In Defense of the Homestuck Patreon

[thorondraco]

Its literally their job. That is kinda the long and short of it. More so they have multiple jobs going on simultaneously and the more is donated to the patreon the more they can focus on Homestuck squared and general homestuck media.

Basically Homestuck has evolved from being one guy's obsessive hobby he spent 6 straight years making to a product being sold in a way. There are some risks to this yes, but at the same time its some peeps making some money in a very nontraditional way. Which honestly is kinda awesome.

Effectively speaking the amount of money they would be making right now if everyone on that patreon gave at last 2 dollars would be like 216 dollars if not less. If 5 dollars is the norm then it would be a fair bit, like 900 or less. A fair sum but that is less than a god damn Fastfood worker makes. Even at the max about that would be a total of 10,000 dollars monthly divided into roughly 1500 each. I am probably wrong and it is less than that.

That is around the amount a Store Clerk makes.

I am using the 2 to 5 dollar range cause i think that is the most likely, possibly the 5 dollar range being more popular because it provides more.

So yea these guys are working on a lot of stuff, both for Homestuck and for their own lives. And so far what they have produced for homestuck in General is good shit. They are fans of homestuck and now they can have something like a job in creating it.

https://www.patreon.com/homestuck/overview Linking the patreon so to gib moneys.

[rubs juice]

Your math doesn't seem to be making much sense to me dude...

If you assume all patrons are donating the minimum 2 dollars, that's 2764 dollars a month. With the assumption that they're giving 5 dollars for the bonus stuff, that's upped to 6910. I'm legitimally not making much sense of your math...? Even if you take it into account it's being divided among the people working on it, they still earn more than the share you mentioned (not much more, but still)

But the point behind it is good, actually. HS² isn't a full time job for its creators, and it's not making them any money. They're still struggling to do it and it's important to support the staff if we want it to continue and thrive. This is a good twitter thread on the subject.

[thorondraco]

Your math doesn't seem to be making much sense to me dude...

If you assume all patrons are donating the minimum 2 dollars, that's 2764 dollars a month. With the assumption that they're giving 5 dollars for the bonus stuff, that's upped to 6910. I'm legitimally not making much sense of your math...? Even if you take it into account it's being divided among the people working on it, they still earn more than the share you mentioned (not much more, but still)

But the point behind it is good, actually. HS² isn't a full time job for its creators, and it's not making them any money. They're still struggling to do it and it's important to support the staff if we want it to continue and thrive. This is a good twitter thread on the subject.

I am kinda shit with math XD But yea they aren't making a living wage with homestuck. At this point the patreon is most of the way to the 2000 double update mark. I would love to see that pop up soon but we are currently in the set up phase. So it may be a few months and updates before we can reach that number. I think they also mentioned it would take a month before they can do the double update, or it happens every other month, before they can do that update. Probably adjust scheduling.

Which sucks cause double update would lead to the story picking up more quickly.

[cyberKinetist]

<Sorry folks, my comment was kinda disorganized, I'll probably clean it up and repost it someday>

[dualfallen]

I've heard a lot of people say that the money isn't that much divided among 7 people and that's absolutely right. I have to ask though: Why are there seven people on the team? For how little content is actually being put out, 7 people sounds like far too many. Hell even if they cut it in half and had 3 people remaining it'd still seem like a little much but at least the remaining people would have a significantly more healthy income.

I can't fathom why they would get this many people on the team when, looking at the recent update, there's no way anywhere close to that amount of employees are necessary. If they can't get the funds to give their workers an acceptable amount of money and give the people paying them a reasonable amount of content, maybe they should trim back a bit.

[rookie1978]

I don't think it's wrong to open a patreon but I do think it's wrong to try and tell people to donate because making a webcomic is your job now. Because it's not. That's not a job. No creative pursuit is ever really considered a job unless you get paid regularly or make something so good you live off it for the rest of your life. Or getting signed onto a label for music artists.

These people complain about having no time and money and then talk about how the only things they do in life are work on webcomics and indie video games, and say you should donate because theyre clerk/waitress/fast food job just doesn't pull in enough cash. Like, no shit, get a grip on your life and stop pushing people to help you out of the bad situations you got yourself in because you couldn't plan properly.

