Thanks for your info
I don't have the exact numbers on hours spent, but usually our release cycle is about 6 weeks give or take 1-2 weeks, right now we released after 4 weeks, and its important for us as well to have a monthly release, the way that things have gone now, we lose far too many patrons out of nowhere for unknown reasons, even people who join and imminently just leaves. We have pay up front so that has saved us now, but still dont understand why people pledge 1$ and then pull it shortly after.
We tend to have around 300 - pure scene renders per release and a few animations, this time was exceptionally much work all around not only in terms of renders but the overall production quality. Motkeyz render machine never sleeps ever, he either works on it or it's rendering at night. Only thing that would speed this up in general would be better hardware right now.
For coding, there are always a lot of time that goes into it, but it varies a lot more for me, as i can face an unexpected obstacle on the way, its not like i can just move on.
The whole issue of this might not be so evident to you guys as we are really doing everything in our power to push out the updates and keep our fans happy and not see how stressful all of this is, but in reality we sacrifice our social lives almost completely, spending less time with family, and perhaps not as good on personal health. We sacrifice things like this short-term because we really believe that we can make something great, and long term.
Motkeyz post was to indicate that that short term sacrifice, has become a long-term sacrifice for far too long. And honestly, if we have to go for the option where we slow down, we will be disappointing at ourselves, like we did something wrong or didn't give it our everything, even if we did.
Regarding the guy that uploaded;
Actually it was not an active or frequent patron this time that shared our game, same with the previous people that leaked the game.
This time the guy registered specifically on f95 to share the game, and left. He got banned pretty quickly off patreon, and has a permanent patreon ban pending as well. We can't really stop people from sharing the game eventually, if someone joins just to share it's a dick move that can't be stopped unless we sit and do DRM stuff like accounts, and we don't really want to go that way at all.
That's why we have to plead to the people that do this, to please wait at least a couple of days or a week, i mean this time we didn't even release it for gold, he hurried so much that he didn't even upload the fixed version for all of you, and now people complain about issues i already solved the same day on the release?
Platinum and above tiers get the game first, Special platinum edition
Gold gets Normal version after 24 hours.
Silver gets it after about a week.
I don't mind piracy in itself, when it comes to allowing people that were never able to pay for it, to play it. But the biggest hit to us is people who would consider pledging but then they don't because there is a "free" alternative. That's what hit us the most.
Not only that this was a platinum only version but it wasn't meant to go out to big masses, it's an earlier build that could potentially contain issues and thats why we make sure to fix it before it goes out to next version. Normal version was released with all fixes in it.
So not only did the guy who shared the game hurt us in patreon numbers, but now people think that the game has more issues than it actually does, cause you are not on the correct version.
For those that say that piracy doesn't hurt, maybe normally it doesnt hurt as much but it really hits specifically us more than i've ever seen. We are always here and helping even though ofc we prefer that people are on our discord and support us.
Just look at this. You can see it yourself on graphtreon
View attachment 172402
You can clearly see as soon as it went out here on F95 and then copied over to all other sites like svs and whatnot. There's always a drop around billing and payment processing which is normal, but you can see we grow really fast on a release until the exact same moment we get pirated, then right away our support slows down completely.
We got pirated before prime time hour in europe as well, i mean come on. That's a huge slap to our faces and to the future of the game.
Maybe now when you see the chart you can understand better why we keep saying these things. It's to the point where it's ridiculous. Many of our patrons come here from F95, and they know the struggle that we've been facing over the months.
To everyone that pledge to other patrons, or would have money to pledge and say that our game is top class, their favorite or at least a top 3 or top 5 or even top 10 right now, can you explain why this game is not even worth pledging a dollar or more for? This isn't about greed anyway to earn as much money as possible but its to sustain the project long term.
We know things are not going to be easy, but we are resilient and passionate to keep pushing and hope for a bright future, hopefully with many of you with us
/A
