Post by OpenFireplace in Future plans comments

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I was going to write an in-depth comment on this until I went on FA and realized you are very smart.

You understand your game is very small, with proof-of-concept level of content, and that it needs, and will need a lot of work. I agree with everything you said there and I'm surprised with how aware of things you are.

From your wording on FA you seem to know this already, but I'll develop on it anyways:

With the way most porn games go out nowadays, they are either subsidized by donations whilst in-development, or go out for free and the artists plug their stuff and ask for donations in the end. Unless your game is really shiny or has a lot of content already I doubt it'll work with a price tag. And I don't think this is what you want to do, seems to me you want to add an optional price tag, which I agree on as being the best solution. I just want to say this that if you do a normal price tag. 7-8 months from now the game's activity might get so cold that you won't get enough traffic of people that'd be willing to pay for it and that you'd be better with donations.

You can see this as the crazy ramblings of a person who does not want to pay for porn. Or a guy that saw the amount porn game devs get paid on patreon before they started hiding it.

Your game is 3 days old and has 5 stars and many reviews, I really don't want people months from now to go and say "I'm not paying $5 for a RPG maker game", when they you'd gladly donate because they enjoyed the hypno stuff. Besides it's not like F95 wouldn't just leak the game.

You can do optional prices, as it seems you will do, or even open a patreon now if you wanna take it a bit more serious and get donations mid-development. (If you already have a patreon link it on the main page!)

You seem to like writting, so I hoped you enjoyed reading my wall of text lol

Also, whatever choice you make, good luck with the game and remember to have fun with it! You make dialogue not boring, and god is it horrible to read dialogue in porn games, so thank you for that. I even will replay the game next week, to kill everyone and get every line of dialogue, there's also a sprite in the IMG folder I haven't gotten so I'll search for that.

bitshiftgames2 years ago

I absolutely like the wall of text: like I've said elsewhere, feedback helps a lot, and I appreciate people taking the time to share.

I spent a lot of time considering appeal. pricing etc, and still will. I agree that it would be a bad idea to make this one a hard charge, and I don't plan to. To clarify, overall I'm taking a full game, chopping it into five pieces, and releasing them as they're finished. The first piece, this one, will probably always be free, and serve as a demo/intro to let people get a taste. The others will be a small hard charge. When/if it's complete, I'll probably bundle them all together for convenience. I think this stands a good chance of working, but it's impossible to know until Mission/chapter 2 is out.

I've had over a decade of watching artists struggle with how to monetize their work in a way that was sustainable and didn't alienate fans. Two decades really, got in around 2000. I'm old enough to remember artist bragging about wild invisible watermark schemes and other nonsense, long before Patreon. So many artists make the mistake of either undervaluing their fans, failing to put themselves on the other end and see how it feels, or the mistake of undervaluing themselves and underpricing/underpromoting their stuff because they don't want to make waves. One thing I've learned is that you can never make everyone happy: someone will start complaining the moment you charge ANYTHING, which is somewhat understandable. But it's a balance. You want to hit something that's reasonable for most of the people interested in your work, and for you. It's a tricky process, but I'm trying to approach it with the right balance of humility and self-respect. We'll see how it goes.

And glad you're enjoying the writing! It's always kind of boggled me that the writing is so bad in these games, because to me that's the one easy part of all of it. This game took 7 months to make. The writing was...maybe a week all condensed? But people obviously have different skill sets. I'm glad I had another opportunity to write some fun stuff for the game (and I'm actually still slightly tweaking it as I playtest; no "lore" changes, just phrasing and stuff).

itch.io

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