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Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

I'm unsure how much this is getting talked about outside of the circles I'm in, but for the past month or two a lot of shady shit has been shared of happenings behind the scenes. There's a decent range of accusations and allegations going on over there, but the shit I actually think is important is this post sharing the rates artists are apparently working under.

https://www.tumblr.com/santaesecrets/762085721675857920/santae-artist-rates?source=share

Archived version, don't mind the url please I think it needed to be reblogged to a "[url].tumblr.com" blog because it didnt work on the original "tumblr.com/[url]" blog
http://web.archive.org/web/20240921024957/https://harktheefoolishcreature.tumblr.com/post/762196218182074368

I don't know what industry standards are like, but it's really hard to look at these numbers and think it's acceptable under any circumstances in this day and age. Santae is a game I've seen highly praised for how much it has to offer in such an early stage in development, and I used to respect them for that. But now it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth to know it probably was able to deliver so much so early through exploitation like this.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

I am so grateful you posted this, because I got several of my friends into this site and even backed their kickstarter with a rather large sum. I enjoyed their features and what they had to offer, but when they removed their list of artists due to "unsolicited job offers," I just kinda scratched my head. just feels more like a "we don't want our artists to understand that they deserve fair wages" or "we don't want competition" kinda thought process. I guarantee you not a single artist on that team minded receiving offers from other paying customers. it's such a weird way to phrase it, in my opinion.

thanks to your comment and reading through everything, I decided to cancel my pledge. even if this turns out to not be entirely true, the fact that they ""borrowed"" assets from other sites and heavily referenced someone's art for one of their pet species, not even mentioning their abysmal artist rates; I cannot in good faith support a company already shady before they're even off the ground.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

Good for you. I hope more kickstarter backers cancel their pledges. Save your money for a project that deserves it. Not one that was built by stepping on the backs of artists.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT
It's no problem at all, and if anything I should be thanking you for being open to listening. I personally didn't think much of the earlier stuff reported, but the pay rates were something of a last straw for me. I just wish I could get the word out farther, or somehow put pressure on the owners to improve their rates or something! It feels so unfair for a project to be so successful when it doesn't treat its own people with the respect they deserve.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

Wow.

WOW.

Good on OP for calling it out. Wages are not protected information. That means that the artists are getting less than 10% of the revenue from their own work, and it doesn't sound like they have ownership rights over the site either.

That is neither acceptable nor worthy of supporting.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

i always hate seeing good artists getting deeply underpaid to work on a site, but it's a whole new level of fucked up to retaliate against the artists for discussing wages and seeking job offers from other sites. the fact they also have functioning cash purchases on the site in an ALPHA state, but expect to have their game treated as an alpha while paying their artists pitiful wages is outrageous.

it's of my opinion that if a game is going to have paid purchases in an alpha/beta state, it's not valid for alpha/beta state criticism anymore; it gets the same criticism as any full release game with microtransactions. alpha/beta states are for testing and development, and to fish for more money while in a testing state is disingenuous, especially when you're not even using those supplemental funds to pay your staff decently.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

Update on this. Looks like it's been addressed in the discord publicly and the real rates are... Still not great imo.

Screenshot provided second hand since I'm not in the server.
https://imgur.com/a/cUZ3tEh

Link to the artist application form
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeLvD727gVe_piiC95RC6hBywxpVBVZdCbLQCH4Sm7nGTMKOQ/viewform

Screenshots of those
https://imgur.com/a/Dl12XRf

The reusing of old assets is also only vaguely addressed. It's a real head scratcher to me since while I can understand how being more open about the connection to a defunct game that was notorious for being a scam could drive people away, this route of sweeping it under the rug didn't do anyone any favors. It only makes them look worse I think.

I'm almost tempted to try joining the server to be a fly on the wall.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

$40 for a whole new pet is actually insane. For one thing, pets are the WHOLE site, and youre only willing to invest $40 into each of them...? Secondly, look at the pet art - its fully rendered, very pretty. I can guess at least 8-12 hours went into each one, as an artist, if not more. $40 is pitiful

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

For comparison I looked back at the FR Kickstarter.

Designing an item (food/material/trinket): $70 US
Designing a familiar: $130 US
Design apparel: $300
Design a gene: $700
Design a dragon: $1,500 (thank you for Skydancers!)

And that was in 2013 with Undel as one of the artists, who owns the site and as such was probably more willing to take an initial paycut in return for later growth.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah. For as many complaints as I have about FR's art direction and the way they do some things, it's good to remember the site owner has actual perspective on what commercial art costs and it always did seem like the reason for their smaller team and super long lead times is because people are actually being compensated for the work they do.

