Home
Artists
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register
Partychan Telegram Live Sex ThePornDude
Home Artists Posts Import Register

December 11 Update (Patreon)

Published:
2022-12-11 18:06:08
Imported:
2023-02

Content

Before the main post, we have another lovely Lustmas image! Esthera and Nalili were engaging in Wholesome Family Activities on a wintry night, but Nalili fell asleep before Simon Claus arrived. ^-^

-

Alright, it's time to talk about Once Ever After and metrics. I could have tried to write this months ago, and I'll have even more information a year from now, but... now is fine. There's enough information to make some statements that may be of interest to those who want to know more about the business side of things.


Metrics

Was OEA a success? That depends on your definitions, because there are many potential metrics:

- This was my most expensive game yet and it made back several times its budget. This is good.

- It's my worst-reviewed game, though not out of the "Very Positive" range. This was a contributor to the post two weeks ago.

- Though the raw return is high, the return measured as ROI is worse. Ouroboros remains my highest ROI; budget and ROI have been inversely related in my experience.

- There's a ton written online about whether Early Access is a good idea for story-based games, whether it cannibalizes wishlists, and so on. The primary release sales were smaller than the EA release, but still substantial, so I intend to do EA releases for all games from now on.

- It didn't cannibalize wishlists, either. I started with a modest number, which tripled after the EA release, and has doubled again since then. This is my highest number of Steam wishlists of any game so far, which suggests...

- Unless this game has a strange long tail compared to my others, it should have a healthy life of future sales.

- I gained more followers and new players than in other examples or regular updates. Steam followers increased by about 40%, for example. Also got an above average number of patrons out of it, which helped stem the losses due to economic conditions.

- Reviews are roughly correlated to sales, but not very closely in my experience. OEA still hasn't outsold DoW despite having double the reviews.

- OEA sold less than 50% of a cheap hentai puzzle game that its own creator referred to as "shitty garbage".

- It's sold roughly 10% of the copies of the biggest meme hentai games.

- On the other hand, it sold more and was better reviewed than several games with bog standard hentai elements.

- It also outsold a SFW RPG with a full development team and a six figure budget.


I included the comparisons as an attempt to retain perspective and avoid simple comparisons. As I posted two weeks ago, I think I'd sell better if I used more generic formulas, but I want to remain open to the idea that might not actually be true. It's possible that Steam is just a rough market no matter who you are, given the increasing saturation. On the other end, I wanted to emphasize that you don't have to go very far for my success to seem like small potatoes.

What does all of this mean for me? It doesn't have to mean anything. It's not like I'm accountable to any board of directors or stakeholders, and cash flow is positive. I do feel some obligation to everyone here who has given me this career. But otherwise, I am doing this for personal fulfillment, and that's the sticking point (as discussed last week).

Regardless of my personal opinions, I think you can make a legitimate argument that OEA1 is a malformed concept that won't satisfy any general audience. While I have certain kinds of freedom to ignore this, it put me in a disgruntled state. Even though a sequel would probably have filtered out most other players, it's not something to consider lightly.


Once Ever After 2?

So, would I ever make a sequel to OEA? Potentially. There are some obstacles: this one earned out pretty well, but in the years since, Crescentia's commission rate has doubled, so the sequel's budget would immediately double too. But the larger issue is one of fundamental theme and how to potentially correct for the above issue.

OEA2 as a concept could develop in several different ways. The new protagonist wouldn't be tied to Ingrid's character arc and I could easily imagine a version of the game that would be heavier on sex and potentially make a larger portion of the audience happy. Yet I find myself thinking that, no matter how much work I put into this, it would ultimately be viewed as a worse version of something I don't want to create.

A radically different alternative would be to make a SFW RPG with a sizable optional patch adding the sex scenes. If OEA was ultimately "RPG with adult content" as opposed to an adult game, this would be the final form of that concept. Sex in this conception of the game would be more about relationship arcs than central theme.

I'm not sure I'm really happy with either of these, or the null option of repeating the first game's balance. But that said, I'm still enthusiastic about some of the ideas I had for this. If you haven't read before, the sequel would be set in the Beauty and the Beast Fable. Monsterfucking? Monsterfucking! It would begin with a new cast, but as their worlds crack open, you'd see more characters from the first game (and maybe not in the ways you're probably expecting).

