Patreon evolution and game news

Supporters

(illustration: VirtualSociety's Patreon tree by Alix Kanarek)

Hi folks!

This week began with the release of our video about VirtualSociety's life sim vision and roadmap. It brings together many of the ideas we've been sharing in the devblogs over the past few months: our residents' personalities, memories, relationships and decisions. We've had some really positive feedback, so thank you to everyone who watched, commented, shared it or took the time to tell us what you thought. It feels really good to finally show you all of this in one video :)

Today, I'd like to talk about what's next for our Patreon before catching up on the teams progress. Over the past few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about the balance between public articles and those reserved for our supporters.

With a small team like ours, producing interesting content for both every week isn't easy. Development moves forward, but not every week brings a spectacular new feature to show off. And some days are mostly spent fixing bugs, editing videos, doing the accounts or dealing with paperwork. I could tell you all about my adventures with invoices, but I'm not sure that's what you're most looking forward to :D

We want your support on Patreon to come with something worthwhile, while continuing to share the game's development with people who can't support us financially. Before suggesting a change, I'd like to explain why that support matters so much to us.

But why Patreon in the first place?

VirtualSociety has been around for many years thanks to our spare time, personal savings, a bank loan and a lot of persistence. All of that has helped us keep going, but our resources are still limited compared with the game we want to create.

You've seen this particularly in our characters' appearance and animations: they aren't yet at the level we'd like them to be. We're well aware of that. We'd like to grow the team to make more progress in these areas, but we can't currently afford to.

That's also why we're on Patreon: we hope your support will gradually allow us to put more resources into the game and have more people working on its artistic and technical aspects.

Growing together

Some other games choose to rely heavily on generative AI and asset packs. We don't want to go down that route, for several reasons:

• We don't believe in the idea of "starting with AI", then "cleaning it up and having people remake everything once we can afford it". Spending years and thousands, or even millions, to redo what was produced in a few months with AI doesn't seem like a credible plan to us. We don't want to build the project around that promise.
• We're convinced that using AI to replace people is never a good solution. As I said on the game's Discord, there are good uses of AI, such as cancer detection, to name just one. But replacing people also means destroying their jobs. As a developer who LOVES writing code, rather than just getting the result, I don't want to be replaced any more than artists do. If everyone keeps replacing people with AI, our jobs, our passions and the joy we get from creating will all disappear.
• We're also convinced that relying heavily on generative AI ultimately diminishes the people who use it, whether they work in a creative field or not: we become lazier, practise less and learn less over time. I see it as a button that would instantly make us muscular and athletic. Everyone would want to press it, but we'd lose so many opportunities to experience important things, learn, go out, meet people and feel proud of ourselves.
• We don't believe that games made by AI can be good when they launch. They can look convincing in videos, but we think they'll still be full of bugs, poorly optimised and often little more than copies of other games, with no real originality. If you have counterexamples, we'd like to see them! We also feel that the stability of many software products has declined alarmingly in recent years, as AI has become widespread, and we don't want to see that happen to our game.

For all these reasons, we hope your support will help us make faster progress in these areas by growing the team and giving our art and technical work more room to thrive.

Let's be clear: we have no intention of criticising those who use it, or condemning every use of AI. We use it ourselves for translations between English and French. We do, however, refuse to let AI replace creativity, learning, people, technical and artistic decisions, creating, developing, drawing, and so on.

Articles for supporters first, then for everyone

For the next stage, we're suggesting a model that the life sim community has embraced for a long time: early access. What I'm proposing today is to keep our new Patreon articles exclusive to our supporters for a while, then make them available to everyone in the months that follow.

More specifically:

1. On publication: a new article reserved for Patreon supporters or, as with today's article, partly public and partly exclusive to Patreon.
2. Over the following days: the first discussions with you (our Patreons) about the ideas, questions and progress presented.
3. One to two weeks later: opening the discussion to the whole community on Discord.
4. One to two months after the article: a public video exploring the subject more broadly, with more explanations and examples (as we did in our two videos about the life sim side of the game).
5. At that point: the article also becomes available to everyone.

These timings would give us a general rhythm, varying according to the time needed to prepare the videos. You'd get the news first and take part in the earliest discussions, without the information staying behind a subscription indefinitely.

If you're happy with this change, especially those of you already supporting us on Patreon, we'll introduce it over the coming weeks. It would also mean making all articles published before this one public. I'd really like to hear what you think of this approach. Does getting the articles early and joining the first discussions feel like a worthwhile benefit in return for your support, which makes a huge difference to us?

And for those supporting us on Patreon, some extra details on this week’s progress and the articles coming up in the next few months!