Not successful enough

Well, this is going to be a long and boring post that will probably destroy my reputation and the project. I've been thinking for a long time about whether I should write it or just do it without explaining anything. In the end I decided it's better to be honest and open with the public.

I wrote this post over several days, and then it turned out to be huge and a bit confusing. I apologize for that.

Backstory:

Almost 2 years ago, in December 2022, I came across Koikatsu and noticed that many of the visual novels I played were made on it. So I thought, why don't I make one? I wasn't a designer, artist, screenwriter and I don't consider myself a creative person at all. I am a programmer, or rather a computer science student, who had no experience in anything like that. But I wanted to try and a week later the first version of Kidnapped By The Mistress was ready.

It turned out horribly crooked, the visuals were weak, the music wasn't there, the script was weak, even the grammar was weaker than it is now. However, I decided to put my creation out into the public eye. As I remember now, the main platform for me at that time was "tfgames", because I just didn't know about f95. And to my surprise, someone noticed my game, downloaded it, played it and decided to subscribe to me on patreon. In the first month I had 3 subscribers, one of which gave 15 dollars. I was happy. Someone appreciated my game worth paying for. This energized me and I decided not to give up my new unexpected hobby, while trying to improve my skills...

Gradually I've been making new versions, developing my skils and improving content from older versions. Gradually the quality of the project and the number of subscribers grew. After almost a year, I came to a plot point where the Kidnapped By The Mistress story I had planned was coming to an end. It's worth noting that not everything went according to plan. Many scenes had to be cut, many had to be added, some plot hooks that I'd laid out back in 0.1-0.3 went unfulfilled, and some plot twists were quite spontaneous. But I knew I didn't want to drag Kidnapped By The Mistress out and turn it into a never-ending project, for the plot and even the title were planned for a finished story.

Beyond that, I always had a lot of ideas waiting to be realized. One of them was the idea that eventually turned into Kidnapped Isekai Story. This project seemed and continues to seem more promising to me, as it had gameplay and more diverse fetishes. I invested a lot of effort and money earned from Kidnapped By The Mistress into it.

Kidnapped By The Mistress is coming to an end. Kidnapped Isekai Story is going through a phase of closed technical testing and is liked by almost no one. Some actively criticize the new project, others just say "worse than the last project". Some don't like the grind, some don't like the non-anime style, some don't like the fact that the game is not only about femdom. As a result, this project was postponed for revision and will be released to the public later, where it will also be clearly visible that people didn't like it (or at least didn't motivate them to sign up).

Okay, I thought it was probably too drastic a change. But I don't want to make Kidnapped By The Mistress endless. After much deliberation, I came up with another game, Mistresses and Slaves, known to you as Femdom Stories. A game whose first version would be made with quality (I didn't realize at the time that my visuals would continue to improve), having unique tree-like mechanics with scene selection, and focusing on everything I learned about femdom during the creation of my first project. Not focusing on one fetish, having everything femdom fans love about it. You want BDSM and domination? There's a Saki branch for you. You want feminization? The Alex branch. You want semi-romance with femdom? The Mary branch.

Unlike Kidnapped Isekai Story, Femdom Stories was liked by most. There were no mass unsubscribes when I did it, the feedback was positive, and there was an influx of new subscribers when it went public. Success!

And then everything stopped and froze. After a couple of months of active development, the number of subscribers and revenue began to gradually decline. On F95 there were criticisms that the story was too slow or not interesting, but more importantly there was no interest in the game. Even now the number of reviews there is 3 (the first project had 27). The game, unlike the first project, was very reluctantly uploaded to other sites, and people coming to Discord to praise me for Kidnapped By The Mistress often just didn't know about the sequel. I don't know how to explain it, but it felt like my new project was simply not interesting to people. It demotivated me, but I thought that maybe the game was too small and the plot points where it gets interesting hadn't been reached, so maybe there would be growth later....

There was no growth. I may now look like a greedy sod who isn't happy with what he has, but I'm well aware that I have much more than I deserve and than many other worthy projects have. It may be worth mentioning that I am a student and while I am studying I can do my hobby and I don't really care how profitable it is. The problem is that I can't be a student indefinitely. Sooner or later this period will end and I will either go to work and I will not have enough time for this hobby, or my hobby will become my job, for which this hobby must bring enough money for minimum survival (at least to bring 1/2 of the minimum wage).

Reasons for failure

I have analyzed and discussed at length why Femdom Stories are not successful and have come up with the following points:

• Sequel. Even though the game is independent, you really need to go through Kidnapped By The Mistress to understand the story. That being said, there are obviously both those who could potentially enjoy FS, but the content from KBM was either too low quality or too shocking for them. Also those who liked KBM may not be happy there that things are different in FS.

