Funding - Goals, Milestones, and Where We Are.

For the last 6 months patronage has been very stable, which is excellent! Thank you all for making that happen! Having a consistent membership each month has made the production and budget for comics more predictable, and has also made it possible for me to keep MonsterChu hired on part time as a coder to help with the game development.   

Ok, this is about to get a little ranty and is largely me thinking out loud about what needs to happen with the studio to get us on track to keep the game development going. 

Realistically, what I'm not seeing yet is the kind of membership numbers we will need to keep the game development going after the demo and initial release it out.  The Kickstarter funding is covering the development for now, but that money will be running out soon. That has me looking at what the options are to keep the game development funded.  Me and Chu are working on getting a playable demo out ASAP, but game development is a slow process that is rife with delays and setbacks. I'm also doing what I can do make sure it's fully worth the wait. We don't have a set date right now for the demo release but we're aiming for Mid-November. The best I can currently do is keep rolling with the animations and clean up, and get it all together as quickly as possible.

The membership numbers might start rising once there's something playable ready and people can get excited about that but there's no certainty, so the comics are the studio's economic driver for the foreseeable future. The comics are actually intended to be supplemental to the game itself, while helping fund it, but so far they're only really paying for themselves and a tiny bit extra. And, honestly, that's only because they also go up for sale on Gumroad after they're published here. 

So the comics are solid and stable for themselves, but don't actually make enough to help with game funding as hoped - at least not currently.  

We could launch another round of Kickstarter funding if things don't change (again, after the initial version is released) but monthly funding is the key to the project being viable long term, with on-going development and regular updates.

To reach a financially viable position for me to keep working on the game full-time, with Chu staying on only part-time, and to keep the comics rolling as they are now we need to be seeing $3,000 monthly before fees, which means more than double the current membership. That's not a small task but it's far from impossible. Ideal would be hiring Chu on full-time. He currently has a stable coding job and can't walk away from it to focus on his own games or Cretaceous Seas without knowing there's a steady paycheck in the deal. We'd need to be over $6k month, over 4 times our current membership. I'm scratching my head on how to make that happen.

Back when I worked with Nyte on Deadly Hunder Studios, our patreon reached over 200 patrons and $5k monthly but it was because the animation tier was $30 a month. That also included 3-4 comics monthly. I don't want to raise prices unless I have absolutely no other option. My preference would actually be dropping the game down to a $5 month tier, aiming instead to garner interest from a ton of people... except that only works if there are actually enough people interested.

I usually get around 1,000 views on DA submissions, which means our membership already represents up to 9% of the actively interested audience. The more popular posts get over 2k views, so maybe our members is closer to 4.5% of the audience, which is about a decent conversion rate from views to membership. It also means we might be close to maxing out and it's why the numbers have plateaued. BUT 600 people backed the kickstarter. So where are those guys?! lol Unfortunately, I don't have the metrics for how many people visited the kickstarter page but over 10k people watched the promotional video, meaning the conversion rate was about 6%, which would make a lot of sense. If everyone who pledged for the game also decides to throw a few bucks a month at the game to keep it going, things will work out. Otherwise, it's going to be tight.

Alright, I'm going back to drawing bewbs and monsters. Business hurts my brain after a while.