ABDL Video Game Patreon Survey

[Personalias]

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RNPQ7WL

Howdy Folks,

I’d like to talk to you about ABDL video games for a second.

Just in case y’all aren’t aware, Piece of Soap and I worked together to create the ABDL game “Perpetual Change”. If you haven’t tried it and you like my writing or Piece of Soap's Art, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not googling it and taking the time to play it. Because it’s my writing AND Soap’s art on a FINISHED video game that we worked together on..

If I don’t talk about it much, it’s literally because I thought everybody knew about it by now.

Now let me peel back the curtain and drop some history on y’all

When Soap and I started on that particular project, I was a full time teacher, part time writer. It was a commission situation, financially, but creatively it developed into something of a partnership.

And yes, we had a lot of help from a lot of people. Soap commissioned other artists to do key scenes and stills, and hired someone to help with editing and to make the random bits of dialogue from all the non-named characters. But from pre-production on, Soap and I were the primary creative forces and contributors to that game.

We made a really good team. I’m really good at using my words to invest people emotionally and to misdirect and amuse, while Soap is practically a genius at what he does and creates poetry with his visuals and gameplay. We’re practically Penn & Teller but our magic is padded fan-service!

I love it, loved writing it, and was frankly AMAZED with how much detail he put into that game. You can only imagine how relieved and honored I was for him to ask me to continue working with him on a second game, called The Hive. It’s a different system, a different feel, and a different story, but we’ve both learned so much since we started on Perpetual Change all those years ago.

Here’s the part that hurts to say: I’m a full time writer now, and as glamorous as I make it look sometimes, a niche writer doesn’t make as much money as a public school teacher (a profession not known for its affluence). I don’t want to raise my rates on MY Patreon, either, because I can’t guarantee making more content that is significantly different from what I write. That’s why my focus has always been trying to entertain and asking for your support.

Soap’s a full time Patreon artist, too. Sometimes, he can’t afford to commission me or anybody else for that matter. If you think I undersell myself, it is my honest and heartfelt opinion that Soap doesn’t fully know how amazing he is at what he does.

It can also be challenging to find a good balance on a collaboration, financially, when the collaboration is entirely on just one of the collaborator’s Patreon amidst tons of their other amazing creative works.

Soap puts all of his video game content on his Patreon alongside his fantastic original artwork, fanart, and comics for the obscenely low price of just one dollar. It literally only costs someone 12 dollars a year to get access to ALL of that.

It’s difficult to determine who is subscribing for what and where the interest lies.

He originally had a Patreon called ABGames, but he shut it down and folded it into his main Patreon. We would like to re-start the ABGames Patreon and move all future work on The Hive over to that site instead.

In doing so, we would be able to ask for support directly for that particular project as well as any other video game collaborations going forward and then share the profits with one another. Ideally, this would enable Piece of Soap to not have to commission me and would let me write for The Hive more often. Hopefully, it will also create extra funds so that it is easier to commission additional artists where desired.

And as much as it makes sense, financially, and it would help us a great deal, we’re worried. We certainly don’t want to ask too much of you in your support or to feel like we’re taking advantage of anyone.

Things are just getting more expensive these days, and a video game charging 12 dollars a year per person COMBINED with all of Soap’s other remarkable work is criminally inexpensive in my opinion. We are still committed to making the best ABDL Video Game content that we can. We just don’t want to take advantage of anybody. If anything, we need your help. It's a balancing act.

Please give us your feedback and opinions. We want to be competitive with other niche video game Patreons, but still give you the best value while still being fair to our own needs. Considering the quality of the art and writing, what do you feel would be a reasonable asking price each month in support of a game like The Hive?

Please click or copy and paste to the survey below and above. It's only 4 questions.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RNPQ7WL

[PeculiarChangeling]

Not filling out the form because I want to ramble more than the form allows: 

I really can't say what a 'fair' asking price is without more information. I'd happily contribute 3-5$ a month, potentially, but I do want to add some context to that: When I subscribe to a Patreon, I'm typically not *just* subscribing to get content in exchange for money. 

Also, when it comes to video game production, the returns are often kind of intangible in the moment. There are very few games that I actually want to play various build states of as they come out, and while I don't mean this as a negative in the slightest, Perpetual Change is a game that I think is not well built for playing iterative versions and demos - It's heavily story driven, and while the branching paths offer some replay value, it's not the sort of mechanics-focused game that would have me playing it to try and achieve systems mastery. There's no gameplay loop. I generally only want to play the chapters when they're complete, and I can experience the whole story. (Or at least the whole 'available' story.) For my mileage, playing partial chapter demos would be like reading half a chapter of a book, except that when the full chapter is out I can't even properly start in the middle and have to re-read that section. 

To reiterate, this isn't a bad thing about Perpetual Change, but it does mean that, if we're talking purely about paying a monthly fee to get access to a product, the patreon doesn't offer as much. Cynically, I get exactly equal benefit from waiting until its out and then paying once for the whole thing as I do from paying monthly, because I am personally not going to play the demos. 

There's also the question of production speed - how much is 'fair' in exchange for a monthly dose of content depends on the volume of content. (And video games are often notoriously difficult to measure too. How do you measure a game that doesn't take long to play but has massive replay value versus a massive open world game with a ton of repeated content?)

But... I'm not paying for the demos, I'm paying to support the creation of a game I want to play. And that's way more important to me than my Monthly Dose of Content.