the the menu and get anything BUT what you did order. Also, the level of trolling he did when he gave the mc some strap-on action

Games repeating itself is nothing new though, not even in the main gaming industry. How many "call of duties, and battlefields" now? Just as example. The thing seems to be find a recipe, keep do it over and over with small iterations until people get feed up and scream for something else. There is very few games I find have a original/good story. I do think thought that those that keep start and abandon games doesn't have a very good plan to start with. Make up things as you go along seldom work out good in the end.