If I had enough regular income, would I donate to the patreon? Yes. I still think people deserve recognition for their work. But I think the same people need to realize you can't live off of something like a webcomic. That's just silly, and it'll always be silly.

[egg]

Have we not learnt anything from Hiveswap? The teams assembled for official Homestuck content have always had severe management issues. I can't imagine it's different here. How much do you want to bet that they don't even organize in real life, and just use a private Discord for it? These people all seem to have different ideas on how Homestuck and certain characters should be handled, they differ from Hussie's ideas even, if Friendsim and Pesterquest's writing team's collective twitters are anything to go by. How many arguments do you think they have?

[Alienoid]

How much do you want to bet that they don't even organize in real life, and just use a private Discord for it?

I would bet quite a large sum of money seeing as how part of the team is in the UK and part of the team is in Russia. That makes things a wee bit difficult. :P

I'm terrible at having intricate and eloquent thoughts on "controversial subject matters" (which I am quite honestly stunned this counts as in all honesty, I didn't exactly think "hey these people are working on something delivered to us for free and that they're not getting a living wage off of" would cause this much uproar), but here's a very good Twitter thread delving into the issue that I can very much get behind.

[thorondraco]

I don't think it's wrong to open a patreon but I do think it's wrong to try and tell people to donate because making a webcomic is your job now. Because it's not. That's not a job. No creative pursuit is ever really considered a job unless you get paid regularly or make something so good you live off it for the rest of your life. Or getting signed onto a label for music artists.

These people complain about having no time and money and then talk about how the only things they do in life are work on webcomics and indie video games, and say you should donate because theyre clerk/waitress/fast food job just doesn't pull in enough cash. Like, no shit, get a grip on your life and stop pushing people to help you out of the bad situations you got yourself in because you couldn't plan properly.

If I had enough regular income, would I donate to the patreon? Yes. I still think people deserve recognition for their work. But I think the same people need to realize you can't live off of something like a webcomic. That's just silly, and it'll always be silly.

I am pretty sure they know that better than anyone and that is why literally speaking, they have a 2 dollar option. The shitty math i did was thinking on the lowest likely numbers patreons would use.

Also lets face it normal jobs are very much bullshit themselves because most corporations and business are suicidally incompetent. Reason why you don't go on the news and see corporations collapsing into a singularity of incompetence and debt is because they long conned governments into preventing them from dying from their own mistakes. The Golden parachute.

[Royaute]

Why should it be their job and source of income? Hussie has said that anyone who wants to continue Homestuck can, so nobody really owes them a thing.

[furrylatula]

I've heard a lot of people say that the money isn't that much divided among 7 people and that's absolutely right. I have to ask though: Why are there seven people on the team? For how little content is actually being put out, 7 people sounds like far too many. Hell even if they cut it in half and had 3 people remaining it'd still seem like a little much but at least the remaining people would have a significantly more healthy income.

I can't fathom why they would get this many people on the team when, looking at the recent update, there's no way anywhere close to that amount of employees are necessary. If they can't get the funds to give their workers an acceptable amount of money and give the people paying them a reasonable amount of content, maybe they should trim back a bit.

yall really have no clue how long it takes to make most comics, huh. hussie had an *absolutely insane* workload for one dude and was basically eat-sleep-and-breathing homestuck for years straight. that was not a healthy pace in the SLIGHTEST and there’s a reason he slowed down significantly and brought other people on as he got older.

getting the equivalent of a single comic issue once a month is a perfectly reasonable workload for a team of this size

[thorondraco]

I've heard a lot of people say that the money isn't that much divided among 7 people and that's absolutely right. I have to ask though: Why are there seven people on the team? For how little content is actually being put out, 7 people sounds like far too many. Hell even if they cut it in half and had 3 people remaining it'd still seem like a little much but at least the remaining people would have a significantly more healthy income.

