Re: Survivor Sarah 2 ~The Cruel World~
Most of the Patreon devs care little about forum topics, apart from promoting their game. Once people know of your work - the less you share for free, the more money you make.
When most of the thread is about complaints, what people know is that this is not worth your time.
"Most" patreon devs have no idea how marketing and promotion works, that's why "most" patreon you never even heard of fail miserably or fade into obscurity.
Aslo your claim that less sharing means more money is based on nothing, let's take wolfzq for an example, the broken english is definitely not better than Combin_Ation, fairly similar low level of writing, the art is not top shelf stuff by any definition, and the niche market for fetishes is almost identical. The only real difference in content is the type of art style, and that is apparently not much of a problem since 3DCG is as popular as drawn art if not more.
By your definition wolfzq should not be able to make more money, and yet he does, and i'm gonna argue that the reason is the free part of his business model. More accessibility means more free publicity by word of mouth, more exposition means more people discuss about it which in turn means more feedback, more opportunity for the developer to interact with the crowd outside the loyalist echo chamber of patreon.
Don't get me wrong, talking to your patrons is important, they are the ones who pay the bills, but they are already hooked on your stuff, if you don't go out in the world and talk to new people your market becomes stagnat.
Stagnation doesn't seem a go option n this niche market, that's starting to get flooded from all sides by all kinds of more or less talented people, like pigeons on a piece of corn in a empty city square during a hot summer, giving out free stuff and doing great for it.
There is a huge crowd of people out there with low income, that will never pay for a game of this kind and quality unless they have first played it, because they just can't afford to waste their money on something they would not enjoy. This is everywhere in the gaming industry, it's the reason the free to play model has taken over the market, because that crowd is the vast majority. The important thing to take out of this is that a part of that majority is more than willing to donate or support the developement team if they enjoyed the game, which will never happen if they have no access to the game in the first place. They would rather move somewhere else.
In comparison the small minority that is gonna be desperate enough to pay because you have made your game otherwise unaccessible, may give you a false sense of growth, since the numbers on your feed grow slightly, but those people may not come back the next time if the game is not a masterpiece.
