1 Month+, 200 Patreons, the future of Lewd Lad Modding (Patreon)

Hey all!

Probably should've written this blog post up for the actual one month anniversary which was a few days back, but being busy making mods, putting them up and just life things in general.

Nonetheless, I want to thank you all! We crossed the 200 Patreon mark briefly yesterday - and now the numbers from people signing up for the month are starting to trickle in (making the number tick back down).

Overall, it's been great - a lot of positive reception and support, and the number of people signing up has blown away my expectations!

I could probably afford to make this my full time job around the 1,000 Patreon mark - which is to say, with a linear extrapolation, that'd only be 4 months away! Of course, a linear extrapolation is extremely naieve, especially given that retention numbers are finally starting to show up. Plus I don't know how large the modding community is and what proportion of people willing to sign up to support premium modding content is (or how long they'd be wiling to support it for).

Also, if the number seems high, it's a function of both living in a high cost of living country/area and that my opportunity cost (from quitting/reducing time at my current job) is high - so these are things I have to consider.

I'm also uncertain about the future of Genshin Impact itself - it's a big game with a huge userbase right now, but will it stick around for years and years? Or will it drop off a cliff if Hoyo doesn't find a way to better retain existing users while running out of new customers? I'd like to think that modding is something that helps them and the community out - I'm certainly playing Genshin again *because of* modding.

Point is, going from hobby side gig to career change is a huge move with significant opportunity costs and risks. To some extent I'll be mitigating that by modding more than just Genshin Impact (will probably be working on Street Fighter 6, Starfield and returning to Elden Ring once the DLC drops, on top of continuing to do Genshin stuff).

As a career, modding is kind of a tough place to be - the rights to your work and the market you base your work on is uncertain and volatile. Likely, I'll want to pivot from modding into making my own games, or otherwise using these skills for something that could support me long term.

Also, I'm a little stressed about people ripping this content off. Media creators making vids without providing credits, and people pirating early access stuff and uploading them to pirate sites. On one hand, I'd like to take it as a sign of a compliment - that people think it's worth pirating/stealing in the first place, but there is a nagging thought of whether or not it impacts my ability to continue doing this. At this early point, the worst that will happen for me I simply walk away - which would remove a nice potential income stream, but also give me back huge amounts of time (I'm currently putting more time and effort into this than my real job for sure).

Also variation requests are taking up a significant amount of time - in a large part, I started this patreon to deal with them. You want a variation? Here's my patreon! But even so, because of my drive for quality and my willingness to please, I end up spending more time on them then is sensible from a time management point of view. I reason that it's because these variations help out the content I put out - and they do - but even so, I'll need to put a cap on total number of spots available to make requests. That might mean a consolidation between the Request and Patreon tiers to streamline things.

If you're the one uploading my stuff to pirate sites, do me and the community a favour and provide a bit more time between my uploads and you uploading to their site - I think the early access model is a great deal for everyone, including the patreons that are signing up to support and encourage this sort of work, and the community as a whole which benefits from a stream of high quality content from people (including myself) with the skills to provide them.

In the medium term (next few months), I plan on continuing on with this experiment - it's going very well so far, so I'm willing to continue investing my time and effort into it. If I can retain the mid to high hundreds of signups for a couple months, I'll look into hiring assistants to help me package up these mods - which will save me a huge amount of time, in turn allowing me to create more content for all of you. The possible permutations are massive - basically every option can have 2 or many steps (on/off, or size change), which can be multiplied by every other option - which is why I don't make all the possible variants and instead have people in the higher tiers make specific requests for those variations instead.

With an assistant, we still wouldn't be able to put together every possible variation - but at least the more obvious and regular requests can be consistently put together. Additionally, it'd allow me time to properly categorize all these variants and setup a system to let you easily find what you want and download/use it.

I'd also be finding a way to better create a library of components to allow for easier reuse of parts - allowing quicker  and better turn around on possible variations. Ideally it'd almost be as easy as using a character wardrobe and character customizer. That requires a lot more work per item of clothing (to allow for resizing across all the different body permutations) though and a bit of forethought and planning.

Anyway, I know that's a lot of things to consider, and you're really all here for the lewds - Thank you hugely if you've made it to the end of this post. Let me know your thoughts; I'm kinda flying by the seat of my pants here, so getting a conversation from you guys would be hugely helpful!