I dont want to influence this discussion too much but I do want to add some info but I want to add some context based on some of the discussion I have been seeing.
First, I would not suggest anyone dismiss the arguments about the difficulty of finding artists to assist on projects. The “thats not that hard” argument more comes from survivorship bias. One of the largest issues we see cited for a games failure is being unable to find an artist or having an artist leave. One way I have seen some groups deal with this is by commissioning several artists at a time to play the odds, but this tactic may not work for everyone.
We have also seen it on our side, back in 2020 we where working on a project I had to shut down when I quit my job, but before that we where offering a contract for ~$1000 a week to artists to help with the project. If my memory does not fail me we reached out to 10 artists and out of those 10 only 1 was willing to consider the offer.
The largest factor we see with projects successfully getting artist on board in networking or having a prior relationship with them. Finding artists to work with is one of the largest problems faced by most projects.
Second, I didnt mention this earlier though I should have, there has always been a “main site” project on our end. Its just been slow but I have been picking away at it as I can. I have not talked about it much the last couple of years bc I have been trying to be head down getting it finished.
@AimiIsFat I personally always welcome more competition, but I would not discount the complexity or cost of doing it. WG currently operates at about $1000 a month which is lean for our size and alot of that actually comes from our DB and bandwidth cost. We could go leaner if we moved away from some of the managed services we use but I would not suggest anyone to do that. One of the reasons we moved off of DO was manually maintaining everything got so stressful it put me in the ER once. If you dont have an IT staff to help you the extra cost is well worth the reduced stress and not having to try to find ways to be available near 24/7 in case something bad happens.
If you would ever like to ask me any questions on that stuff feel free to reach out any time and I would be happy to share.