I didn't do the math but I am pretty sure patreon income of wild life is well beyond a million at this point.
Which is irrelevant when you're paying over a dozen employees a livable wage and all the costs that come with paying for the building they work from, the hardware and software along with other expenses and taxes that come with owning and running a business. That money isn't piling up in a scrooge mcduck vault somewhere with Steve diving into it. If you could get ahold of their budget you'd probably be surprised at how little they probably have in reserve if you were to take every position of each of their employees and apply the average salary for the positions. You also have to factor in that they didn't start making substantial support until a few years into the project.
Besides, 7+ years development time is NOT the norm for developing a game, REGARDLESS OF BUDGET.
That is your opinion.
Bigger budget means more employment power that turns into faster production time. You might think the budget doesn't matter in this case of 7 years, but that is you being simply wrong. The WL team wasn't there from day one and if you're just gonna ignore that they didn't have a small team until 2ish years in, then you're just gonna keep digging yourself into a hole where nobody agrees with you as you're not correctly factoring in everything and are looking at it from a very simplistic mindset. Even at that couple year mark the team was roughly half the size it is currently now and still nowhere near your average studio that has a multi million or hundred million budget along with the usual parent company that could secure more funding if needed.
Average game development time for pc is between 2 to 4
What games are you picking out of a lineup to compare to wildlife that has similar quality and dev team size? and no, honey select isn't one of them unless you have poor eyesight.
The average from my understanding is 3-5 years (2-5 for triple A titles) and mobile games range under a year to two because they're all simply hot garbage (my opinion of course). For games like this that are crowd funded and grossly understaffed in terms of development, you can't realistically compare them to what the Internet is comparing said averages to. The games/studios they include in those averages have hundreds to thousands of staff/developers working on those titles and millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to throw at the project right from the start.
They are simply not the same and no amount of mental gymnastics will make it so.
You are the reason why there are no good porn games with decent graphics. Because there isn't a need for them. People like you are perfectly happy with half assed "games" that are not even games. Yes, be glad these scam games are not abandoned! Praise the scammers!
Care to share a source that has a fact stating that the guy you just spewed that drivel on is the sole reason we don't have more games to choose from, or was that just another baseless opinion?
If this game is making you so emotional, you don't have to keep getting worked up by it and just forget it exists as it's clearly a scam. It would be a shame for someone of your intellectual superiority to waste such vast knowledge in the game development field on an obviously dead game that is only maintained so Steve can edge us all for decades as that is secretly his kink.
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I'll do you a solid and pick one of their years out and give you the total earned via patreon.
Let's go with 2019 as that would've been roughly the 2ish year mark in and as you said, this game has been in development for roughly 7 years and each and every year should count when factoring this in.
Jan 40,503
Feb 41,126
Mar 43,445
Apr 43,557
May 47,554
Jun 48,056
Jul 53,202
Aug 54,061
Sept 53,796
Oct 54,913
Nov 56,381
Dec 66,042
So we have a budget of 602,636 dollars to work with. Chances are this might be less as I don't know if the earning graphs account for patreons roughly 5% cut/other taxes and the I believe 2.5% conversion fee for subscribers that pay in different currencies compared to the account holders.
Now, keep in mind that I don't recall an accurate account of Steve's employee count in 2019, but I need you to budget out the average salaries for roughly 10 employees of varying skillsets in game development and other roles associated with it for I believe Germany. Shouldn't take you too long as I know you're well versed in this area of expertise.
Once you've finished this task I'll need you to then add in the cost of renting a building of a comparable size to what they use in their location if at all possible if you can tell from their previous office videos along with software/hardware including all the various supplies you would expect in an office job for around the same amount of people in total.
Someone from Germany please correct me if I'm wrong on this next part.
Then we need to factor in the flat 15% corporate tax rate on profits.
Then onto the utility costs which will be hard to account for without knowing the square footage of the office space.
Then we have to factor in if he is required to carry insurance for his employees as it seems to be required for many over there unless a certain salary is reached where they can provide their own coverage. Again, I don't live there, so if I'm incorrect on this part please correct me.
I could keep going, but I think you get my point and I still didn't list everything that he is likely paying for with said budget.
We could look at the bigger earning years, but when the patreon money returns got bigger, so did the employment count as he continued to build his team which lead to even more spending.
We could ramble on all day long about this and that, but at the end of the day this isn't an average gaming company that can be compared to the said averages. Many of those are massive studious that spent years and some even decades becoming what they are today and the sheer volume of budget they have to throw at things is mind boggling most of the time. Many of them even made their fortune in a time where the games simply weren't that advanced and required much less spending power to produce and get to market for absurd returns.
We could've easily had the full wildlife game by now, but it would've looked and performed like hot garbage, so I'll take these few extra years above the average for what will hopefully be a quality game that didn't start with a few hundred million dollar budget.
