Regarding Sauce's Health, Possible Changes to Tier Rewards (Patreon)

Hi all, this is BáiYù again, and I'd like to address some of the topics that Sauce talked about in their previous post. Namely, ways to reduce the amount of stress they take on when creating content for SnaccPop Studios.

"Please take care of yourself."

Many of you, including myself, have expressed concerns to Sauce about how much work they are capable of doing in a short period of time, but anyone who has struggled or is struggling with mental health can understand just how difficult it can be to internalize well-meaning wishes from others. Even I have suffered from toxic productivity in an attempt to meet expectations, and as a result, I injured my back at a thankless retail job only to be diagnosed with chronic fatigue and pain for the rest of my life at the young age of 25. It's been 2 years since that diagnosis.

Sauce is 5 years my junior. It is legitimately frightening for me to see what they're doing to themselves despite my efforts to encourage them to slow down.

Running SnaccPop Studios is no small endeavor. Being successful enough in the indie games development scene to be able to hire multiple freelancers at hourly rates is rare. Juggling projects, coordinating several moving parts, drawing tons of art, posting updates, responding to players and readers, filing taxes, and all the other business things in-between is so much for someone in their early 20s to handle. My job is to help take some of those duties off of Sauce's shoulders, but there's only so much I myself can do.

Why Do We Work So Damn Hard?

We work hard because it’s always been a core value for Sauce and I to be able to positively impact creator spaces. Sauce has always funneled as much of the Patreon earnings back into hiring aforementioned freelancers to continue providing content, while my own slice of pay feeds back into Project Ensō for things like Steam Direct fees, website costs, commissioning artists for promotional materials, and recently hardware upgrades in the form of acquiring Apple hardware and a Steam Deck for Mac/iOS certification & development and testing respectively. In other words, unless it's a dire financial situation, everything else goes to our team and not our pockets.

It's important to continue hiring those freelancers to cover the things we can't do ourselves: voice acting, composing, audio editing, programming, and more. By hiring people who are masters of their craft, we're supporting them and giving them strong resume materials while giving you higher quality content to enjoy.

At the same time though, there has to be a more sustainable way to do this.

What Needs to Change?

Sauce has been working on improving their work-life balance, as well as physical & mental health. After speaking together in private, we identified one major task that was one of the primary sources of stress that no one else could reasonably help them complete: the custom art rewards for the $35+ tiers, including Bad Apple, Sweet Tooth, and Ultimate Temptation.

I made the executive decision to further limit the number of slots on those tiers a few days ago, but it still doesn't solve the issue of having to message each Patron at those levels to ensure that we get their requests correct; there's a recurring pattern where some Patrons never respond to collect their rewards, which actually makes things harder on us. Did our messages reach them, or did we miss hearing from them? And what happens if on one month, everyone decides that they want to claim their custom art piece?

As we begin to work on more and more games, the custom art rewards begin to become a major timesink, delaying progress when it comes to the art stage of development. As this affects our Patrons at our higher tiers however, we want to hear your suggestions on what we can offer in place of the custom art rewards. More input on our games via polls, maybe limited physical merchandise?

Please let us what you think in the comments. Once again, we thank you for your continued support of SnaccPop Studios.