I recently received a notice from my hosting company that I need to renew in 3 months. This has prompted me to take a closer look at the financial situation of Night Games. It’s been 9 months since I moved to the new website and added the donation plugin. In that time, I’ve received a total of $20.36, all from a single donor (who is quite generous and I do not want to downplay my appreciation). This isn’t enough to commission a single piece of art, let alone cover my hosting costs. If I sound accusatory, that is not my intention, but clearly this system is not working.
I want to be clear that I didn’t make Night Games for monetary reasons. I perceived a gap in the adult games market and wanted to do what I could to fill it. It was a good learning experience for my first released game and I don’t regret it. However, I’m quickly approaching graduation and need to start paying off student loans. I at least need to devote more time into something that I’m not actively losing money on.
Before anyone gets worried, I’m not going to start charging money for Night Games. I made this game with the intention of releasing it for free and that hasn’t changed. What I am currently planning is setting up a Patreon account. Anyone who has followed a lot of Patreons will know that they do not tend to do well unless they are either already well known or offer something to their subscribers.
I’ve thought for a while about what I can offer people while still keeping Night Games publicly available. I could give subscribers earlier access, but I’m not sure how effective that would be given my audience size. I could also add in some premium characters, but I’m not thrilled by that idea. It would mean devoting a lot of time to create content for subscribers and would likely thin out my public releases. I’m not going to rule it out entirely, but it’s not my preference.
My current inclination is to offer a premium version of Night Games with additional artwork for subscribers. This will obviously require getting a dedicated artist on board rather than relying on commissions. I’d need to find someone willing to work for a percentage of the Patreon earnings without a guarantee of how much that will look like. For this reason, I want to test the waters with the poll below so I can get an estimation of likely monthly earnings.
Loading ...I have considered that the answer to this poll may be a resounding “No”. I think this is probably the most reasonable way to support the development of Night Games, but it’s also possible that it’s simply not sustainable. I tried to fill a gap in the market, but between my lack of experience and the rather niche gap I’m filling, there may simply not be a market. I know a lot of you came here from text-based game communities. I’m hoping the addition of artwork would create a broader appeal in other hentai game communities. Night Games may not be the game to bridge this gap. Christian Peterson, CEO of Fantasy Flight Games, gave a great line about game publishing during an interview: “We sort of look at the hemisphere of stars that is game publishing, and we look at if there are any attractive, empty spaces, and we hope there’s no black hole there. We hope we can put our star there without it getting sucked into the abyss.”
Hopefully Night Games is not sitting on a black hole in the adult games market. I obviously took a long hiatus during the summer to experiment with other designs. If Night Games has a future, I’d like to continue nurturing its development. Otherwise I may start working towards an ending in the next few months and moving towards development of one of my other prototypes.
Hey silverbard, I haven’t been around much, but I’m sure you know that I think NightGames has value.
I voted ‘no’ simply because I don’t think the illustrations add much to the game. With text based games, sometimes things are best left to the imagination.
I propose that you look at what Fenoxo did when he had Corruption of Champions in its earliest stage, before his Patreon. He would propose several different additions to the game, and encourage people to vote with their donations. You could even donate X amount to suggest additions to the game, with the understanding that he’d spend as much time on the feature as your money would pay for.
As time went on, his following grew. I think people really enjoyed seeing their influence on the game, and shared it with others. Once it caught on at /d/, he got a huge influx of followers, and he could charge more and more for custom features. And since it was completely free, those new followers could play the game and get hooked and become donators as well.
As always, I’m more than happy to help out in my spare time if I can, particularly with the UI. Just let me know!
-DO
One more thing. I’m more than willing to donate. I’d prefer not to do it through a webform, though, as I’m a little worried about the confidentiality of my name and information.
Quite simply, I would be happy to contribute a few bucks per month just to help make the game available, and I see Patreon as an easy way to do that.
I believe Patreon has three main uses. One is to directly pay someone to make a thing or things, a second is to help support someone who makes things, so they can continue to make things, and a third is to offset the cost of someone making things so they can continue to make them. I support people in all three categories, and at least a couple of Patreons that I have seen have started out as one and moved to another. (For example, Cypress Zeta set up his Patreon with the intent of paying a few expenses and getting art. He is now more than halfway to the goal of working on his games full time just from the amount people have pledged.)
