Re: Discussion - why I think hentai games often get pirated and potential solution
I agree with a lot of this thread. Rephrasing some points made elsewhere in my words:
Beware of statistics involving piracy: "would pirate the game given the chance" and "would buy the game given the chance" are only partially overlapping sets of people, usually you'd expect most of the people who pirate something "for free" to just do something else rather than spend their money buying it instead, if pirating were not an option.
Culture also plays a large role: Questionable legality, and just general "culturally frowned upon"ness causes people to be sneaky, and an anonymous torrent feels more sneaky. Also, there's the related post-masturbation shock problem: If you're in "wtf did I just jerk off to" mode, it's a lot easier and comfortable to delete a throwaway downloads folder than something that might cost money to replace.
Though I'd urge people to avoid the "porn just is free on the internet these days" argument: From what I've seen in traditional video porn, this is mostly pushed by a surprisingly ubiquitous monopoly, who use it to gut competition - and it leads to shady business practices, poor treatment of workers, and general samey one-size-fits-all low-quality-lower-price products: You don't actually all want cheerleader porn, but it's easier to mass-produce, so it's marketed such that you think you want it. Also, customer loyalty is a much bigger issue when you have paying customers rather than ad-impression eyeballs, so people are more likely to care about quality when money gets involved.
I'd expect some of these concepts translate quite well to more digital-art forms.
Ideally, I figure some of these issues can be fixed by pay-what-you-can/donation models like patreon: If you don't require everyone to pay the same, you'll get less money from some, but others will pay more instead. Unfortunately, it may lead to a wildly unpredictable income, which isn't great when you're trying to pay a mortgage and put food on the table. Then again, as said in webcomics: "Now 1000 people would each have to decide to fire me for me to lose my job..."
And it doesn't excuse independent creators from managing funds: It's not the internet's responsibility to fund future projects, it's the creator's responsibility to manage time and money such that there's a new product ready before the old one dries up, and to keep enough rainy day savings to absorb the occasional flop when a product didn't work out as expected: These will happen periodically in creative work - the only way to avoid those is to keep re-hashing the same ideas with no innovation, which leads to even more certain death.
Overall, I don't have a clear recommendation what model creators should do, though. You do what you like best! I mildly prefer things that have a polite "if you got this for free and like it, here's how you can throw money at me" messages over DRM, but I figure both have their uses.
