King of the Sea

Hello everyone, I'm back with an early post on some of the recent Patreon tomfuckery.

Before I start with that, I thought I'd share the results of my investigation into game saving and loading speeds. While it's never been what anyone would call fast, the wait has become rather noticeable. I was starting to worry that some part of my code was just too inefficient, or some part of the setup was causing the issue.

The good news is that isn't the case. In fact, the entire saving process that has anything to do with AW data/code only takes about 40ms on my AW developin' PC. I have been trying to keep it efficient, after all. The bad news is that it isn't my code that is causing the slowdown, it's the way that SugarCube's save system works. That means that fixing it would require more mucking about in the SugarCube story format to change the save system.

To really simplify things, SugarCube compresses the save data, and stores it locally. The main issue seems to be that it stores everything as a single stringified array, and any time a save or load operation takes place, it has to recover, decompress, and parse all the stored data. In the case of saving the game, it has to then stringify, compress, and store the data again after the save is added to the array. This is why even deleting a save takes a long time, but deleting ALL saves is relatively quick. I believe it's fixable, but it isn't a high priority for right now. 

To have better save/load performance:

a) Limit the number of saves you keep. The more saves there are, the more data has to be worked though. Each save contains a lot of data about clothes, NPCs, and more.

b) Use 'save to file' instead. This bypasses the slowest parts of the process. It's a little more work to browse to your chosen folder to save/load, so it's up to you if the time savings is worth it.

c) To a limited extent, reducing the number of NPCs that are generated using the system settings "performance" option, can increase save and load speed somewhat.

Patreon...

This all got started with this little interview given by Jack Cunte Conte, the CEO of Patreon. It was helped along by the recent payment processing issues, and more generally, the ongoing stream of special-ness that has been plaguing Patreon for quite some time now. 

To be clear, this isn't a complaint about patrons themselves, and it isn't even a complaint about the basic business/services provided by Patreon. It's more about the way they've been trying to change Patreon into something else.

Patreon charges creators 10% of their pledges for their services. Now ostensibly, 5% of that is for some of the most expensive processing fees you can find, it doesn't even cover the fees you have to pay to get that money transferred from Patreon to your bank. The website itself doesn't have the basic features you'd expect from a multi-million-dollar website, like the ability to control your news feed (as a patron) or to control which posts send out a hail of alerts (as a creator). The suggestion algorithms are middling at best. Suggestions are important, because a creator that works on anything adult is blocked from searches, even for obviously adult topics, so the suggestions are essentially the only form of promotion that Patreon does for adult creators. (And even then, mostly only when a patron pledges for the first time...)

Searching for just "cum" gets you people with the last name 'Cummings', and also a weekly podcast from some creators called "the cum boys". Good on them, because a podcast obviously doesn't have visual adult content I guess, so they get to stay non-adult. Also, because they have over $40,000 per month of pledges, for a weekly podcast. (Being the only semi-naughty search result for "cum" has it's benefits) I don't know what they produce, so they might actually be really awesome... I'm just illustrating the importance of searches on any sort of platform like this.

So, Patreon doesn't advertise for you (in fact, they have plenty of guides on how to advertise for them.). What else does Patreon provide? A very basic blog post feed, that allows you to restrict each post to a certain pledge level. The editor for posts is fairly nightmarish, and the overall format and details you can put on your page is very limited. I actually started writing blog posts separately from Patreon because it's so limited. But because they do the opposite of promoting these, and it's so limited, it's hard to give them credit for a service provided numerous other places for free or very low cost.

So what do they offer?

They do offer a discord bot to give roles on discord based on pledge level. They also have a smattering of other APIs, usually with limited information available. They also allow you to distribute content, though again, the only thing to recommend Patreon for hosting content over free options is simply that you can restrict it by pledge tier. They act as a charge aggregation service, charging numerous patrons for you, though the cost of this service is very high before considering the additional 5% charge. (There's also the comparatively high charge failure rate, and incidents like Patreon suddenly changing banks to one overseas for obscure reasons)

It really all comes down to patrons. It's convenient for patrons to support several creators in one place, without having to sign up in multiple places or create multiple accounts. It's easier, and therefore more likely, for someone who is already a patron to pledge to a new creator. That's pretty much the sum of it.

And that last one is why we pay 10+% of pledges, and honestly I wouldn't complain. Patreon essentially created this segment of crowd funding, and a game like AW wouldn't be possible otherwise.

Then why the post?

Patreon CFO Tracy Jordan explains difficulties maintaining reliable services with limited funding.

Because of the seemingly endless stream of incidents, policy changes, bullshit, and more. Progressively banning more content. Getting rid of some major creators. Lying in interviews and press releases. Political bans, and banning creators for things totally unrelated to their Patreon page, that happened elsewhere on the internet. The demand for extra censorship on top of already being cut out of searches, and somewhat arbitrary purges where Patreon suspends first, and asks questions later. Basically the string of ridiculous things coming from the C-suite, or at the very least, things that the C-suite allows to happen.

And then this latest interview where the CEO talks about Patreon's 10% cut being too generous. There's no mention of mismanagement, or suspending accounts worth millions per year in revenue to Patreon. It really makes me wonder how Patreon could be concerned about profitability. Pretty much the entire revenue-generating portion of the business, charging patrons, is covered by that 5% transaction fee. Bank costs, employees, transactions, office space, etc. All that's left is running the website. 

A website where the content costs nothing (in fact more content offering = more money for Patreon). It's also a website where the bandwidth demands are far lower than many other content-oriented sites. Certainly the cost of servers and bandwidth are not free, but with $25 million to work with annually... 

And now instead of some honest discussion about how things are going wrong inside Patreon, there's intangible mentions of raising their cut, or more disconcertingly, the idea that they should claim creator's IP via contract requirements (and potentially lock them in to Patreon as their sole distribution channel).

Basically... Patreon isn't inspiring a lot of confidence.

I still believe strongly in the concept, and I'll continue to fund all the creators I support. I'm not going to leave Patreon, at least not as things are now. That said, it feels too much like having all AW's eggs in one basket--and that's a lot of eggs--to stick solely with Patreon. I'm going to start looking into other funding sites, some of Patreon's new competitors, in addition to Patreon. I've heard that PornHub is going to open (or has?) a crowdfunding platform for adult content.

I will keep all of you informed, of course. I also plan on putting a table listing the rates from each platform I add onto the AW website, so you know just how much of your money goes to AW vs the site operator. If you also happen to be a creator, hopefully this'll help you out as well.

It'll probably take a little extra work to post versions simultaneously across platforms, as well as just linking to blog posts... but honestly that probably won't be too big of a deal once I work out a good methodology.

And most importantly...

Thank you to everyone who has supported AW, whether monetarily or not, it does mean a lot to me. I'll keep working hard to bring you the best game I possibly can!

ThaumX