My Thoughts on the Breeding Season's fallout and Patreon.

[cheddaredgrizzly]

Today I was scrolling across the Forum and it still surprises me that the Breeding Season page is still a active discussion on the Forum despite the fact that the game was canceled 4 months ago. It was a shame when I heard the news and I was surprised how fast the news actually spread, even being reported on Kotaku.

There have been fights over if H-Bomb or S-Purple were responsible for the failure of the project. I honestly think both parties were responsible. H-Bomb was probably poor on his management skills and because of that became very delayed in his progress, while S-Purple took advantage of the contract and decided to work behind his back. I think that if S-Purple just told H-Bomb before filing the paperwork for Cloud Meadow that he wanted to leave the project that the tension would not have escalated to the point that it did.

However the one thing that I took away from this was more about the Use of Patreon. S-Purple mentioned that before he joined the project that the Patreon postings were inconsistent and that production more or less halted. When S-Purple joined it revitalized the project, but the cancellation of the game caused more controversy for patreons than the creators themselves. $42,300 a month of people's money had gone down the drain and a community divided, blaming both sides for the failure of this project. Although Patreon is a great tool, the question I have is at what point SHOULD you have a Patreon?

I have personally never made an account for any project I was a part of, both inside and outside the forum. The reason being that I know I'm inconsistent. My schedule might be free one semester but the next I have no time to spare. It's even worse when you work on multiple projects, because then you have to choose how to break up your schedule just to make deadlines. Some weeks I just don't want to work on stuff. As well as the fact that managing the rewards system on Patreon should really be another job on it's own. So if I'm working on a project for something, it means that I'm working on it on my Free time, behind closed doors, and not getting paid. I honestly wonder how Breeding Season's fate might have been changed if everything was behind closed doors instead of having the constant pressure of Patreon waiting for progress to be done.

So in my position I'm wondering at what point should a game start a Patreon? Should you do it right away? Should it be when there is a team involved? Should you be a certain percentage done with the game? Should the programming be done and use Patreon just to implement the GUI? At what point is it appropriate to Start a Patreon Page? I only ask because I remember people telling me for one project (which is on Hiatus right now, whoops) that I should get a Patreon, but with the amount of progress I made, I'm glad I didn't.

What do you think?

( Also If you wish to talk about the Breeding Season's fallout, that's fine, just please be kind and courteous. I won't accept any hate speech about anyone on the discussion. )

[evildumdum]

Patreon should be treated as a tip jar and not some subscription payment system. Don't sponsor unless you simply want to help the developer and if things look as if they are being wasted or milked for cash then vote with your feet and remove support until you see proof that things are being managed well again. Simple as that.

[cheddaredgrizzly]

Good Advice for People looking to sponsor projects. What are your thoughts if your on the other side of the project?

[evildumdum]

Thats something my own team has put a great deal of thought into. We settled on making sure we were very transparent with what we were doing. We have a discord server which every member of the team logs on and chats at least once a day, and by that method we keep track of each other. There is a clause written into our partnership contract that penalises "Going dark". If and when we launch a patreon, we'll want to do the same with our supporters. Basically communicating exaclty what we are doing and showing that proof. There are only two things needed on the creators side, commitment and transparency. As long as you demonstrate both there is nothing more you can do.

[Lucky777]

I'm interested in the topic, and in reading people's views, but I don't really have very much to say on it.

I believe that any project can rightfully start a patreon (or start accepting money by any means) at any time, as long as one basic requirement is met.

It's a single requirement, but it should be met completely:

Honesty.

As long as you're transparent about how you're spending people's money, and precisely what they may, may not, will, and will not get, I think that's all there is to it.

Sensible people may do stupid things with their money or otherwise.
Stupid people may do stupid things with their money or otherwise.
But once there has been complete and total honesty, if stupid things are done by people, with their money or otherwise, they have only themselves to blame.

Now if I HAD to give an answer to the question other than "anytime", I'd say 50% done, because by then you know what you can do and how fast you can do it.
But shit happens, y'know?
The last "half" of the project might be more challenging than expected, your lead artist might die, or you might break your fuckin' arm.
And what do you do then?
You let people know about it.
"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THERE HAS BEEN A HITCH AND THE PROJECT WILL TAKE LONGER THAN INTENDED TO COMPLETE, FOR I FEAR I HAVE BROKEN MY ARM."
In the end it all just boils right back down to honesty.

[porne]

Patreon seems to do a couple of weird things. I've seen it used on individual projects, as well as for artists continued work. I suppose it boils down to how people want to spend their money. I don't know if Patreon allows single shot money transfers like Go Fund Me or whatever, but it seems like that's your preferred tip method. Other times, I've seen it used to essentially pay artists to use their work as payment without having to find a bunch of sponsors. Of course, that seems to work a lot better for webcomics and such.

I suspect it's going to go come down to the people spending money to do things correctly. If you donate money, you are, in effect, paying someone to do something you want so they don't have to seek money from elsewhere. While they may come back with what you asked them for, they do have the right to cancel it. At the end of the day, it boils down to whether or not you trust someone to make good on their word. And people who are honest about what they're doing with their customers are much more likely to get that kind of funding on a routine basis. Games are weird in that you can't really partially assemble them like you can artwork, which is why those type of Patreons seem to work very well.

[waterdrop]

What I don't understand is why did most of their Patreons decided to support that guy that dropped the project in his new one, are they masochists?

[Zeus Kabob]

Personally I think Patreon is a symptom of a problem, but not a cause of it.

People overvalue and overprotect their work. This forum was born from Playshapes deciding to share his source code, and without that I wouldn't be here and it's the same with everyone else. I think Patreon is just another reason for people to protect their work and continue to build an ego over it. If the same people decided instead to share their source code either while they were working on the project or after they declared it "finished", it could spur on a lot of post-development changes and forks that might really liven things up.

In other words, what I'm suggesting is that by trying to protect work, things become slower and there's less that our forumgoers can do to help out or just give their honest feedback. In my mind, more sharing and openness in the forums would lead to more higher quality projects being posted.

[porne]

Would you say that's a general problem among artists, or specifically among game developers/programmers?

I can point to a few people that seem to have pulled it off, Splendid Ostrich with newlife being the prime example. Of course, that's different since it's effectively a point and click written text setup. The coding, while beyond me, is probably not nearly so finicky and rebellious as what something like what Playshapes has built.

[Lucky777]

What I don't understand is why did most of their Patreons decided to support that guy that dropped the project in his new one, are they masochists?

If you're talking about S-Purple, it's because he's not the guy who dropped the project.

He's the guy who pulled his art from the project in accordance with his written contract, and the guy H-bomb then blamed for H-bomb's dropping of the project.

Time will tell what happens to Cloud Meadow.