With OEA establishing some basic concepts, I'd be free to go nuts with the sequel. There are characters and concepts I'd really like to explore within the fairy tale framework. As of this post, I have no concrete plans to put any work hours into the concept, but as always, I will keep you informed.


Anyway, this post has been a weird mix. I hope that some of the industry stuff was interesting to those who like that sort of thing!

Files

Comments

Anonymous

Sierra do you know a Game called sunrider?

Rachnera

For more reference points (and inspired by the last you quote), do you know how well SFW pseudo-retro* indie RPGs sell in general? It's a niche I know nothing about. *I have no idea if there's a term for that, but reminiscent of the style of SNES/Playstation RPGs.

Leveler All

How long has it been since you release oea? wont you feel is a bit to early to give it a full metric on wich if it was succesfull or not? there are times where the issue tends to be how many people see it and get to play it and lewd games are as far i seen spred by word of mouth rather than platform

Desertopa

So, this whole subject is of great interest to me, and it's hard to fit all the things I have questions or commentary on into a single comment. I think it's best if I collapse all my questions down into a single one which precedes all of them. I was curious about which games you were measuring OEA against as benchmarks, but what I'm *really* curious about is how you got the specific sales figures for the other games in the first place, because I've often wanted those for reference and never been able to find them. ROI: I think ROI is likely to be negatively correlated with budget for most things you might spend money on for a project, if you hold your own writing and direction constant between them, but this doesn't necessarily mean higher budgets are a mistake, if you weigh in terms of return on time-investment. I think Squeenix probably makes back less money than you do, on games with budgets in the hundreds of millions, relative to their investment. But they're obviously making a lot more money total, relative to the time it takes them to generate games. Some things you can spend money on will probably have a better bang for their buck than others, but overall, development costs probably exist along a tradeoff curve, where the more money you have to spend, the less you're likely to make relative to your initial investment, but the more you can make in a given amount of time. Higher budget options which don't make you more money relative to time though should probably be rejected, at least from a business standpoint. OEA's reception: I think OEA is also at a different point along another tradeoff curve than your other games, in terms of its appearance of porn-gaminess. On the one hand, it succeeded in bringing in a bunch of new players and supporters, but on the other hand, it had a greater distance than your other games between the expectations its appearance elicited, and the actual experience of playing it. Most of the negative reviews are cases of "I was dissatisfied because I expected this to be more of a straightforward porn game." Since it brought in a number of players on a "came for the porn, stayed for the plot" basis, the lower overall reviews aren't necessarily a bad thing from a business standpoint, but if they weigh on you as a creator, I think you can limit that by having a closer alignment between first impressions and the actual flavor of the game. Art: I think Crescentia was a good fit for OEA, with its tongue-in-cheek approach to a deliberately porny aesthetic. But, I think that her characteristic style is such that any game she illustrates is likely to give the impression of being deliberately porny. Due to kind of weird historical quirks of the medium, most Japanese visual novels are still 18+ rated, even ones which don't really need to be. But some simply contain sexual content, while some are focused on it. Stylistically, it's often possible to differentiate sex-focused games from sex-containing games with just a glance at the character designs. Going by those sorts of conventions, I'd expect works illustrated by Crescentia to be probably sex-focused. I think that's probably going to create misaligned impressions with most of your work. Of course, you don't have unlimited freedom to select artists based on ideal aesthetic fit. Budget aside, you can only hire people who're actually available and can be relied on for the work, which I know is way harder to find than people who've never tried to hire artists for long-term projects would usually think. I was just wondering though whether you might be able to get some help from your audience on this. If you put out a call to your audience for suggestions of artists who're available for hire, whose styles they think might fit with your work, maybe that would give you a novel candidate pool worth checking out? OEA2: Beauty and the Beast sounds like a great basis to work with based on the original concept of the game. And as far as monsterfucking goes, I'm definitely in favor of your takes on it. But, I think this might actually be particularly hard to pitch in a way that gives the first impression of being an RPG which also contains porn, rather than a "Porn RPG."

sierralee
>>97361377

I know the category you mean, but it's difficult to give an answer because there's so much variance. If we consider just RPG Maker games, that's a different category: there's a sea of games that barely sell any, but others that would crush OEA's sales beyond even the biggest games I mentioned here. Even with fully custom RPGs, it seems like a gamble to me. It's a popular subgenre, but because of that it's hard to rise above all the games being created for it.

sierralee
>>97361425

While that might seem logical, games sales tend to be front-loaded. It's typically said that a majority of a game's lifetime sales are made in the first year, a majority of that year's sales are sold in the first month, etc. I don't have sales data from some secondary platforms (and Nutaku STILL doesn't have it up), but Steam outsells everything else combined. So my assumption is that OEA has already seen the majority of new attention it will ever get.

