I'm not opposed to leaks and if I were a supporter of a project with a massive funding base I wouldn't hesitate to leak an update. But for smaller projects that use the crowd funding to pay for further development before the paying the devs? I won't ever leak one. HC3 is a special case, though, as I wouldn't leak it even if its funding quintupled. I've been bothered in my DMs by enough people begging for HC3 updates that I'll never leak them out of pure spite.
- Jun 8, 2017
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- Oct 21, 2022
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Meh, being unable to afford it is rarely why people don't sub to a patreon. I have paid many times more than HC3 is going to sell for on Steam to support it. By its nature patreon is something of a scam since it does not require creators to actually provide anything to their supporters and you're always going to wind up paying more than a project is worth if you support the creator for more than an update or two. Patreon is difficult to justify for regular projects, doubly so for porn, especially when piracy of their content is so easy.
I don't know if scam is the right word for it. That implies the creators are just stealing money on purpose. The entire point is that you are a patron- Somebody who gives for something to be created with nothing in return. It's core design is that you only give money under the condition that you know you might not get anything back from it.
Of course, many creators take advantage of this- But HC has been a series that has consistently improved as more people support the game. It's nice seeing the developer put more effort into animations, artwork, the story and so forth as his budget increases. Shows a real care and attention to detail that most games of this type lack.
Until Patreon has rules in place to enforce timely updates and releases I will always consider it a scam. I don't immediately consider the people using it scammers but the system itself is so easily abused that many people essentially use it as a means to supplement their income with low effort products or absolutely minimal work. People like ICSTOR who raked in thousands of dollars a month and produced nothing for years, constantly teasing new projects, and only actually putting out a half assed version of what he originally promised a couple years after the fact, and has since been teasing DLC for that half assed final product even though he claimed he's been burnt out on it for years. Or SadCrab the team behind Innocent Witches who are constantly late and spend their time working on a "new story" that has no content that anyone wants and actually removed the content people do want, all while stealing a beloved intellectual property. Or Gunsmoke Games where the updates have gotten further and further apart and the updates have slowly dwindled in content size and quality. Or MagicNuts who have spent the last 27 months working on one update with the art allegedly having been completed over a year ago with the last year being spent on programming with more and more bugs popping up every day. Or DarkCookie who has spent the last three some odd years working on a "tech update" only to eventually give up on it and start putting it out in chunks because it got hit with the abandoned tag here and his sub numbers were beginning to slip.
I could go on and on and on. Crowd funding is so easily abused that it is, by its very nature, a scam. Not everyone who uses it takes advantage but the temptation is there and the truly successful at it seem to always take advantage. The N_Taiis and the Team NLTs are few and vastly far between.
I could go on and on and on. Crowd funding is so easily abused that it is, by its very nature, a scam. Not everyone who uses it takes advantage but the temptation is there and the truly successful at it seem to always take advantage. The N_Taiis and the Team NLTs are few and vastly far between.
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Yea I wouldn't call these things scams, but unfortunately its always a risky investment. And while most people can afford 1 or 3 or 5 $ here and there does not mean they can afford 2, 5 or 10 times these sums. Having to pay monthly with sometimes being unsure how much you actually get out of an update and never really sure the project is gonna get completed at some point or WHEN its gonna be completed is kind of like preordering games, but without the guarantee that you get your money back if it never is released. Or like supporting a kickstarter. Or like paying for early access games. Its always a risk, even if what you are risking is only a couple of bucks at a time.
Crowd funding is one of those "Well, I know what I'm getting into" scams, but it is definitely a scam since there's no guarantees of anything. With Patreon especially, it's not a guarantee that the creator you support will take advantage of you but you know that, by pure virtue of what it is, you're going to get ripped off since you'll wind up paying way more than the product is worth. It's just something you have to accept because the practice is in many ways the online equivalent of shaking a can for change at a traffic light. But early access? That is a definite scam and I won't listen to any arguments to the contrary. Patreon is one thing, as that is definitely a form of early access, but when you get into the Steam side of things it's basically the wild west as the rules are few and far between and rarely enforced. It's especially bad when major publishers started trying to do it.
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Again, not a scam in my book. Definition of a scam for me includes the INTENTION (in this case in the system) to rip people off. Which imo is not the case. As for the "paying more than the product is worth", that is mainly because you do not pay for the product, you pay to support the person creating the product. It's more like a sponsorship. Like a person getting payed college tuition because they are good at what they do. "I believe you can make something I want to see in the future, but I know you would never have the time or money to do so if people did not support your cost of living WHILE doing it, so I give you a steady stream of money, and if enough people give you 1 or 2 $ hopefully you will be able to survive while doing this thing". I don't see this concept itself as a scam. It has the POTENTIAL to be used as a scam, but it is not inherently a scam.
Regarding "no error description found 0x8096002A", I was running in to the same issue and did a bit of research. It appears to be a RAR issue with Windows 11, and the current (easiest) solution is to download 7zip and extract via 7zip rather than using the extraction included with Win 11.
I tagged you as well N_taii in the event you get the same question again, but sorry for the spam!
In the event you're not using Win 11, I would still try downloading 7zip and seeing if that resolves the issue.
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Edit: I intially wrote "tomorrow". My bad, I somehow mixed update 16 (the upcoming one) with Update 15 (the previous one). 16 will still take some time to finish, but 15 should be out to the public tomorrow.
Thanks, and thank you for the kind review!
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- Nov 3, 2019
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Yo it is really tommorow?i recently become your member so i hope wat u say is true
looking forward to the update,keep up the good work
My bad, I thought they asked about the public release of Update 15. Update 16 is still a long shot away. I've had a very busy few weeks lately, with moving countries and all, so I'm behind on schedule. I'm currently developing the second scene.