Financial security = get a real job, divert 10% or more of your paycheck to Bitcoin investing (buy when it drops under 5% for the 1-2 weeks prior, sell when it's up ~10% from your buy price before the short-term bubble pops, repeat). Porn in general is a slowly shrinking industry (mainly due to free = why pay for it?) so almost no one gets that these days from an AVN competing with 10,000 other active devs and the limited support money pool (though good loli/incest ones like Ketzal's may slightly raise those odds, if you can get on SS). For every Dr. Pink Cake that started when there were Covid lockdowns/home quarantines there's 1000 that don't even make 1% of that and those quarantines are sadly are long over (could be why his AVN hasn't had an update in over a year, the money river dried up to a trickle even for him). Barring a 2nd global pandemic forcing more lockdowns AVNs for money these days are a bad idea. Doing it for fun or simply because you want to tell a story, sure, for money nope, that's why there's so many abandoned ones and so few completed ones, mostly from dead dreams and unrealistic expectations. These days if you make it to $1000/mo you are among a lucky few (probably among the top 5% of AVN devs), and after the needed hours are either put in making it or paying someone else to do it often what's left doesn't even amount to half of US federal min wage. Still, most of my subs came from recommendations on Discord based on what I'm already subbed to or from here or from A T F. None of those ever were on Fuck95 due to loli content, and every other AVN allowed on Fuck95 or Patreon isn't worth supporting anyway, at least not to most (for one I may have liked it enough to dl it for free, but not pay money for it, only the kinks I want the are not allowed on most sites like Patreon and Fuck95 get my $100 monthly support money). Sure, those devs are not getting rich but they still do 6- or 12-month updates so apparently they have a day job too and don't care about even trying (and probably failing if they set that as a goal) making their AVN hobby they probably make hardly anything from their day job.
Look, I dont disagree with you that having a proper irl job helps but you can absolutely make money off it.
All it takes is actual good way to market yourself. If you dont promote your game and don't hammer into people WHY they should support you, nobody will.
If you dont show off your game and tell them where to find more, your game will be only played by handful of people.
I genuinely believe that if you're smart about it, you can outcompete majority of devs via smart promotion. One HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE advantage porn has is that it's widespread. When you go searching for porn, you usually find it.
I don't deny that it's a fickle job. You entirely rely on goodwill of others.
I do have to disagree with the "every VN thats on the other side or patreon isnt worth supporting anyway"
I personally have paid a fair bit of devs who make some really damn good content. Just recently discovered one which was quite brilliant actually.
But... but. I do agree that games which are on patreon specifically are more tonally deaf and restrictive. Alternatively they entirely change their story and characters to suit TOS.
Any smart dev moves to substar, boosty, fanbox...
Whatever the fuck works for them. Because Patreon is extremely unstable. very convenient for sure but unstable
My point was though: If people as community support devs and there's platform to support them on, collectively they can employ them. Which leads to the person being able to make games in their free time.
My example is Seath Black. Never once I was disappointed. Man works on 3 games at once, doesn't relent.
Also, I do feel like we should take this to DMs