Unless there is a cost to setting up a Patreon, you may want to just create one, and set a $1 award of “support the website”. You could then offer rewards (beta/more frequent releases, or getting the game a few days early are common) or stretch goals based on the response, OR just leave it as “chip in a few bucks if you want” and see how that works. I bet you would get enough to break even on the hosting and other basic costs…
Patreon might not be the best platform for this. I’m sure a lot of people are willing to donate, especially given that we’re now aware of a pressing financial issue, but they might not be interested in doing regular donations or in sponsoring a premium version that would mean more work (and investment to get the artist) for you.
The biggest issue with your small donations is your bad donation system.
web-form is absolutely the worst choice. It doesnt have any (real) security and I am not willing to risk my card’s number. I’m sure, there are a lot of people, who are not willing to risk it.
You should add more secure payment method, like PayPal or PaySafeCard (or some external well-known credit card site).
Though Patreon account could help, too. But I am not not exactly fan of paying on Patreon for some additional pictures ingame.
if you really wanna try Patreon, then go ahead. Though I would suggest to start with something smaller (“chip in a few bucks if you want”) and watch how it works.
PS:
I dont want to be an ass, but another big reason you didnt receive any donations was probably due to your big break.
(7 month break between 2 releases “done with finals” and “return of sex fighter”)
This is the first time I’ve set up an online payment system. I didn’t realize there were security issues associated with web-form. PayPal does not appear to be a viable option, but I’ll look into alternatives.
I said no because I can’t use patreon and PayPal won’t let me pay for lewd stuffs q.q
if PayPal doesnt work, then you are clearly doing something wrong.
No payment service has some sort of silly tags “beware! lewd stuff! Dont send money” and thats why they cant block your money.
PayPal does have a history of seizing accounts related to adult material. That’s the primary reason I went with Stripe instead.
PayPal does indeed have a “beware! lewd stuff! Dont send money” tag:
https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full
Prohibited Activities
You may not use the PayPal service for activities that:
2) relate to transactions involving … (g) items that are considered obscene, … (i) certain sexually oriented materials or services
*THEY* get to decide what is obscene and which “certain” sexually oriented things are prohibited.
PayPal’s exclusions would actually be illegal if they were a bank or credit card company, but they get around a lot of legal issues by being their own category. Additionally, they do not warn sellers/recipients about violations, and give them the opportunity to stop using PayPal and withdraw their money. If PayPal thinks the site/recipient violates the T&C, they freeze the account and usually just keep the money. In some cases, they will release the funds, but there is a chance everyone loses their money. (They do NOT refund the money back to the sender either.)
The nice thing about Patreon is that you can use any credit card, including prepaid and reloadable ones.
On a side note, PayPal will allow you to support via Patreon, unless they believe the artist/creator is creating anything sexual, in which case they will block the transaction. PayPal is pretty bad.
thanks for informing me of this. This is actually 1st time I noticed this problem, even though I have send my money over PayPall several times to some ecchi game developers and usually without any problems. I guess it all comes down to assholes reporting those users.
I assumed its something similar to Steam’s policy of “no adult stuff” even though some developers dont bother and release 18+ games anyway (they were never persecuted on Steam).
anyway, I will be happy of any change, just not webform with direct card number 🙂
Why did you even bother with a domain name if it was going to cost you so much money? Why not just stick with with the free wordpress domain? Unless you start getting really big, and donation sizes accordingly increase, I really don’t see what the custom domain adds.
My recommendation: focus on what people on patreon tell you to. If they want to develop a certain fetish then do it as a reward, however set a few limits of what fetishes you dont like.
Another thing you can do is as most of them do give early access, its okay and people like me who cant donate understand it.
Then if you are getting artwork you could give them sketches so that they can see what is it about.
Any of the three can work and even better if you add them together. As goals of the funding i recommend:
-More sex scenes
-More developing the relations between characters
-The so called “more time working on the game”
-Other activities than the nocturnal sex fights (even more having days off)
-Adding hiding parameters of characters like inhibitions, sexual orientation…
And many many more…
But BEFORE you make a patreon you should let more people try it. First of all go to multiple sites like the ulfm forum and other hentai sites and make yourself more known. So post at many hentai sites showing the game and one month later say that you wanna make a patreon.
If i can help you at anything just ask. However you truly need to make yourself more known.