Thoughts on thoughts

Dinker, I think the majority of your comment, if I’m understanding it correctly, actually echo’s my point about conversion rate. Of course, getting more people is nice but if that’s not an option then the question is how do you convert the people you have. Your last point is the challenge, obviously, even if it can’t be seen at this moment the need is to either increase the number of people subscribing a small amount or increasing the amount from a small amount of people. What you’re speaking to is the challenge of any business large or small, how does one break through all of the “noise” to reach a potential customer? If I had that answer I’d already be making millions 😊

Just a question, I see that a lot of other games go for $10 or even higher, while you give a bloody good game away for $5 per month (okay, it severly lacks at a huge amount of porn CG in comparison to some of the other games especially those with rendered graphics). And I see that you have a good amount of pledgers with 370 members in comparison to them, but only 40 of them pay $10 while 200 pay just $5. In my opinion you have the better game. So if you would get from all of those 200 patrons $10 instead of $5, you would get $1000 more and are able to order more CGs, which would help to increase the porn. And as porn sells, what would be so wrong in rising the needed amount for getting the newest release to $10, while for $5 you just get the previous one and the public release is two or more releases before that?

AbyssalEros

We're in an environment where there are about 3 or 4 places to 'market' this sort of game. You have chans and a few websites and that's it. Pretty much he's hitting everyone that would find this 'relevant to their interests.' The way I see it there are only two things that encourage people to sub: 1) A genuine interest in seeing the project completed and being willing to put your money where your mouth is. 2) Liking the creator and the community enough to drop money to engage in a meaningful way. (A little flag next to your name when you go on Patreon.) I don't see where he could increase engagement or provide a better value proposition at this point for getting people onboard outside of how the patreon is featured inside the game itself.

Dinker

Thanks Hans, and I appreciate everyone who has increased their pledge, hopefully I'll be able to find a lot more backers though so people don't feel like they have to pay more. :)

Lord Arioch

I just hiked up my pledge to 25 stones. The vision you gave for the game and how you go about it really speaks to the person you are. That kind of commitment and character really deserves equal support and reward. I wish you the best of luck with this!

Hans mann

Hello, I like your work very much because it makes me think a lot of the role-playing books heroic-fantasy "where we are the hero". Never seen such a complete and complex game. Everything is really possible. Congratulation and we are very quickly immersed in it. The first version, free, left me on my end. I can not wait to see what happens next. I also wrote essays or news and some novels, all unpublished (because I worked in the kitchen and I could not reconcile the two) and some, although I am a touch to everything (sf, hf, war , Policeman, black humor, mystical ect ...), if you want a helping hand, do not hesitate to ask me on my mailbox. Still congratulation. Sorry if the translation is not very conform, I use google translation ^^

I'll comment on your point about PR. Consider this going off your rough estimates of 1600 downloads (that you're aware of), what's your conversion rate? When I mentioned PR before, what I meant is driving numbers to your product. So if, for example, your conversion rate is 1% than out of the 1600 downloads you've only secured 16 new subs. So the question is two fold; either increase the views, or increase your conversion rate (in the perfect world you increase both, yes). You're product is one of the few that when I sampled the game I came here and pledged. It's a good product but, think about this, lots of companies have good products and they don't sell. If you're old enough to remember the Beta and VHS wars of the 80's then you'd know that Beta was an arguable better format but Sony lost that battle. Focus on your marketing, as you noted above, and start gathering data points to see what's working and what isn't. Good luck out there.

the fight against piracy is a loosing fight. Nothing it's save man.

Vénus, there are ways to fight piracy. If you can run a small registration server 24/7 on some machine with static IP, I can help you to write an app that would register people with serial numbers and synchronize their licences. I used to do it for some production apps (written in C++), never tried for RenPy, but can research that, if you want to move that direction.

Artem

someone might've mentioned this before but why not make public releases delayed by versions instead of time. For example: Instead of two week delay, it's two release delay. Then you can see which version was more polished etc and make that public.

Okay, that's pretty quick. I've pirated games like yours before if it was a month where I couldn't spare the 5, 10 or 20 the game demanded, usually it takes some digging or I can only find older versions. I guess it's sort of a good thing some people are so into your game, but it's also a bit disheartening your rate of pledges is so low. Like pirating isn't even the real word entirely in this case, no one cracks your game, a fan of yours shares it and it it's shared instantly I don't really see any solution that's easy. Maybe as your game grows people will feel alright about just trying the older versions while waiting since they haven't caught up to the new content anyway.

Nineanon

My game was pirated ten minutes after the last release, there's nothing I can do about it really unless I go after links, and that is too much hassle for too little reward.

Lord Arioch

If you swing too hard against public releases you risk more and quicker piracy. I think you definitely need and want to go with the delayed releases, but make it too long and it'll hurt your 1 dollar backers. Maybe you could layer it, but that's more work. Just be careful you don't turn into a shrieking monster people want to pirate just to spite you. Best of luck :)

Nineanon