I can't fathom why they would get this many people on the team when, looking at the recent update, there's no way anywhere close to that amount of employees are necessary. If they can't get the funds to give their workers an acceptable amount of money and give the people paying them a reasonable amount of content, maybe they should trim back a bit.

yall really have no clue how long it takes to make most comics, huh. hussie had an *absolutely insane* workload for one dude and was basically eat-sleep-and-breathing homestuck for years straight. that was not a healthy pace in the SLIGHTEST and there’s a reason he slowed down significantly and brought other people on as he got older.

getting the equivalent of a single comic issue once a month is a perfectly reasonable workload for a team of this size

They are also using a very clean arstyle. Hell in this case the entire update used dat artstyle rather than the sprite like panels.

[Barraskewda]

If the team hasn't cracked 2000 yet that should be a clue that there are less than 2000 people willing to give them monthly money and that this is a useless endeavour for their talents. They can keep going but they really shouldn't expect much, if anything if this is the plateau number.

[furrylatula]

They are also using a very clean arstyle. Hell in this case the entire update used dat artstyle rather than the sprite like panels.

yeah! i mean jesus, look at these two panels and tell me which one took longer

[dualfallen]

I've heard a lot of people say that the money isn't that much divided among 7 people and that's absolutely right. I have to ask though: Why are there seven people on the team? For how little content is actually being put out, 7 people sounds like far too many. Hell even if they cut it in half and had 3 people remaining it'd still seem like a little much but at least the remaining people would have a significantly more healthy income.

I can't fathom why they would get this many people on the team when, looking at the recent update, there's no way anywhere close to that amount of employees are necessary. If they can't get the funds to give their workers an acceptable amount of money and give the people paying them a reasonable amount of content, maybe they should trim back a bit.

yall really have no clue how long it takes to make most comics, huh. hussie had an *absolutely insane* workload for one dude and was basically eat-sleep-and-breathing homestuck for years straight. that was not a healthy pace in the SLIGHTEST and there’s a reason he slowed down significantly and brought other people on as he got older.

getting the equivalent of a single comic issue once a month is a perfectly reasonable workload for a team of this size

Don't think of this as extremes where you can either have like 25 pages a month OR break your back and put out multiple pages a day. I'm not asking the team of SEVEN PEOPLE for anywhere close to the workload one really committed guy did and I think that is very lenient of me. There is no possible way that they need seven people to produce this output in a month and I refuse to feel guilty for considering just how much work is really being put into this compared to how much money they expect in return.

Other people have put it quite well: you shouldn't expect a livable amount of money from a side project (which is what this is) AND ESPECIALLY not when you split it seven ways. Despite this being a side project, though, thousands of dollars are still being gathered and they have a responsibility to provide a bit more substantial content than this.

[classpectanon]

Please remember that speculation and gossip regarding WP is not allowed on this forum.

[furrylatula]

https://www.patreon.com/posts/31821833

[Barraskewda]

Still haven't actually talked about how much each team member is making and what else they'll do to entice people to pledge rather than your name on a website and bi monthly updates lol

[Auntie]

It seems pretty entitled to demand to know the exact salaries of everyone working on a project. Like this isn't a demand I see from other indie projects, and they did say where the money goes- into the pockets of the people making all this happen. What we do know is that employees and freelancers working on hs2, hiveswap, and pesterquest are not making enough to make it a full time job. This isn't speculation, this is something openly stated by several people.

So, they aren't full time jobs. Did I feel like the update was less than I wanted? Sure, but perspective is a thing. Like it or don't, but randos on the internet aren't entitled to be the backseat driver to the finances of folks who are, to most fans, near strangers.

[Barraskewda]

It seems pretty entitled to demand to know the exact salaries of everyone working on a project. Like this isn't a demand I see from other indie projects, and they did say where the money goes- into the pockets of the people making all this happen.

Yes, because indie projects clearly state what their goals are, and from this recent patreon post it comes forward that its funding other WP projects as well, what if someone didn't WANT that? Yes there is a very similar team but please think about how it comes off if you cant choose where your money is going to. I don't want to pledge to hiveswap products because I backed the kickstarter and thought the game was bad. I WAS interested in HS^2 because I enjoyed the epilogues and what I'm reading so far. So having the money I would have pledged go to something I wouldn't want it to go to makes me upset.