Anonymous
>>97360659

So, you should try it, because there is a thing the game has in common with yours: the gameplay is interesting, the history is interesting but its a porn game Anyway to the real point : The people from sunrider released it when steam didnt have adult games, so they made a game that could be played anyways (you could download at the time a patch to make it +18 again) (edit because I pushed enter by mistake) When the game was made the creators promised a lot about it (branching paths for example) that they didnt really do. there was a lot of drama, they lost a lot of players and patrons (because it was, if i remember it correctly a kickstarter game before patreon) but still the game was good enought and they retained enought people for a sequel and a... third one they have done some other games that didnt have so much impact but, there they are still doing games. I think they are gonna release Sunrider 4 in a while, so that is my opinion: Making games, not only for steam is rought, sometimes you hit the nail, sometimes you dont, some people will hate on you, some people will buy your game anyway ( i didnt buy the second one, but i got the third and the second in a bundle for example) Making people happy with your games is HARD

sierralee
>>97360659

Sure, I can give it a try. To be clear, is the full name "Sunrider: Liberation Day" or is it another game?

Anonymous
>>97360659

There is 3 parts, one of them is free , one that is not free, is a continuation with mostly the same gameplay, and the third is a dating sim called sunrider academy (that continues the history, is a prequel at the same time and changes gameplay) I recomend you the free one

Anonymous

Very interesting, thank you for sharing! I really like your games, your writing is amazing! One thing that held me from looking at OEA was the RPG Maker Style of it. Since it looked like a standard H-RPG, I expected one. The reviews praising it into the heavens made me give it a chance. I think what I'm saying is: If this is any kind of option think about switching up the game engine too something more unique looking if you don't want to be thrown into the same pot as every other RPG Maker Game. I realize that this probably wouldn't be possible as a one person studio. But your work is great and I personally belief it deserves recognition! Please don't read this as a "you should do". I can't tell you neither do I know. I just want to give you something to think about. You'll know what's gonna be best for you and your games!

sierralee
>>97362561

Unfortunately, my answer to your condensed question is not useful: all numbers come either from devs sharing data on private Discord servers or making public statements about sales/performance. That was part of the reason I wasn't more specific, as much of that information was shared at least implicitly in confidence. ROI: You may be right. Given the years between expenses and profits, my concern is seeing the margin not just decrease, but potentially disappear. For example, there are a lot of things I could have spent more money on for OEA that I think would have had no impact on performance. Aesthetics: I may be in too negative of a mindset to accept it, but at the moment I feel that the certain elements of the expected porn game experience are inextricable from the genre, regardless of presentation. That's not to say that I deny that Crescentia's style and audience could have contributed to the factors discussed. Artists: Huh, I honestly don't know. The difficulties in finding artists are large enough that I had presumed that my audience wouldn't be able to offer many suggestions. If I went forward with the Crimson Gray game I mentioned last week, which would require a new artist, I was actually going to ask you if you knew of anyone.

sierralee
>>97364103

Thanks for the kind words! I'm glad you ended up enjoying OEA. ^-^ I do consider what engine I use seriously, but you're right: there are limitations to what I can use as a one woman studio. I try to keep up with these and regularly consider new potential options. Hopefully with everyone's support I'll be able to keep improving my work.

Anonymous

I think that the "problem" of your games is that they are not fap material. Because the plot is too good. Sometime, I ran through a sex scene in LS, because I want to know what happen next. The marketing of your game is, from my point of view, not a porn game, but a story game with sex. If I dare the comparaison, comparing your game to standard porn game is comparing nymphomaniac from Lars von tier, to classical porn. In both case, the sex is a selling point, but it's easier to fap to porn because we have nothing to focus on except the sex. In case of your games, sex is a selling point, but not THE selling point, the story is (at least for those who know your games). For me, what you sell is not sex, it's "feeling good" (sorry, I lack a better way of explaining it). It's the idea of being in a world where we can make the world a better place, and sex is a part of it, which make it more complete, in a sens. Like a Disney for adults only. I do not know if what I feel for those game is what other people feel, but I think that comparing your games to fap material games is not a good idea, because the purpose is far from the same.