I'm thankful the stream of "just hire another set of artists" suggestions eventually dried up because there were a couple of people on the PvP forum I wanted to shake over it. I doubt any of the current artists are actually getting close to full market rates for their work, of course, but they're also not being paid the money dug out of Undel's couch cushions.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

reading the screenshot from CJ:
"...to move away from the profit driven models that dominate other sites."

you... you mean wanting to keep the site running? or a desire to pay your staff a decent wage? there's an infinitely long list of petsites that failed to generate enough profit to stay alive. petsites are a black hole for funding. unless you keep the scope of your petsite small enough that you can pay out of your own pocket to keep it going like gryffs did, you're absolutely going to crash and burn. also, you don't get to say you're not profit driven and have paid purchases available and heavily pushed on your alpha/beta test. you're an LLC-- a business; be honest with yourself.

in searching for business info (which is something you can do for ANY registered business; it's free, public information and they supply their business name on their website), you can find out that the minimum wage in the business' state is $7.25, which is US federal minimum and lower than over 3/5 of state minimum wages. this is likely where they're basing their pay rates at, but i can't imagine wanting to churn out an animation without tweening for 15$ flat, when even 5 seconds of 2D animation can be an entire day's work. one animated twitch emote can go for 20$ each, and those are low-end rates that TYPICALLY involve tweening or use bases used for multiple clients.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

Move away from profit driven models with a cash store in Alpha. What the actual fuck?

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

it's certainly a hell of a thing, innit? things in early access or alpha/beta states are perfectly fine; it's a great chance to develop while taking in feedback and fixing things running up to releasing a better product to a full audience. microtransactions are a woefully integral part to gaming now, but no one can discredit their benefit to keeping a steady flow of income to the developers.

to have a playable testing state with microtransactions while also refusing to pay your workers a decent rate and then to say you're not profit driven is an absolutely outlandish thing for a business to say. it's okay to be profit driven while also being purpose focused- these are things that can and should coexist in a business. gaining profit means you can expand your purpose's scope or invest in your existing state of purpose to create a stronger foundation for your business. then, your purpose can attract more individuals into your product as its quality increases, leading to more profit.

to be one or the other is dangerous; profit driven oft leads to stagnation as you chase what works to make money, while purpose driven leads to a draining of resources and funding as you implement too many things that generate no money. there's a balance here that the owners aren't respecting at the very least, or outright lying using flowery corporate PR language at the worst.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

I will say, they did add they SanDust side of the cash shop, so you don't have to pay actual money for anything premium.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

has anyone else seen what CJ said about cross site trading?

apparently it'll only be allowed if the other site names Santae specifically !by name! as an allowed cross trading site. see screenshot (not mine):

https://imgur.com/a/H2oQwaX

no way FR would ever directly endorse another site like that. i can't think of most other sites that would either. i honestly think they're shooting themselves in the foot, cross over activity from FR is a big part of the playerbase.

it is good that they want to establish communication when scams happen. but i don't like that CJ seems intent on controlling the player market. him saying they want to monitor that items are being traded of equal value (which can be subjective and typically the currency ratios are determined by players anyway) and wanting to cap how much items are priced in user shops really rubs me the wrong way.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

Well, seeing as neopets has a price cap (999,999 NP on retail Neo, 99,999 NP on neopets classic) for user shops, I can see why they'd want to make a price cap, since they're going for the neopets approach. This would force you to use a trades market or whatever the equivalent would be.

Personally, I don't mind a price cap, as it'd make everything *possibly* obtainable with time with enough SP, and not skyrocket in price like the y1 fest items on FR do for gems.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

sorry i should have clarified, the cap mentioned is so players cannot sell NPC shop items higher than the shop price. effectively removing any typical neopets RSing or even faerie quest malls. a lot of people during alpha were complaining about "scalpers" because there are items that restock less frequently but are requested by the quest givers, so naturally they go for more on players shops when not in stock.

when people made a suggestion to not do that, CJ said that quests are supposed to be the main source of income. IDK it just bothers me, why even make items different rarities that stock less often? why don't the NPC shops have infinite stock then?

just a perfectly valid play type that is apart of the economy and it's weird to exclude it

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

other anon who mentioned neopets

AH i see what the problem is. yeah, THAT sucks. there's a valid market there in restocking, and it's a reasonable playstyle so long as it's not out of control. maybe they could have a check that allows up to 50% over store price, that way it doesn't inflate INSANELY but still allows room for a market and competition.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly, I don't really mind that. I personally hate when common shop items are absurdly priced or rare ones are fifty times the original price.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who is kind of tired of watching new projects only get supported so people can cash out in favor of dragon game, I'm kind of glad developers are starting to impose some limits on it. I know here CJ is talking about protecting the playerbase from scams more than anything, so it isn't quite the same, but as a player it can be a little disheartening to hear people only care about a game for the sake of trading and jump ship the moment doors open to the public. I'm aware that it isn't a detrimental practice since trading is a two way street, but it just makes me sad seeing how it turned out for games like Dappervolk and Lorwolf.

