If you think about it, it's kinda stupid making one animation set for every different character of the game. Rookie mistake.
But I just mentioned Illusion as an illustrative example that it is possible to reuse the animations for every character. I know people get angry at them, but they used to make 2 games every year, before COVID. And they were much better than MOST Patreon games. But this company is NOT the topic. It was just an example.
Anyways, there are 2 types of game develpment:
Star Citizen type: The game never gets completed
Cyberpunk 2077 type: The game completion is rushed, but at least we have a game.
Between those 2 options, I'd choose CP77 style every day.
Personally I neither hate or like Illusion though I find it a shame they never made Artificial Academy 3 boy at all girls academy one is meh since no competition
That aside somewhat unfair comparing an established company to Patreon games since majority of them are either RenPy or RPG Maker Daz3D image fests and unique characters are rare either. Got nothing against them just that kind of feeling. Personally I much prefer working on Unreal Engine though find that the new UE5 is stupidly heavy on hardware requirements. Though I admit I suffer the same issue as most other people that my scope is too big but it’s more of a hobby either way.
That aside the whole CP vs SC is a bit different while not the case for other games SC scope of what they want to make is simply so large I don’t see any AAA studio ever attempting it. While CP suffered from marketing and way too much overhype. Personally for my own project I will take the SC approach so to speak and if I do release I’ll release it by pieces but then again sandbox game and designed that way so can’t really comment on other projects.
For a project like TogetherBNB well given how long it took them I would do the same and only release Nanas part and finish the rest as it should be a lot easier since everything is pretty much implemented … hopefully they don’t start making other things like cooking at least.
Released products are of course the preferred way however is also an escape hole since e. g. on steam if you release as supposed to be full release you have no obligation to continue working on it unlike Early access as far as I remember been a while.
Either way Early access is a bad thing however also an option to fund indie projects just sad that a lot of devs ruin that so people mistrust devs because of people like them.