• Title. It was changed quite spontaneously through a vote when we found out that the name I had planned was taken. "Femdom" might scare off a lot of potential players who could possibly give the game a chance and discover something new.

• Scene Tree. Some people don't like this system, some don't understand it, and also perhaps visually the number of new scenes in the new version looks small. Also such a system killed any variation of the story because of technical problems.

• Splitting the story. Everything develops too slowly. I already often hear about how my updates don't have enough content, and then each of the 4 branches gets 4 times less content than it could if it was the main or only one in the game.

• Running out of people on the internet. Basically, for a person to like my game, they have to sit on the internet, visit sites like f95, not be against 3D anime style, like visual novels without gameplay, and like femdom. There are probably simply not as many of these as there are people who like less specific things.

• The game is boring. Alas, there's nothing I can say here. I, as an author, have never been able to gauge how good or interesting my story turns out to be. But it's worth facing the facts - if the story was incredibly interesting, all the other factors wouldn't have been able to ruin that.

If you have any other thoughts on what could be the cause of what you see as players, then write, it might help.

What are my plans?

First of all, let me remind you of my goal. My goal is to increase the income that I have on the Internet in 2 (ideally 3) times, so that I can live on it. I need to achieve this goal before I graduate from university in half a year and choose where to work. In the process, of course, I would like not to lose what I already have.

I am not blind and I notice that every time I start doing something new, many people unsubscribe and do it much more actively than if I do nothing at all. Some of my friends even advised me to create another account to do something else secretly from you so that there would be less unsubscribes, but I think it's stupid and not fair to you. I appreciate your support and it hurts me to lose it every time, but it's better than cheating.

My first idea is itch.io. The idea is to produce small games with a small story and could both sell themselves and raise my popularity as an author, indirectly promoting femdom stories. As you might have guessed, I've already tried this approach with Three Days With Domina. And it worked relatively well, I was able to make a little money on TDD sales, and a couple of copies of FS thanks to it... And then Femdom Stories got banned on itch.io because the anime characters in it didn't look old enough... I still don't want to be answered by support and there's no hope of recovery anymore.

The second idea, what I'm doing right now, is comics. It's firstly a fresh take on an unusual format for me, and secondly a potential new audience that doesn't play much with visual novels. Ideally, it would be cool to find an audience that likes my comics and maybe get them hooked on femdom stories. In a slightly worse case scenario, I could just experiment with different fetishes and plots, because as I said at the beginning, a comic book is much faster to make than a game (or else I'd make a petrification game and it would be a complete failure). Whether I'll be able to make comics that people will like and be willing to pay for - I don't know. Maybe not and I'm doing it for nothing.

You know, I wanted to list here the rest of my ideas that could save Femdom Stories..... And then after describing them, I realized they were all bullshit. I'm literally out of good ideas. I don't know what else I can do to make Femdom Stories more popular. A lot of the ideas are either small and cosmetic like "change the layout on all the sites and maybe someone is interested" or just plain stupid.

I have a lot of ideas for other projects and stories, but realistically speaking, if you start doing them, it probably won't save Femdom Stories, it will kill it. I'm a little desperate, because I realize that most people here want me to do Femdom Stories and that's it, I want to do it myself, but I'm afraid if I continue like this, the goal will never be reached.

If the comics don't work out, I'll probably release a few more versions of Femdom Stories and if there's no growth, I'll probably have to try my luck with another project, which I'm sure you'll like, but I'm also sure I'll get a lot of negativity and unsubscribes.

Sad conclusion

I understand that all this sounds sad and I myself experience disgusting feelings from the fact that my current magnum opus turned out not interesting enough to cross the border of the required income. I would like to make Femdom Stories forever, there were even thoughts about moving to a country with lower incomes, so that it would be possible to live on a smaller amount, but do what I like.

I did not want to talk to you about money, because you are all here voluntarily and you are not obliged to pay money at all for my small, crooked game made almost solo and I am very grateful to you, and therefore the phrase like "I need more" is disgusting and I am ashamed of this, but I just want to explain why I have to look for new formats and new ideas, and also why it is possible that this will end soon.

I also realize that by bringing up the money issue I'll probably get even more unsubs than I usually get when trying to implement a new idea. But again, I think it's best to be honest about it.

I am very grateful for your support, and so I would like to be honest with you about this difficult topic.

In fact, while writing this long post, I realized that I don't know what to do. If you have any thoughts on this, you can express them in the comments or in the discord. And also, here is a poll.