I've definitely considered that!! I actually surveyed my community about it in June of 2020 because we added three love interests to the project due to Kickstarter and I was debating how best to integrate them into the game and release everything. OwO
Overwhelmingly, the community voted for a full, complete release rather than a route-by-route release. (Route by route was the least popular option and only got about 2% of the total vote).
Here are some of their reasons:
-Quality. There is a general feeling that route by route and episodic games have lower quality story telling with inconsistencies across episodes and routes. I think Tailor Tales can bypass the inconsistency issues because the routes are entirely stand alone and aren't consistent from one to the other in terms of lore and world building. Meanwhile, Gilded Shadows has very consistent, deep lore that has to stand up to scrutiny across the routes. Releasing route by route would make this more difficult to achieve.
-Price. It's a fact that if I charge per route, the game will end up more expensive. I can justify my current planned price for nine routes if I'm considering it a bulk/unit price for the full game. But if I try to break it up per route and just divide that price by 9, the per-route price would be extremely low for the amount of content. Prices that are low for the level of content can actually impact a game's reputation because people make assumptions about the quality and hesitate to buy. I would really have to bump the price up per route, resulting in an overall increase in price (a significant one). Again, this isn't a concern for a free/freemium game like Tailor Tales.
-Fears about completion. People worry about the project not getting finished. It's not so much a concern for a free project because there's no monetary investment in the story. But for a commercial game, unfortunately, people are hesitant to buy a partial project for fear they'll never see the rest of it.
-They want to binge. Basically, people are looking forward to binge-playing the game all at once and don't want to play it as I deliver it piecemeal, route by route. They forget key details and world building elements and have to re-read to refresh themselves between routes, which they find annoying.
-They really just want to play the game at their own pace and in whatever order they want instead of being limited to the order in which I release content.
So yeah! Due to that, I decided to release Gilded Shadows as a full game. The original six LIs (on the cover art) will be released all at once, then the additional three LIs (Reuben, Yuu, and Quill) that were added during our Kickstarter will be released one at a time as they're complete as an update (not DLC or additional purchases).
I feel like this best suits our community's needs and wants. The good news is that I'm nearly done with the 5th LI route (Magnus) and will soon have only one of the original six guys remaining (Lance). Though I still have a lot of art to push through as well, the writing takes so much more time. So getting the writing out of the way is a huge step toward release. OwO
If you want to keep up to date on development, I post bi-weekly progress reports on tumblr and answer character asks and the like as well!