Desertopa
>>97362561

I actually do know at least one artist off the top of my head who I might potentially recommend, but it depends on your priorities. I have a short side-project I'm currently working on with SpiceyKali- https://twitter.com/SpiceyKali And I'm very much a fan of her expressiveness, stylistic range, and her level of communication on the details of the work. I think she can be relied on to stick with a project of that length, and her prices are fairly modest relative to her skills. But, she's juggling a lot of her own work with her project commission work, and if you were to work with her, I think you might have to be satisfied with a relatively slow rate of art progress because of that. I have a *lot* of artists bookmarked as potentially worth trying to get in touch with, but for most of them, I can't vouch for their communication and reliability, and in my experience, only a small minority of them would be available and reliable for a longer term project.

Argo The Ratfolk
>>97367306

I totally agree with you! I have more or less said the same thing when trying to promote OEA and especially TLS to others. Yes the sex elements are great and all, but what keeps me coming back for more rather than dropping it like one might a typical hentai game (I have such a love/hate relationship with games like Corruption of Champions 2 for example for wasting their potential on too much sex/kink stuff rather than the actual plot and such) after the fap appeal runs out, is that the sheer novel plot that the games provide is on par with some of my favorite visual novels/normal books in terms of quality and enjoyment factor!

Argo The Ratfolk

I for one would welcome a OEA2 if you ever happen to do it despite the difficulties! Your point of being a one woman dev team is fair of course, have you ever considered trying to hire someone to help with coding or something (perhaps someone from the community ideally? For some reason for the longest time I thought you had more or less hired Decanter for example) but anyways maybe having an extra pair of hands could open up new possibilities? Though of course I know nothing of how difficult all that would be to balance in terms of cost, especially with rising art prices to consider.

Grim8P

First, this was incredibly interesting and thanks for sharing this information. Second, I would absolutely be interested in seeing OEA2. Something I feel like I may have mentioned but can't recall actually doing. Third, I'm curious what you think a realistic best case scenario for you would have been, compared to how OEA did perform. Did you have a specific positive rating % in mind? A specific number of reviews you would have liked to have hit? Any other related metrics like these would also be interesting to read if you're willing to share. Fourth, do you have any marketing takeaways for OEA, with respect to the metrics discussed? Do you think there are changes you could have made to the Steam page that would have been beneficial? Websites or content creators you'd want reviews from in the future? Etc. It sounds like early access on Steam paid off at least. Any other final thoughts here?

sierralee
>>97377058

Decanter has helped immensely, but has his own job. I should thank many patrons over the years for contributing their own skills to various parts of my work! But at the core it's still just me, yes. Coding is a tricky issue. Coders are everywhere, but reliable coders are hard to find. My biggest experiment with this is DStP, where I hired out for the coding. I went through two fairly bad experiences before using my current freelancer. He's easy enough to work with and his prices are fair, but it really balloons the cost of what was meant to be a simple game, plus there's a gap between conception and execution that's hard to bridge. I'm not sure I have a good answer for this.

sierralee
>>97383040

"Realistic" is a tricky word in this case because indie games vary so much. The highest rating possible on Steam is "Overwhelmingly Positive", which is 95%+ of 500 or more reviews. My other games aren't eligible for anything above "Very Positive", but they've generally had ratings around 95%, so I was hoping for that. OEA's current 85%, which has dropped lower and could easily plummet with a couple bad reviews, is dangerously close to dipping below 80%, which would reduce it to "Mostly Positive". Valve has stated that there's no algorithmic difference between Very and Overwhelmingly, which implies there IS a different when you drop to Mostly, plus it just looks worse. Those are my main metric thoughts. On that note, TLS is the only one of my projects that has a likely shot at getting an Overwhelmingly Positive rating, which should happen if reviews keep trickling in throughout development. Marketing: I'm not sure any likely changes to the Steam page would have made any major difference. Using the Curator Connect program seems to have been mildly beneficial. My efforts contacting websites or content creators seem to have been 100% wasted. =/ I'm considering not spending any time on it at all in the future.

