Changes to releases (Patreon)

Hey everyone.

I wanted to make a post to elaborate on some things I'm going to be doing differently, as well as why I'm making these changes. I will say though before anything else that tier prices and rewards will be staying the same, just so you aren't worried about that as you read.

I'll start with the background. Over the last couple years, there have been a lot of financial scares; high profile bannings, ban waves, policy changes, etc. Five years ago, patreon felt like a very stable place to be. Lately, I feel much less secure. 

I started a subscribestar a while back to spread my eggs between a couple baskets, but its still pretty dangerous. Really, if anything happened to either platform I'd be in a lot of trouble. My stability is basically at the mercy of huge corporations that don't care about me at best, or actively want to ban my work at worst. 

I've been considering what to do. I hired a marketing team a while ago but I uniquely did not benefit from it the way most of their clients did. There are of course, two main differences between me and other developers. One is that I have been around for a very long time, so most people who would be interested in my work have already heard of me. The other, is that I release all of my work for free and monetize through voluntary support. 

I genuinely like to provide my content for free. I like providing entertainment freely for everyone to enjoy. But I sadly have to recognize the reality that *most* people will not pay to support something that is free, even if they would otherwise be happy to pay for it if it was not free. Also, some people would rather just buy something once than have the hassle of signing up for a subscription service and then unsubscribing later.

You all are amazing. Your support has helped me get to where I am now, and I would never be a full time developer without your support. So I don't want to just try to cover my financial issues by demanding even more of you. I am not going to be changing prices or rewards here. You will still get game releases, high res art, and other tier rewards as usual for the same price as usual. 

I'm also not going to go full paywall either. Spiral Clicker and Adventure High for sure will always be free. Mind Conquest I am undecided on as I have had to hire a programmer to help with it, as the programming is very complicated, hence the few and slow updates on it. I want to always be working on at least one project that I do free public releases for though. 

What I am planning to do is experiment with actually trying to put some of my projects up for sale like most developers do. Starting with Succuquest, and also Detective Doe as a digital comic book. These will be included still with your patreon rewards so you won't have to pay anything extra to get them, but outside of patreon, the projects will have free demos/samples available and the full release will be for sale. 

As this will be a large change from what is expected from me though, I figured I would write a post about it so that you can all know what's going on and why I've decided to make this change. Hopefully it will lead to good things. If I end up earning more, I might be able to hire another programmer and get my future projects moving much faster as a result. I think I'm much better as a writer than as a coder, as much as I do enjoy coding. xD

Anyways, thanks everyone for your support over the years. Again, I would not be where I am without all of you, and I'm hoping to keep doing my best to make your support worth it.