I think Paw Borough's dev said something about considering a cross site trading embargo early in the game's lifespan too, though their reasoning leans much more on wanting to nurture a stable economy first and foremost. Their policy is more like Flight Rising's outside of potential the embargo as well last I checked.

Do feel pretty bad for anyone who invested in Santae in any way with the hopes of trading on Flight Rising though. That's gotta be rough.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

Lorwolf's failure is mostly the fault of the owners and admin. Can't blame fr for that in its entirety.

Also Lorwolf just. It sucks. It fails to keep interest unless you like mindlessly grinding for hours just for a piss poor amount of non premium currency, and their prices of moonstones simply suck.

Fr didn't cause Lorwolf to fail. It was built on foundations of sand and couldn't hold up against the tide.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

i know the other anon said as much, but nothing really bad happened to dv or lw because people were mass trading for fr. idk what you mean by "but it just makes me sad seeing how it turned out for games like Dappervolk and Lorwolf."

in fact dv was doing very well for a time and people were having to trade very expensive fr items for things on dv. the cross site trading was much more even between the two sites, and there were other smaller ones in the mix like goatlings. it wasn't until it was becoming more and more clear a year or two after launch that the site was going downhill that pretty much everyone only wanted to offload their dv stuff for fr.

and i mean, c'mon it makes sense. you invest time and effort (and possibly money!) into a site that you think is going to work out, or was fun at a point in time. and then you find out, oh geez, this game actually sucks! or these owners are not doing anything to keep me engaged and coming back! so yeah i think it makes sense that people would want to then reinvest back into the pet site that is consistent and successful.

so really, if the site is good and is more importantly FUN there is really no negative to even huge amounts of people trading for another site. if player retention is good, the game is fun, then there will always be people who are playing the game because they want to, not just because they want to trade for fr currency/items. i think limiting cross site trading to this degree (pb's limited embargo is not a bad idea imo) will probably only limit people who were unsure of the game, or may only have tried it because they could trade for fr (and again, if the game is fun, those people might just stick around too!)

i think you really only see situations like LW where pretty much EVERYONE is trying to jump ship, when the game is just bad. a lot of people saw the red flags for LW during alpha and beta, and because nothing changed some of the more savvy players saw what was coming. i get that it probably does look kind of depressing when everyone is trying to leave and trade their stuff away, but i mean it's not the players fault lol there's a reason it's happening.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

i find that price capping in shops IF there's a trading feature on site is very smart, really, especially if there's a search function. people are going to be less likely to use their shop as a gallery feature (a big trend on sites that don't have galleries; people who do this have no common sense and don't think 'if you put a price on it, it can be bought') and put things of value in their shop to show off their collections/valuables.

if they can't put those valuables in their shop at a ridiculous price, it will result in less 'false' shop listings that bloat search results, and accidental sales of things people only wanted to show off so there's less whining to staff by taking away incentive to use shops as a gallery with caps that are lower in value than the valuables are worth.

will it still happen? yeah, but smarter people will stop and think first, and that matters.

now, if there's a cap on trading, that would be bad. right now, the neopets community use baby paint brushes to equalize a trade because you can only offer 2 million neopoints pure in trades. it's absolutely exhausting and SO risky when there's a 10 item limit in place and baby pbs are 600k np each, in an economy where there's LOTS of items worth WELL over that (and quite a lot in the several hundred million np range). there's a HUGE chance that you're taking when you have to offer on other junk trades to buy an item with, that the person on the other side will never give you the item after accepting all your offers. if you see that on santae, fucking run.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, FR doesn't allow cross site trading until release, but I am very tempted to email FR staff to both make them aware that the other site intends to require that for cross site and that it could be seen as endorsing and encouraging users to go to a pet site with a foundation of underpaying and refusing to credit artists.

You know, to give them some feedback before the decision would be made.

Re: Santae Exposé

[(Anonymous)]

Do it nonny