Re: Breeding Season
It's kinda sad that these guys get so much money thrown at their faces and yet they still can't deliver an acceptable product.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of other devs out there on patreon, who could use some support. Many show great potential and some even have already shown that they are capable.
Maybe have a look around and support someone else?
(Just have a look at the "Comprehensive patreon list" topic here on ULMF and find some devs who are at the lower end of earnings, like <2000$)
I think this whole "Breeding Season" thing is heading straight for a trainwreck, better jump off now and save some money or support others. You don't want to fall victim to the "sunk cost fallacy" here, trust me.
And if they DO come around in the end and ship a good product, you can always resub to them.
The thing is though, this is nothing new or ununsual.
I have seen this kind of stuff A LOT since the dawn of crowdfunding with Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
These new Indie-Devs, who never have actually completed a game in their life, even if they have worked on a few, with little to no experience try to gain support to fulfill their dreams.
At first, nothing wrong about that. But the problems arise after they reach their goal and even get overfunded, adding stretch-goals that SOUND good, but may not actually be feasible at all.
And then the problems start. Little to no updates, bad quality of updates, things taking longer and costing more than anticipated, etc etc.
Sometimes another hassle comes in, whats with all the tiered rewards, especially if its physical goods like shirts, posters or statues/figurines. Shipping shit all over the world is expensive, not to speak of having to make it first (because no company has that stuff just lying around). Even digital goods like special drawing and stuff takes time and ressources away from development.
And all that with kickstarter, where people pay once and the devs have a limited one-time-budget.
But this? these devs get 30k PER MONTH, and are still not able to release something satisfying?
Don't get me wrong, I know there is a "ceiling" when it comes to progress-speed (unless you keep hiring people, but that would up the costs dramatically), but from the last updates it looks like they were kind of just twiddling their thumbs and work maybe 1/8th of the time, maybe even less.
From my experience in the gaming-industry and what I have seen on crowdfunding-platforms, these devs probably were very naive.
I'm not gonna attribute it to malice, them trying to screw their patrons, but rather, they didn't know themselves what they were getting into and probably also not having a very good plan as to what direction their game should go.
They keep adding and adding ideas on paper, but little are actually getting implemented. They have all this money, but don't really know how to spend it and probably don't have a manager or producer who knows budgeting and how to distribute the money to different "departments".
Hell, they probably are not even a real company yet, most likely still working from home and collaborating over the internet.
So yeah, I think this whole thing just grew over their heads a bit...
TL;DR: Sad to see, better jump off their patreon now if you are a supporter and go support someone else until they show they can do better and deserve it again. They're probably too naive and unexperienced to handle all this money, the responsibility that comes with it and peoples expectations.
