Re: Divine Arms - A magical action-adventure hentai game
It really is striking, not to mention how even the most minor life upsets (such as moving) take them out of action for weeks at a time. If I told my work that I'll be out of action for a few weeks because I'm moving house I'd be laughed out of the office.
How in the world would you move in just a few days? Not meant as an insult, but do you only own a few things? Even moving just across the neighborhood and getting situated can take a week at least if you have no one to help you and you have to do it all yourself, let alone setting up internet, utilities, redirecting your stuff to that address, furniture, etc.
If someone's moving across town and they have no one to help them, that would take even longer, and if moving across states (or countries in other continents) even longer.
Even with a moving van moving all your stuff, you'd still need to haul it all inside your new place and do all the above, and that's assuming you can afford a moving van for 6+ rooms of stuff.
lol at people claiming that creating simple porn games on Patreon is more stressful than regular work. They have no bosses, no deadlines, no responsibilities.
They do in fact have bosses (the patrons, and in some cases, the people they're working with), they have deadlines (the ones they set themselves, which if they miss, they get hit with a lot of bad press and dropped patronage), and responsibilities (both the above).
A regular job comes with a steady, guaranteed paycheck, so long as you do what you're told, and also comes with not needing to feel the brunt or impact of any of your work either. Say you work at Google and some new app comes out by them and people absolutely loathe it; sucks for Google, but it's no skin off your back.
At an indie company, such a thing is almost definitely going to have to be dealt with directly by the people working on the product, fielding Patron and non-patron responses and negative press, answering questions nonstop demanding to know why things have went they way they did, doing polls to get feedback specifically on why things went wrong, handing out refunds, and so on.
Doing indie game development requires you to wear multiple hats at once at a bare minimum, whereas a regular job almost never requires you to wear more than the one you were hired for, ever.
And as mentioned earlier, even if you try your absolute best and do your absolute best, you aren't guaranteed money, and one month you could be making $3,000, you change something in the game the Patrons don't like that month (even though you're still doing your job the same as ever) and the next month you're down to $500; this would never, ever happen in a regular, contractural job, as long as you're doing your job.
Finally, you also are responsible for even getting your product out there; again, at a regular job, you do the work, you get paid. You make an amazing game on Patreon, you're responsible for making sure people know about it, or else you get paid squat, and this includes when it's time to sell the game too.
Oh, and of course forget about any retirement funds, 401k, or health insurance, since all of those are setup for you by most regular companies; you'll need to get all of those yourself, which might be somewhat hard seeing as most countries tax self-employed people like crazy, which means you'll also need to hire a tax person that you approve of to reliably do your taxes as well.
Definitely look into doing your actual forms for people you work with as well, since again, a company would normally take care of that, but in this case, you'll need to file appropriate forms to all the people you work with, and you'll need to do it correctly, lest you get hit with tax fraud.
The tl;dr is that there are a lot of luxuries to working on an indie game (work from home, work your own hours, wear whatever you want, get to make cool stuff and be creative), but there are also a lot of extra stressors and many, many things you have to deal with (I only covered a few of them) that you'd never ever be expected to deal with at a regular job.