Jens Mikli

The conventional wisdom is that a sequel that knows its audience ought to do better because the first one acts as free advertising. Same reason people do kickstarter campaigns now which is the actual avenue of how successful smutty projects get advertised these days and I'm surprised you haven't talked about.

Runcible Technician

As your lofty patron, sitting as I do upon my golden throne, I do hereby declare that you can make whatever you want. If you want serious thought talk, what are you really looking for in gaming? Do you want to be American McGee? Josh Sawyer? I'm pretty sure those guys has to compromise the fuck out of their art to reach a wide audience and to be totally honest, if the game is located on the same metaphorical shelf as the Penthouse mags you aren't going to sell this to very many teenagers. Maybe just have faith that you are doing something unique that isn't going to fit well into metrics but has better legs? First I played one of your games, then I bought and played all of your games, one example. Also, a ton of people ate Tide Pods, after which they probably bought shit games on steam, a lot of people are idiots.

sierralee
>>97391105

I have considered Kickstarter, and I actually considered it for both Crimson Gray sequels and OEA. But considering that I have been fortunate in my career overall, this has felt like double-dipping to me. It might be interesting to return to the idea to gauge (and potentially generate) interest, it's just a question of the time investment and hurdles involved.

Anonymous

Game success is a weird thing that seems very hard to predict - witness the number of AAA games with massive teams of professional marketers that sink without trace. Conversely, that one hentai crashgrab did well didn't mean they all do.

Anonymous

I'll add that I don't think it's fair for you to compare your work to porn games. You're making erotica at the very least...

Rachnera
>>97360659

A bit late to the party, so this post is likely to just disappear if Patreon does not send a notification. But, just in case... Sunrider was originally a Kickstarter game funded during the initial craze of crowdfunding, where about everything was getting a ton of money. The "Mighty Number 9" period if you will. The game went through so many dramas it's hard to list them all. To try to sum it up very quickly: The root of all evil is that it was supposed to be released in three free chapters. But the devs underestimated the cost of a full game, and it ended up having to be in two parts, with the first half free (Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius) and the second behind a price tag (Sunrider: Liberation Day). Things still stay afloat for a while in spite of the first controversy. After all, Mask of Arcadius was a solid tactical RPG, flawed but nonetheless quite enjoyable. For example, there was a budget optimization phase the like of some TLS fans greatly appreciate. It was also technically impressive for something made with Ren'Py at that time period and available for free (it might have aged quite badly). Sure, the story and the characters were... Well, the most cliché you could imagine. For example, one character is literally Rei Ayanami under another name. But since you spent far more time firing missiles at starships than having to interact with the plot, it was treated with the same leniency as the plot of Doom. When Liberation Day came... As a game you had to pay for... With the focus put on the Visual Novel aspects of the game... And the writing hadn't really got any better... And they announced at the same time a high school spin-off with explicit sex scenes... Boom! Actually, I would say that game had the exact inverse problem if the one you discussed in a previous post. People had high, and varied (more refined gameplay, better story, etc.), expectations for that sequel. Meanwhile the team doing had no greater plan than more of the same and a potpourri of what they liked in other VNs. In retrospect, maybe the lower difficulty setting being called "Waifu Mode" should have been quite the warning... tl;dr I'm far less confident about the fact you'll enjoy it. However, you might find it interesting for historical reasons.

Anonymous
>>97360659

You clearly are far more involved than me in this Arachne. I got the free game without researching it, and later bought the parts that werent free, and decided to research what happened when I found the third one to be so different. As far as porn games go, Sunrider is a "masterpiece" (most things are VILE) and yet for you it has generic history and generic caracters . As for the game itself , its a miracle it works at all so its plagued with bugs (renpy isnt designed at all to do what Sunrider gets away with ) as a tactical RPG its sufficiently challenging and the gameplay is somewhat interesting The history started really really interesting and then devolved into generic anime #323 So, Sierra maybe you will enjoy the game, maybe you will not, but its an interesting case study about what a game can get away with and still have a fanbase . Also about how many problems a game can have and yet be somewhat impacful (I dont think most of the mistakes the creators made were on purpose, the game has soul and their fanbase is still there probably because they feel it)

sierralee
>>97360659

I appreciate all the info from both sides. Fans should always feel welcome to give recommendations. Even if I don't enjoy a game, the process of playing it can often produce ideas about how I'd like to do things.